More than half require science, technology, engineering and math-related skills…. Most of the jobs hard to fill are for skilled trades, Internet technology, engineers, sales representatives and machine operators. Yet American colleges are producing fewer math and science graduates as students favor social sciences, whose workload is perceived to be manageable, leading to a skills mismatch.”
— Reuters news story, Oct. 12, 2011
MY liberal friends in the states say the Occupy Wall Street protest is not what I think it is. Apparently, OWS is whatever its supporters want it to be, and is certainly not what its critics say it is. Those who don’t support it just don’t understand what the protest is all about or, worse, have been “brainwashed” already by “corporate ideology.” If we can’t join the protesters let us, at least, be awed by the goodness of their hearts and the righteousness of their demands, about which more later.
What do I think of OWS?
Let me just say this right off the bat. It seems that for some people, criticizing their protest action is equivalent to telling them not to do it or to stop doing it — that you are, in short, “against” their right to demonstrate. I can’t, however, tell anyone what to do or not to do. I can only say what I think about what they’re doing or not doing. And no, instead of quoting Voltaire at this point, I give you Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German Marxist martyr, who once reminded Lenin that “[f]reedom only for…supporters…only for the members of one party — however numerous they may be — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”
Everyone in any case is unhappy with the global economic downturn and I don’t see anything unique with OWS although according to NBC’s Brian Williams “it could well turn out to be the protest of this current era,” while ABC’s Dianne Sawyer reported that it has already “spread to…more than a thousand countries,” and never mind if there are only 204.
The Boston Tea Party, Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Tax Rebellion, the anti-renter movement, Dorr’s Rebellion, the abolitionists, the populists, the anti-imperialist opposition to the brutal annexation of the Philippines, the Socialist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the feminists, the gay movement, the Tea Party movement, etc. — American history has been propelled by one popular struggle after another so pardon this ex-activist’s ho-hum reaction to OWS, which merely echoes the early 19th century demands of the Jacksonian labor radicals “who believed American society [was] torn with social conflict, disfigured by the misery of the masses, and dominated by a greedy elite [with] power over every aspect of American life….”
What do the OWS protestors want? According to one report, “The Occupy movement may be a big tent (one with room for opposition to fracking, calls for campaign finance reform, and a host of other positions), but nearly everyone involved says they are angry that a small group of wealthy Americans have grown increasingly rich while ‘the other 99 percent’ have been left behind.”
Based on a New York magazine survey, 60 percent of the protesters in the Big Apple are under 30 years old and 37 percent believe that capitalism “can’t be saved” and is “inherently immoral.” Asked how they would fix Wall Street, they replied: “A maximum-wage law”; “President Elizabeth Warren”; “burn it down.” Twelve percent say they are “strongly liberal (i.e., Paul Krugman)”; 41 percent admit that they are “fed up with Democrats” and that the “country needs overhaul (i.e., Ralph Nader)”; while 34 percent are “convinced the U.S. government is no better than, say, Al Qaeda (i.e., Noam Chomsky).” The very brilliant Professor Chomsky, incidentally, has said that Dubya’s “crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.” He wasn’t joking.
As someone who has, to paraphrase Herman Cain, already left the liberal — excuse me — the “progressive” plantation, I believe that the OWS protesters want sausages but have seen how they’re made and they don’t like it. They want the results of “bourgeois” democracy and capitalism but they don’t like the process involved, which they consider “messy” and “unfair.” They are unhappy about the consequences of the choices they have freely made. So now they want equality of results instead of equality of opportunity.
Success in business indicates a wrongdoing. Failure to straighten out your personal finances proves you deserve more. Not having a job and an inability to pay mortgage and other debts is evidence of virtue — and of someone else’s misdeed. Ability is a sin. Need is a right.
“[Whiners] who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills, who hold their wishing as an equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort….”
That’s from “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, but what did she know.
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