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“Occupy Wall Street” Losing It’s Bite As Reality Catches Up

It wasn’t so long ago that Obama decided that he was the only thing between wall street and the pitchforks.   As I commented at the time in a Pajamas Media article, [1]

America’s bankers lack backbone.

Maybe I’m being unfair to the current crop of bankers. After all, the problem has always existed. It’s just that it has come to a head recently because we have a political power structure in place that clearly plans to take advantage of that perceived weakness. As a rule, financial types are not exactly noted for their bravery. And we all know that predators tend to attack where they see weakness — particularly if they anticipate some gain for themselves.

So it was recently when we saw [2] a Democratic president of the United States suggesting that his administration was the only thing standing between the bankers and the pitchforks.

To anyone who has been watching the events unfolding recently and understands the causes of those happenings, the statement of the president was absurd on its face. The issue, of course, is that most people today really don’t have much of a grasp of economics. Thus, any Democratic Party propaganda offered to explain away Democratic/big government culpability in the current financial mess will have far more credibility than it would with people who do understand economics. Most Americans might say, “Well, I don’t know this stuff, but he must — it sounds reasonable.” So along comes President Obama trying to push the image of the bankers being the problem. And of course his supporters, who know little to nothing about economic matters, nod in unison [3] like so many bobblehead dolls [4] glued to the dashboard [5].

But it’s not true.

Very seldom do economic crises occur without government being at or near the root of the problem. So it is with this crisis.

This is not a failure of regulation [6] of any kind, particularly of banking. Nor is it a failure of free markets. Rather, it’s a failure of over-regulation and a lack of free markets. In short, it’s a failure of government. Governmental interference in the market requiried bankers [7], for example, to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — government-created entities — helped to create [8] this artificial boom, and government also caused the bust by way of serious mismanagement [9].

[10]

Some of the excesses of "Occupy Wall Street" leaking out

Of course, the problem is that while wall street played ball for a while, they recognized that Obama didn’t have the kind of support he claimed.  So, Obama unleashed the pitchforks, with the weirdos at the other end. That’s what “Occupy Wall Street” is.   And while that has attracted some press attention, (and, given the state of the press these days, whose job it is to support liberal causes, why wouldn’t it?) that too is having less of an effect than the White House would like.  That influence is going down, even as we speak, as the exceses of the thing leak out, literally. It is, I think, as Ann Althouse explains;

[11]

Ann Althouse

You know, there’s a real problem with this Occupy [Your City] protest format: It doesn’t have an exit strategy. You come, you conquer, and then time passes, protesters get dirty and ugly, internal divisions crack them up [12], the nearby residents get disgusted, the local businesses get mad, and then what? There’s isn’t going to be a revolution.

Well, look, I seem to recall someone addressing this point, a few years ago. First of all, the anti-Semitic “Adbusters”…

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can
But when you want money
for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait

And as for the spectacle of OWS morons carrying signs extolling the virtues of socialism:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head [13]
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow

Amazing his words got lost so quickly.Yet, it’s not very surprising. At the bottom line, what we see coming out of the occupy Wall Street protests, what we see reflected, is unenlightened self interest. Sorry, I’ve not been impressed with this thing from the beginning, and the rest of the world has started to catch up on that feeling. Andy Kessler adds some perspective: [14]

Maybe this is all really about disappointment. I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

Educating the whole child was bad advice. So was follow your passion. California spends months teaching ninth-graders how to build a waste-treatment plant with only a day or two on natural selection. I think Occupy Wall Streeters are as much disappointed with the route they all took as they are with “fat cat” bankers.

So, it is as I as suggested on the Midnight Radio Network a few nights ago:

So you went out and get the education that the left said you were supposed to. When you got to the far side of that education which you were left with was a bill that was far larger than the jobs you could get with the education you got could provide for. And you’re upset with the banks? How’s that work? It seems to me that the banks were the ones that of the two provided the contract of service. They did their job. You did what they told you was yours. What would be wrong with being upset with the people that got you into this mess in the first place? The leftist idealists so far removed from reality as to think that four years of remedial basket weaving would get to a job that would pay six figures? And now you wonder why that loan is hanging over your head?

There is another point to be made here, that I have not seen made very often.  I suspect that that’s because it’s hard for a lot of centrists and liberals to quantify, I suppose because it runs directly if all of their world view.  So be it.

What we have is disappointment in liberalism.  Say what you will about the sanity or the lack thereof of an Obama in the White House.  I’ll probably agree, at least in part.

But we need to eliminate this concept that the reason that his presidency has been such a disaster is because he is politically inept.  I would argue exactly the opposite; he has been wildly successful.  Who else, for example, could pass something as sweeping as Obamacare, without the Congress even having read it? Can you imagine anyone to the right of, say, Castro polling something like that off?  Mr. Obama has been nothing if not wildly successful in implementing liberal policy.  So it is that left is everywhere, including the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd are faced with a huge dilemma… the choice between blaming the man the top, for being inept, or blaming the policies which he was wildly successful in implementing .  Clearly the latter runs afoul of the leftist world view.  It is therefore much easier to blame the man, then the policies. So it has always been with the defenders of socialism; The argument always comes up that it works, we’ve just not done it right.   Yet, the logical holesin the arguments coming out of the OWS mob (for mob they are) are becoming larger by the moment and harder thereby to explain away with the usual socilaist platitudes.

It’s my guess that even those who were taught basic logic by government schools can’t withstand the huge illogic that they are trying to force feed the rest of us.

I submit that over the next several days and weeks we are going to see that reality starting to catch up with some of the protesters. I grant that there are large number of them that will never catch on to that reality, but then again reality seems to have given them the slip in the total.There are always a few true believers, who despite all reality, will continue to believe in the leftist mantra. Just as there are those who so disconnected from reality believe that Obama is the solution as opposed to the problem. That government can save us from everything. Etc., etc.. These ones are going to end up in the jails around the country , and the martyrdom continues. We always face that challenge. That’s why those fighting for freedom in our own revolution, recognized in their writings and in their speeches that continual vigilance in support of freedom is key.