The emergence of a Democrat version of the Tea Party was something that was long foreseen by political analysts, and at last it has come to fruition. But instead of coming to a town near you, in true grassroots fashion, the Occupy Wall Street movement has a center; Wall Street.
It is almost impossible to judge a movement without any sort of coherent uniform message, so certainly I am in no solid position to praise or condemn the organization. But what I can point to is the behavior of the individuals involved.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, while significantly smaller in size and participation than the nationwide Tea Party movement, is responsible for numerous acts of violence. To be clear, not all of the protesters are violent. Though there have been documented signs and interviews expressing anti-Semitism, this certainly does not mean that the majority of Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semite. But to ironically see the media embrace their new darling organization after years of claiming fringe elements within the Tea Party classified it as a “racist institution,” the result becomes more than a little hypocritical. Add the fact that a 31 percent number polled amongst Occupy Wall Street protestors claimed that they would happily resort to violence in order to achieve their political ends, and the strong argument can be made that the left’s Tea Party is actually more radical than the other side that they despise so much.
The reason I say “The other side” is that I have found almost nothing that everyone in the OWS organizations agree on, except that they hate Republicans. That is all nice and fine, but accomplishes very little when the typical aim of a protest is to… actually achieve something. Terms like “Corporate Greed” are thrown about like they are some sort of disease that could be simply cured through political unrest. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) this is not the case.
The energy of Occupy Wall Street is focused in entirely the wrong place. Capitalism is certainly not the problem, as it is the only economic system that has consistently shown raises in the standard of living of an entire population of a country in mankind’s recorded history. Like it or not, humans are greedy. We are lucky enough to live in a system which takes humanity’s greatest flaws and channels them in a way which makes them both constructive and conducive to nationwide improvement. If Occupy Wall Street was actually interested in changing the economic situation of this country, they would be protesting outside of Congress- to those who actually make the laws, tax codes, and system which Wall Street abides by. Moreover, consider governmental greed and the fact that every year Congress’s demands increase and our amount of printed and borrowed money increases. It was government, in the form of the Federal Reserve, which plunged our economy into the toilet by artificially sinking interest rates. It is government greed, and Keynesian economics-not corporate greed-which causes the economic problems in this country. The sooner the OCP protesters figure this out, the sooner we can get back and focused on the plans to fix it.
