"The 'Occupy Wall Street' Protests"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protests”

October 6, 2011

Civil disobedience is an honored means of protest. Henry David Thoreau, the author of a speech entitled, “Resistance to Civil Governments” (later published as “Civil Disobedience”) is considered the father of civil disobedience. Mahatma Gandhi said of Thoreau’s pamphlet, “…it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.” Martin Luther King wrote of Thoreau: “As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the legacy of a creative protest.” Throughout history, protesters were often treated terribly. During World War I, pacifists in England were hounded, jailed, physically forced into the army and, when they refused to carry a weapon, shot.

As one who came of age in the 1950s, I was witness to marches across the south for civil rights, many of them ugly and too many that ended in death and destruction. (Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried the review of a book, Elizabeth and Hazel, which tells the sad story of two women, one white and the other black, who were captured in a photograph that became an iconic emblem of 1957 Little Rock.) In the end civil rights prevailed, but not before the assassination of Martin Luther King and the deaths of hundreds of blacks, many murdered in horrendous ways. Fifty years later the wounds are still healing; but the appointment by George Bush of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as Secretaries of State, the election in 2008 of Barack Obama and the fact that Herman Cain has become a Republican Presidential candidate speak to the distance we have traveled over the past fifty years. Civil disobedience changed the country for the better.

But not all protests have such honorable origins, or such noble goals. Many protests are “unserious.” Who, when in college, did not march in protest? I certainly did. Looking back fifty years, I generally remember the demonstrating, but not the cause. The goal was to be outrageous, to appear incensed, but in truth to have fun. Even when one is involved with sports, time hangs heavily over most college students. Classes, homework and athletics consume a lot of time, but not all of it. Youth is both blessed and cursed with energy – blessed in the sense that they are imbued with the belief that there is nothing they cannot do, but cursed in the sense that that energy can be expended in destructive ways.

Occupy Wall Street fits neither mold, but leans toward the unserious. The demonstration stems from a sense of frustration that people were left to hang while Wall Street was bailed out. There is an element of truth in their complaints. Banks were bailed out. They had to be. And it proved too difficult, even for glib politicians, to explain simply and clearly why banks had to be bailed out – that if they were not, the entire financial system was at risk of collapse. On the other hand, banks had no excuse for taking some of the money and using it to pay exorbitant bonuses. The fact that they did is a manifestation that on Wall Street returns on labor greatly exceed returns on capital. When capital and labor were the same, as they were in private partnerships, capital was treated with the respect it deserves. But when capital and labor became divorced, as happened when Wall Street firms went public, capital began being treated cavalierly. For many traders, it became a time of “heads I win; tails, I don’t lose.” It is little wonder that so many on Main Street became incensed with Wall Street. Capital provided to banks that was not needed for operations should have been returned to the owners, in this case the taxpayers – not paid out in bonuses.

Initially, the protesters were comprised of unemployed youth. Following the highly publicized arrests over the past weekend, a number of labor unions chose to join the fray, bringing a level of adulthood (but not much maturity) to what had, for the most part, been youthful demonstrations. Matt Miller of Bloomberg yesterday described some of the youth as wanting “to change the conscience of the nation,” a goal of every college sophomore. Others have jumped aboard the cause, eager to be seen as enemies of ‘greedy’ Wall Streeters. Why else would Susan Sarandon make an appearance? Why would that billionaire “King of Hedge Funds,” George Soros make public his support for their goals? The cause, frankly, is less important to them than the cameras and publicity, which to them are as slop is to pigs.

Not to be outdone and never a good person to have in your corner, comedienne Roseanne Barr, best known for not being very funny, articulated with a straight face her reasonable solution to the protests: “I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount of that amount then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps and if that doesn’t help, then being beheaded.” Not being able to completely unscramble Ms. Barr’s elocution, it seems she does not like rich bankers.

The list of demands issued by Occupy Wall Street protests smacks of silliness and socialism, peppered with items from the liberal agenda of the Obama administration – guaranteed living wages, free college, a universal single payer healthcare system, ending dependency on fossil fuels, spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure and another trillion on ecological restoration, and forgiveness of debt for all. Indicating truth to the old maxim that things never change, and apropos of today’s Wall Street protests, a 1934 political cartoon from the Chicago Tribune was sent me by a friend. The cartoon depicts a horse-drawn cart carrying “young pinkies from Columbia and Harvard.” They are shoveling bags of money to the street. Their desire is to “bust” the government, “blame the capitalists for the failure – junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship.”

Perhaps my tone is too glib. I do not mean to suggest that the protests on Wall Street should be ignored or belittled. They are indicative of dissatisfaction with the economy, a distrust of our political classes; they reflect a growing awareness of disparities in wealth and a sense that some of the young feel they are trapped in a downward spiral. This year has been a season of protests: from uprisings in the Arab world, allegedly fueled by a desire for democratic reform, but in fact often encouraged by the Muslim Brotherhood; to government strikers in Greece who object to paying taxes and to the unfair demand that the retirement age should be raised to fifty-five, and now to New York and other cities, where the young ventilate their frustrations by taking to the streets, disrupting traffic and commerce.

It is difficult to tell how Occupy Wall Street will end, but my guess is that it just peters out. While their frustration is real, their goals are unrealistic to warrant serious reaction. When the cameras go away, so will the celebrities and when that happens, so will the protesters.