Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (12 page)

Why aren’t they angry at the politicians and the interests and corporations that feed off government failure, who create government barriers to their success?

This cognitive dissonance is on full display in the person of Sarah Mason, an Occupy Los Angeles protestor made famous in a composite image on the cover of
Time’
s 2011 “Person of the Year” issue, dedicated to “the Protestor.” The day before the magazine was published,
360 Magazine
posted a full profile of Mason and her motives for joining the movement. “I think the Occupy Wall Street Movement has shown that a lot of attention has been going to the fact that students have made an investment in their educations,” Mason said, “then they come to the real world and they realize that that investment is essentially worthless.”
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Fair enough. The inflated cost of higher education and the government-generated student loan bubble is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

But Mason’s bigger gripe seems to be with Bank of America, who offered her a credit card, a card she accepted and ran up. “I still have debt and I’m not paying it back because I feel like at this point, I have an obligation to try and disrupt and upset the financial industry, the credit industry. This industry is built off of the belief that it is okay to exploit poor people in order to make a profit,” said the
Time
magazine icon. But is her financial situation really someone else’s fault?

Each paycheck that I would get, I would overspend. I got a credit card because I had no money and I needed a credit card to buy things that were essential to my life during this time. I had already spent all this money on clothes, make-up, accessories, and I got the credit card because I needed to [pay] my electric bill. Bank of American [
sic
] offered it to me, so I was like, “Yeah, of course—I’ll pay my electric bill with it.” . . . I think that some of it—most of it was feeling inadequate and insecure and feeling pressure to look a certain way. What I also think it was that you’re just surrounded by these messages telling you to buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume. . . . I frequently find myself walking around stores in the mall, ready to make big purchases, and buy impulsively just because I feel insecure.
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What would Adam Smith do? The laws of justice, according to Smith, “guard what is due . . . from the promises of others.”

Not so for Sarah Mason, who feels no compunction to honor a contract that she voluntarily entered into, of her own free will. “They make money off this bad shit, so why am I going to walk around and feel like this moral obligation to pay them back?”
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There you have it. Government failure is certainly culpable for the financial dilemma of many Americans caught between a rock and a hard place. But individual freedom comes with a responsibility. With profit comes the potential for loss. With contracts come “what is due from the promises of others.” That should be true if you are Bank of America, too: in a free society, you don’t get a bailout when you take on too much risk, even if you have the best lobbyists in Washington, D.C. You go out of business, ingloriously scooped up at pennies on the dollar by a more financially conservative, properly managed bank.

One of the most corrosive effects of top-down government, where winners and losers are chosen by someone else, is the destruction of the values that allow for peaceful cooperation among individuals. Individual responsibility is replaced with a sense that someone else owes you something. “If Bank of America gets a bailout, where’s mine?”

Where is the sense of responsibility in Occupy Wall Street? What do they stand for? The closest thing to a central organizing principle is an overarching sense of entitlement. But who is entitled to what, and who has the authority to decide? The real questions in the OWS’s world of social justice are: By what standard are decisions made? Whose claims are legitimate, and how might you reallocate the wealth of some to the benefit of those deemed more deserving?

THE DRUMBEAT OF CHANGE

I
N
Z
UCCOTTI
P
ARK, REAL LIFE ILLUSTRATED THE TROUBLESOME TASK
of doling out resources in a centralized regime. The group gathered there quickly created a “General Assembly,” à la the United Nations’ General Assembly, to come up with a set of demands and to allocate resources among competing protestor factions. The purpose is the pretense of true participatory democracy, but that’s not how things really work. These assembly gatherings quickly devolved into arguments over who gets what, and whose opinions matter most.

According to a report by the
Huffington Post
:

There’s no shortage of talking, and you never know who will take hold of the People’s Mic. Persuasive speakers on all sides can give General Assembly meetings a roller-coaster feel. Someone always seems to oppose a budget proposal, or have a strong dissenting opinion on something that seems on its way to sure passage. Just one voice joining the debate at the last minute has the power to sway the entire discussion.

With every proposal, there are questions and there are concerns, and the process continues and continues. The facilitators say numerous times the group has strayed off process. Questions are sometimes ignored for being “off-topic” even when they aren’t, time constraints are cited and frustrations boil over. Occupiers curse, speak out of turn and sometimes they just keep on talking, despite “Mic Check” calls over them. Those on all sides alienate each other.
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One seemingly inconsequential fight was reminiscent of the saga of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Ayn Rand’s novel
Atlas Shrugged
, where ability and hard work were replaced with a compensation system based on needs. The
Huffington Post
reported:

On Thursday, the matter at hand was a proposal from Pulse—the group of drummers—for $8,000 for new musical instruments. They say they hoped to secure the funding after a $5,000 handmade drum was sabotaged and destroyed during a rain storm. They say that because they’ve been there since Day 1, they deserve the funding more than anyone.

“We have worked for you! Appreciate us!” the leader of the proposal shouted angrily to the GA [General Assembly] in response to voices of dissent.

After a long debate, the proposal was tabled. No funding for the drummers. After the meeting, one drummer cursed and yelled at GA members for their decision. He confronted another occupier and the two shouted obscenities back and forth; a physical fight nearly erupted but a peacemaker came between them.
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Mediating the squabbling over who is entitled to what is apparently an essential part of managing any coalition of progressive interests. Van Jones himself lamented the dynamic in his Netroots Nation speech. Along the garden path to peace and love and social justice for all, there has apparently arisen a fundamental conflict between utopian rhetoric and the actual process of wealth redistribution in a centralized system.

