Last week, the Occupy movement passed the 50-day mark. On Sept. 17, this ongoing protest began as Occupy Wall Street in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. Since that date, the movement has diffused nationwide.

An interactive map provided by The Washington Post, powered by Google and populated with Foursquare check-in data shows U.S. Occupy protests from coast to coast. The original Zuccotti Park location has 8,550 Foursquare check-ins reported, the most nationwide by far. Besides this location, smaller East Coast protests include Occupy Boston, Occupy Philly and Occupy D.C. in Washington, D.C. Protests of similar size appear along the West Coast, in cities from Seattle to Los Angeles. Remaining protestors sparsely occupy the Midwest and South.

Because the Occupy movement is broad and decentralized, there is no explicit list of policy demands to cite; however, there was a single call to action. Two months before the first Occupy protest in Zuccotti Park, Adbusters, a left wing publication, released a call to action that specifically named Sept. 17 as the start date, lower Manhattan as the target location and Occupy Wall Street as the name.

Adbusters’ call to action stated that ‘the time has come to deploy … against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street,’ labeling America as a nation that has been hijacked by corporations. The provided solution was to have ‘20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, (and) peaceful barricades.’ Ironically, this roughly translates to: We want to protect our democracy with mob rule.

In case the class warfare mentality was not obvious enough, the Occupy movement adopted the slogan ‘We are the 99 percent’ from a blog on Tumblr. By ’99 percent,’ they mean everyone but the top 1 percent of income earners. On this blog, people upload pictures of themselves holding up paper with written complaints about their economic situations. The complaints typically follow this format: ‘Something bad happened to me financially, and it’s all Jay Gatsby’s fault. I am the 99 percent.’ They blame the top 1 percent earners for their own financial troubles and our current economic situation, but their anger is misdirected.  

Granted, greed and fiscal irresponsibility caused to the subprime mortgage crisis. Yet banks and mortgage lenders are hardly to blame. Greed should be attributed to those who borrowed more than they could afford; irresponsibility should be attributed to those who borrowed but did not understand; and irresponsibility should be attributed to the federal government for pushing banks to overextend. The 1 percent is made of our best and brightest. They are the innovators who not only carry the tax burden, but also employ our citizens. Meanwhile, Occupy protestors post status updates from their iPhones, and objectively, this is only a conflict between the haves and the have-mores.

 

Published on November 16, 2011 at 12:00 pm