A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"By the hoary conventions of American politics, Americans should fear
and loathe Occupy Wall Street. The occupiers are vaguely
countercultural, counterculturally vague. They are noisy. They are
radical. They offer no solutions, though they are prey to the damnedest
ideas. (Anti-consumerism! Anti-leaderism!) They are an
extra-parliamentary menace, mocking the very possibility of liberal
reform. They are anarchists or, worse, McGovernites. Some of them appear
genuinely nuts. For all these reasons and a hundred more, real
Americans should hate their guts.
And yet, they don’t.
...What gives, I suspect, is that most Americans don’t particularly care
what the demonstrators in downtown New York and other cities look like
or believe in. They’re not interested in the demonstrators’ attempt to
build a movement prefigurative of a radically consensual society (which
could end up just as gridlocked as the U.S. Senate). What they care
about is that the demonstrators are confronting unmerited power and
unearned wealth. They are taking on the banks.
...At its root is the simple fact that the Wall Street banks over the past
quarter-century have done none of the things that a financial sector
should do. They have not helped preserve the thriving economy that
America once enjoyed. They have not funded our boldest new companies.
(That’s fallen to venture capitalists.) They haven’t provided the
financing to maintain our infrastructure, nor ponied up the capital for
manufacturing to modernize and grow here (as opposed to in China).
Instead, they’ve grown fat on the credit they extended when Americans’
incomes stopped rising. They’ve grown plump on proprietary trading and
by selling bad deals to suckers.
...The country isn’t being built; no one’s been building it for the past 30
years. Wall Street’s interests are elsewhere, in realizing huge profits
and bonuses for arbitrage and paper-swapping that has brought little
but debt and ruin to the larger economy.
So Occupy Wall Street espouses a fuzzy radicalism? That’s fine. At its
best, American radicalism kick-starts an era of liberal reform, to
which, as in the ’30s and ’60s, its zeal is essential. At its worst,
that radicalism can hinder those reforms by itself becoming an object of
public ire. But Occupy Wall Street, all our assumptions about cultural
polarization to the contrary, isn’t an object of ire. It’s channeling
ire — our ire — where ire should go: toward the banks that have fostered
and profited from America’s decline"
THE WASHINGTON POST: It’s hard to hate these occupiers
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