talkpolitics | There's Something Strange in Your Neighborhood

badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com posting in

To preface this - I'm not bothered by the...strange call-and-response-style discussion we're seeing here. I get the purpose, I'm not here to mock them for it, etc. Nor do I care much about demographics or whether they're showering enough or whatever. I'm more concerned/interested in the bigger picture here. If other people want to play those games, fine, but it ain't my bag. This is going to be about as all over the place as the OWS/99% protests are, though, so bear with me.

Being a conservative in Massachusetts, and being an active (and activist) atheist, I find myself surrounded a lot more by left wing types than many other right wingers. Thus, I've been getting nothing short of a barrage of the 99% movement in my Facebook feeds, via the few LJ communities I'm still active in, etc. It's giving me a warped viewpoint of the movement in that it feels bigger than it really is - just like how, if I went solely by what my circles are interested in, Community would be the highest-rated show on television and everyone listens to Spoon. There's that small part of me who sits here and thinks that this might have a shot at actually accomplishing something beyond irritating the locals, but then I see the video above and realize that there's a reason so many fringe movements and ideas fail to gain traction, and much of it has to do with a severe lack of organization (leaderless groups rarely work out well) and how one treats their allies. When John Lewis shows up to a left wing movement like this and is essentially tossed aside for ridiculous reasons, you're going to have trouble getting people you agree with on board, never mind people you need to convince.

The key problem with the OWS/99% movement can be boiled down to one salient point, I think: movements designed to hold people accountable for their actions don't really end well when you're trying to hold the wrong people to account. 90% of the "problems" they're identifying are government, rather than Wall Street/corporate ones, and all of their prescriptions require less freedom and/or making said problems worse. While there's no "official document" of demands (leadership vacuum strikes again), the things we hear over and over aren't really Wall Street issues - they're government issues, and they're issues that impact all of us. Examples:

*Overturn Citizens United: This is not a Wall Street issue at all, as the Citizens United ruling was more about a...group of citizens. Many of the complaints along this line keep bringing up corporate personhood, which has nothing to do with the ruling. To overturn this ruling would mean fewer speech rights, which is...kind of insane, to be frank, especially coming from people who seem to be embracing the idea of the power of many.

* Banking crimes: Not that they're identifying crimes that banks or bankers have committed in order to hold them accountable. The recent Bank of America issue seemed to really energize some folks, but the protesters again fail to recognize how the regulatory structure made it so. They get mad about the housing bubble, but fail to see how government tax policy and regulatory policy created it. They get mad about the bailouts without understanding that the major banks didn't have an option. I'm underwater on my mortgage - that's not Bank of America's fault - I'm the one who bought a home before the recession, and the government's the one who got us into this mess.

* Student loan debt: This one might tickle me the most. I have well over $40k in student loan debt right now for a degree in a field that is not very marketable and thus is more or less going unused, I went to a small private college and commuted to school daily, so my loans are lower than they would have been had I gone to some of the other private institutions locally. Yet, somehow, it's the banks fault that I have that much debt? If this is to be believed, the heavy bulk of loans are handled by the government anyway, and they aren't setting the prices of an education anyway. It's corporate America's fault that I'm working in publishing instead of a museum or teaching? Why not march on the colleges for charging $30k/year for an education? Completely misguided.

I can't figure out why more people aren't recognizing this - it's kind of depressing. Putting aside the living wage crackpots and the bonafide socialist folks involved, you've got a lot of people capable of actually making a difference and they're completely misfiring. Say what you want about the Tea Party (speaking of questionable populist movements...), but at least they understood where the problem was and actually organized in a productive way to try and fix it.

What's the problem here? Where did it go wrong, and how did it get there so quickly?

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There's Something Strange in Your Neighborhood

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