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Occupy Washington and Wall Street
Seeing the so-called "conservative" media wax indignant about the Occupy Wall Street protesters is almost exactly like watching the mainstream media attack the tea party three years ago. In the process of purportedly criticizing the protesters, they reveal both their ignorance and their ideological bias and completely manage to miss the entire point of the very justifiable protests. It is true that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are incoherent and advocate inherently contradictory policies. For example, they wish to turn to Washington to limit the havoc that Wall Street has wreaked, and continues to wreak, on the American economy and the American people, little realizing that Washington has been knowingly enabling Wall Street's capacity to do so from the start. But it is equally true that the tea-party activists are incoherent and advocate inherently contradictory policies. The tea party wants to reduce government spending while retaining the expensive income transfer programs and continuing to fund what now amounts to six foreign wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Uganda. Or, as its position has been so effectively lampooned, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." And if the involvement of international financier George Soros quite reasonably renders the Occupy Wall Street protests suspect, so too is the legitimacy of the tea party rendered suspect by its own entwinement with many of the Republican establishment figures who helped bring the nation to this pass. Just yesterday, the Treasury announced that the 2011 federal budget deficit, which was passed by the tea party-endorsed Republican House, amounted to $1.299 trillion, the second largest annual deficit in American history. And it was that same Republican House that voted to increase the legal limit on federal debt. In other words, the tea party and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin. They are the angry, frustrated, incoherent voices of the American people. One speaks for the ignorant right, and the other speaks for the ignorant left. But to attempt to view them from the conventional left-right, Democrat-Republican, liberal-conservative perspective is to completely miss the point and to fall into the trap that George Soros and the Republican establishment have set for you. What most Americans, especially those Americans involved in the two activist groups or criticizing one of the two groups, fail to understand is that while there are two sides to American politics, they are not the two sides that most people commonly believe. The real political divide is not between Republicans and Democrats or between red-state America and blue-state America; it is between the Washington-Wall Street axis and the rest of the American people. And the two political parties are not in opposition to each other. They are instead allies in the bifactional ruling party that governs the nation on behalf of the Washington-Wall Street axis of pure evil. This is why George Soros funds Occupy Wall Street and why Republican establishment figures such as William Bennett and Dick Armey were quick to attempt to jump in front of the tea-party parade and pretend to be leading it. The purpose is to co-opt both movements and redirect the justifiable fury of Americans both left and right away from the architects of their financial servitude and back into the conventional political channels designed to permit the safe release of popular pressure in a manner that doesn't threaten the financial or political order. Thus conservatives claim Occupy Wall Street is a plot to re-elect Obama, even though it is directed against the bankers who were, and are, the chief financial supports of President Goldman Sachs. Thus liberals claim that the tea party is racist, even though the tea partiers are enthusiastically supporting a black man. (Ironically, he is a black man who is even more closely tied to the banksters than Obama.) And both the conservative media and the liberal mainstream media serve the interests of the Washington-Wall Street axis by constantly attempting to redirect attention toward the less significant, more replaceable element of the axis. The Occupy Wall Street protests are no more an attack on capitalism than the tea party is an attempt to restore the Confederacy, because there is nothing capitalist about Wall Street. Wall Street is actually an outdated throw-back to the pre-capitalist period; it is a variant of the royal mercantile system in which profits were not dependent upon superior competition, but upon the monopolies granted by the thrones of France and England. Neither Occupy Wall Street nor the tea party are going to achieve their self-contradictory objectives. Their ideological incoherence renders that impossible. But the mass anger and frustration they represent are real, their grievances are legitimate, and the inept, short-sighted, arrogant governance by the bifactional ruling party makes it likely that eventually, the two popular sides will come together to fight their real enemy: the unholy alliance of the politicians of Washington with the bankers of Wall Street. |
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