“We talk, ‘kumbaya,’” Jones said. “We talk, ‘Solidarity Forever!’ We talk, ‘Can’t we all get along?!’ But we have enacted the most individualistic approach to politics. ‘Why she’d get that grant!?’”
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Why indeed. Was she more deserving than you? Only one thing is for certain in a world where someone else is doing the deciding: You don’t get to decide for yourself.

In the fictional
Atlas Shrugged
, and in the all-too-real catastrophic experiments in socialism put into practice across the world, this is what happens. Where the edict “to each according to their contribution” is replaced with “to each according to their need,” the disastrous results leave most of society—the 99 percent—jobless, angry, hungry, and destitute.

APPLES AND ORANGES

D
ESPITE VIOLENCE, PROPERTY DAMAGE, AND LACK OF A COHERENT
“set of demands,” Occupy Wall Street has been celebrated by the media as a legitimate counter to the Tea Party movement. Indeed, the
Time
“Person of the Year” write-up that accompanies the image of Sarah Mason favorably compares the cause of Occupiers with that of the young street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose death triggered a grassroots revolution against an oppressive, autocratic government regime. According to international development economist Hernando de Soto, Bouazizi “was a repressed entrepreneur” who struggled against arbitrary government rules and corrupt law enforcement—all insurmountable obstacles that prevented him from earning a living for his family:

For years, Bouazizi had endured harassment at the hands of deeply corrupt petty officials—most notably, the municipal police officers and inspectors who lived off street vendors and other small-scale extralegal business-people. The police officers helped themselves to the vendors’ fruit whenever they felt like it or arbitrarily fined them for running their carts without a permit. Bouazizi complained about the greed of local officers for years. He hated paying bribes.

But on Dec. 17, 2010, this otherwise uneventful life took its place in history. That morning, Bouazizi got into a tussle with town inspectors who accused him of failing to pay a fine for some arbitrary infraction. They seized two crates of pears, one crate of bananas, three crates of apples, and his electronic scale—worth some $225, the entire capital of his business. A municipal police officer, a woman named Fedia Hamdi, slapped Bouazizi across the face in front of the crowd that had gathered at the scene. With his uncle’s help, Bouazizi appealed to the authorities for the return of his property. But he got nowhere—a common outcome in a society where small-scale business-people were treated with contempt by local officialdom. One hour after the confrontation with Hamdi, at 11:30 a.m., he doused himself with paint thinner and immolated himself in front of the governorate building in Sidi Bouzid.
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Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire because someone else, a government agent, took his stuff, the means of his livelihood. There was no path to justice, no rule of law that existed, no legal recourse available to Bouazizi to get his private property back. The false equivalency between Occupy L.A.’s Mason, whose spending spree landed her in trouble, and Bouazizi is striking, to say the least.

FRIENDS AT THE TOP

T
HAT SAME
Time
COVER STORY SCARCELY MENTIONS THE IMPACT OF
the Tea Party. Indeed, all the accusations wrongfully hurled at us were conveniently absent in the mainstream media’s coverage of this purportedly “morally superior” protest movement. Accusations of racism, for example, were cast heavily (and unfairly) toward the Tea Party, but legitimate claims of anti-Semitism within OWS were largely ignored. Van Jones was first in line defending OWS’s values, saying the movement’s “moral clarity” excused its bad behavior and utter lack of policy clarity.

Vice President Joe Biden—who referred to Tea Partiers as “terrorists” simply for being opposed to a bad piece of legislation—got all introspective when analyzing the OWS movement.

“What is the core of that protest?” Biden asked at a Washington Ideas Forum in October 2011. “The core is: The bargain has been breached. The core is: The American people do not think the system is fair, or on the level. That is the core, is what you’re seeing with [Occupy] Wall Street. Look, there’s a lot in common with the Tea Party. The Tea Party started, why? TARP. They thought it was unfair.”
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Biden voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program when he was a senator. But now, he feels our pain.

President Obama himself is sympathetic: “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street. . . . So yes, I think people are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”
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Even when the Occupiers occupied an Obama campaign rally, disrupting his speech, the president refused to distance himself from them, while they handed out a statement that read: “Over 4,000 peaceful protesters have been arrested. While bankers continue to destroy the American economy. You must stop the assault on our First Amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.”
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Obama didn’t exactly defend OWS—to do so would have been to alienate the majority of Americans who find their behavior repulsive. But he did play to their complaints. “Families like yours,” Obama said, “young people like the ones here today—including the ones who were just chanting at me—you’re the reason that I ran for office in the first place.”
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Obama’s willingness to play ball with OWS raises important questions for 2012: Should Democrats hitch their political wagon to Occupy Wall Street? Can Barack Obama, the king of crony capitalism, win reelection by pandering to radical progressives after having offered his crucial vote in favor of TARP in 2008 as a U.S. senator, and after having codified “too big to fail” into law two years later as president? Can congressional Democrats, having spent the past three years attaching Republicans to so-called “Tea Party extremism,” now embrace without consequence the radical demands, blatant anti-Semitism, violence, and property damage of OWS?

Who knows, maybe cognitive dissonance is a good political strategy for the Left.

But they join in common cause out of desperation. Since the first Tea Party protest, the Democratic/progressive/big government coalition has been searching for its own Tea Party. Van Jones in particular is worried that we have successfully stolen the Left’s strategy playbook. OWS is just part of a broader effort by Jones to regroup after the devastating electoral repudiation of President Obama’s economic agenda on November 2, 2010.