September 17, 2011: Occupy Wall Street

During my recovery from hip replacement surgery, at a moment when I didn't feel well enough to get out of bed, sit down at my computer, and type my thoughts down, it finally occurred to me just why the "populist left" in America seems to hate the Democratic Party as much as the "populist right" does. It's because they view the Democrats as their oppressors. 

They view them this way because the evidence shows it to them. Think of the defining moments in America's populist left:

* The populist left identified with the Civil Rights Movement, even though their contributions to it, and especially those of a then-young Bernie Sanders, have been seriously overblown, and even lied about. In 1963, the civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama had police dogs and firehoses trained on them. At the time, the President was John F. Kennedy, a Democrat.

* In 1968, the populist left protested at the Democratic National Convention, over the Vietnam War, and the Chicago Police beat them. At the time, the President was Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat.

* It took a long time for there to be another defining moment for the populist left in America, but it came in 1999, in the protest of the World Trade Organization conference at Seattle. At the time, the President was a Democrat, Bill Clinton. 

* And the most recent major formative event for them, in 2011, was the Occupy Wall Street movement, where the police moved in and beat them. At the time, the President was a Democrat, Barack Obama.

It doesn't seem to have occurred the populist left that, in some of these cases, in some of these cases, it was a Republican Mayor or a Republican Governor sending the big boys in to beat them.

Nor does it seem to have occurred to them that, when it was a Democratic Mayor or Governor, it was a more conservative one than the liberal Democrat who was President at the time period.

Another thing that does not seem to have occurred to them is that, in each of these cases, the President of the United States didn't have a damn thing to do with the harm that was caused to them and their movement. 

But these people are so thick, all they saw was the top of the org chart: President, Democrat, liberal, not progressive, not one of us.

They either saw the President as ordering this (which he didn't), or approving of it, or standing by and letting it happen to them and doing nothing about it. 

That's why they see the Democrats as the greater enemy than the Republicans, even though it's not even close to being true. These people are just that thick.

*

September 17, 2011, 10 years ago: The "Occupy Wall Street" demonstration began.

On February 2, Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist publication, called for "A Million Man March on Wall Street," intending it as a peaceful occupation of Wall Street, the street in Lower Manhattan that is home to the New York Stock Exchange, making the Street itself a metaphor for American capitalism. The idea was to protest corporate influence on democracy, an increasing disparity in wealth, and a lack of legal consequences for the perpetrators of corporate malfeasance.

The original location planned was One Chase Manhattan Plaza, home of the world's largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, formed by the 2000 merger of J.P. Morgan & Co. and Chase Manhattan. That's at 28 Liberty Street, across the street from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, and 2 blocks north of Wall Street. The backup location was the "Charging Bull" statue in Bowling Green, about a 5-minute walk from the Stock Exchange. The police found out about this, and fenced both off. So they went with Plan C: Zuccotti Park, in front of One Liberty Plaza, at Broadway and Liberty Street, 3 blocks north of Wall Street.

In response to the charge that the Republican Party's tax cuts were designed for the top 1 percent of richest Americans, the demonstrators came up with the slogan, "We are the 99 percent." The conservative response to the protests was to use some of the lines they used on the 1960s' Hippies. They were Communists, or Socialists. They were dirty. They should get a haircut, take a shower, and get a job. The liberal response was practically nonexistent.

Over the next few days, shouting matches between demonstrators and uniformed police officers led to several arrests. On September 30, over 1,000 demonstrators marched on NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza, half a mile away. The next day, they marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, and over 700 people were arrested.

On October 10, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that as long as the protesters operated under the law, they would not be arrested. Three days later, he contradicted this, saying that Zuccotti Park had to be cleared so it could be cleaned. The protestors refused to leave.

The park cleaning was continually delayed, until November 14. At 1:00 AM on November 15, the police cleared the park. On occasion, they would return, but the momentum was lost.

Result? Within a year, President Barack Obama won an overwhelming victory against his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts, a predatory businessman who called himself "severely conservative." Four years after that, an even more corrupt businessman, Donald Trump, took the Presidency, in part due to the resentment of rich people against the demonstrators, and of "Heartland" America against "coastal elites." Four years after that, Trump got his ass kicked by Joe Biden, who won in large part because, like the Occupy movement, he made a big deal of showing empathy.

And on the 10th Anniversary of the initial demonstration, income inequality has gotten worse. Obama wasn't able to do much about it. Trump refused to. Biden? We shall see.