Here’s a helpful tip: if you are a political pundit and you still don’t know what Occupy Wall Street stands for, you are an idiot. If you purport to make your living analyzing the political landscape, or from parsing the effectiveness of various political messages, or if you write columns explaining what the American people want based on your deep, intimate knowledge of what the American people want, but you still, after a month, cannot quite grasp what these uncouth people in the streets are going on about, then you are categorically bad at your job. If you find yourself tuttering and tsking over how the protestors are merely a group of fringe figures, and you do not notice or care to notice the polls expressing wide support for the message, you are a fraud.
\nIt really is that simple, at this point. No supposed “pundit” should be able to say with a straight face that they cannot possibly understand what message the protestors have. Here, I will give it to you in a mere few words: the Occupy Wall Street movement is a protest against rampant income inequality, against corporate excesses, and against a government rigged to protect and worsen both.<\/p>\n
It is a protest specifically against the members of the financial sector, who were bailed out at taxpayer expense after wrecking the economy with self-perpetuated fraudulent schemes against one another, and who have learned not one damn thing from the experience, but instead have continued on their merry, privileged way. They assert themselves to be masters of the universe, and pay themselves accordingly, and whether the world they supposedly run hums like clockwork or burns to the ground makes no particular difference to them.<\/p>\n
It is a protest against the perceived entitlement of the wealthy, for whom any slight economic injury (say, from taxes) is seen as an apocalyptic event, and for whose sake austerity must be imposed on every other group, from schoolchildren to the elderly, from the poor, the sick and the comfortably middle-class alike.<\/p>\n
It is a protest against a government that seems to exist solely to meet the needs of wealthy and corporate benefactors, a government that cannot competently even execute routine functions anymore, but which is instead dedicated single-mindedly to the premise of cutting taxes on the rich and balancing the books on the poor.<\/p>\n
It is not a protest against TARP; it is a protest against the failure of TARP to achieve even a stick of reform in exchange for the body blow dealt to the rest of us. It is not a protest against political parties, but against a system that has been so corrupted that the needs of the one percent are considered of greater merit than that of the entire rest of the population.<\/p>\n