Reading through the CBS news story on the globalization of the Occupy movement, complete with wicked violence and attendant hysteria, it seems rather obvious that this whole thing represents blowback against all the varieties of “macroeconomic management” – and that includes “stimulus,” “stabilization,” QE1, QE2, bailouts and everything else.
Who benefited most of these policies? Clearly not the masses and not the middle class and not the poor. It was the financial elites who benefited. The policies didn’t work and yet the elites got the money anyway, and hence the protests and mania, all of which are being used as a bludgeon not against the macroeconomic stabilizers in government and central banks but against capitalistic enterprise.
There is a rough analogy here to how U.S. foreign policy intervention inspires acts of vengeance against innocents – a reaction that the CIA called blowback. So too these Occupy protests might be seen as a reaction to economic interventionism. And no doubt that free enterprise – the real innocent bystander in this entire ghastly episode – is going to be hurt.
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This is probably the place where the mainstream Republican party does the most damage to the cause of liberty. By using free-market rhetoric to describe the corporatist/fascist economic system prevalent among the biggest businesses in the US, it’s hardly surprising that many people are objecting to “capitalism.”
I don’t think it’s blowback, I think it’s a fake protest movement designed in order to interrupt, subvert, channel and control the public confusion and latent anger over the Wall Street/Fed/White House bailout disaster.
It is unrealistic to expect to rob people and have no opposition at all. Therefore it is better to create your own captive “opposition” movement in order to disrupt and discredit legitimate complaints and protests. The more angry and dangerous-looking the movement, the more it appears to be genuine.
I would not dismiss any protest movement out of hand, but in this case it appears to be intellectually confused and unfocused, yet well-funded and highly organized. I conclude that it’s a fake rent-a-mob.
The tea party on the other hand apparently started out as a genuine opposition movement, but was quickly taken over and co-opted after the fact.
One wonders whether other examples of “blowback” against US policies are also to a large degree fake, counterfeit organizations designed to provide a dangerous-looking “opposition” in order to give the powers-that-be a punching bag and an excuse for further acts of robbery and murder.
The Tea Parties are not centrally organized. Most are still organic, legitimately grassroots, local movements intent on co-opting the GOP, not the other way around. The Occupy movement, on the other hand, was centrally organized by many of the same people, including the White House, who organized the “Arab Spring.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s20upMVfr7g
There is truth to this. But it is naive to think that this movement is entirely made of hirelings. I find this whole movement very scary and dangerous – and in this way it is also analogous to terrorism (which isn’t entirely spontaneous either). But it might be seen as one response, obviously misguided, to an evil policy.
We all know it’s a scam. There is no way all these people can sit out there for day after day with no income. Every single one of them has to be unemployed. There is no way you would be able participate in these sort of things and have a job, unless you had some sort of special arrangement. Even if you are self-employeed or independently wealthy it’s still a big stretch. The majority of people can’t do this sort of thing.
So there is some people that are absolutely bank rolling these protests. The people in the streets are the very definition of “useful idiots”.
I would like to believe the article, but after thinking through this post I have to say that you are probably much closer to the truth.
Their parents.
Actually, when I was in college, I could get by on about $40.00/month for food and transportation. Parental support, inheritance, previous savings, day labor, begging, theft, selling drugs, prostitution and the like can easily meet and surpass those needs even after one considers inflation. They’re not necessarily paying for the place they sleep, utilities, adult transportation options, taxes and other things like that which make up about 75% of most peoples expenses. Most of them aren’t saving for the future and obviously believe that this protest is their best economic alternative. If all you want to do is bitch about how the casino let your dad bet your tuition when it was his decision to keep gambling, life is pretty inexpensive.
Any links concerning the idea that this is a contrived movement? I don’t really doubt it, I’d just like to see more about it.
They probably document their comings and goings on the internet. If you can find out what websites and mechanisms they use to organize and recruit members to protest then you can probably pretty easily trace the money. No point in hiding links nobody is going to investigate, nobody is going to hear about, and nobody is going to care. At least in the ‘mainstream’.
Their parents
Only one way to go from here…..A re-make of “Woodstock 1969″……You know only better, but this time with more CGI.
T-Pain as Sly Stallone
Katie Perry & Lady GaGa alternating as Joan Baez.
Carlos Santana as himself, (because he’s cool again among the rubes)
“Trust Fund Babies ain’t what they used to be, ain’t what they used to be….”
Seriously though….
I don’t think folks understand just how succesful the American Propaganda Wing of Philosophical/Political Distortion has been, and how much effort has gone into it. See FreeRepublic.com and their slander of Rothbard, Lew, Ron Paul, etc. as an example of convuluted diatribe. Really sad. Same can be said of the cliched left, but conservatism (in a modern way) is more dangerous, because it cherry-picks the good in free-market, but alters and distorts to garner more support for the State.
But… its so much fun to act like a left-wing anarchist. Seriously, whatever your views on property rights destroying it is a blast. Not that theres alot of that happening at OWS or that i do alot myself but yelling ANARCHY!!!! in the streets is not nearly as fun when you hafta defend it with economics afterwards.
Sure Im a free market anarchist but most statists dont know the difference, might as well just stick to being fed up
The OWS protests are an example of failure in democracy. It’s just chaos of majority rule. It has no legal direction, and rather than the protestors recognizing powers that are already in the hands of the people, they instead continue to plea for the government/Wallstreet to listen to their catharsis.
If the people were educated on U.S. History, they would understand that their most powerful tool under a Constitutional Republic is nullification. They would be speaking out to their respective States to listen and to stand up in opposition. But instead you just have yet another powerless group forming that gets nothing done, even though the tools to say “enough is enough” are already in place. Sadly, people are using the idea of nullification more to fight for marijuana in California than the most important issues of today.
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