It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Novelist, playwright, and activist Ariel Dorfman’s new memoir, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, begins with his own “death” in Chile in 1973. A UPI reporter tracks him down to ask about it. “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he replies, feeling inordinately pleased with himself for delivering Mark Twain’s classic line -- until he realizes that there’s still a body in a ditch in Chile, that someone else’s throat has been slit, that someone else’s mother is missing a son or already grieving. And that’s just page one! This is Dorfman at his usual best.
Today, TomDispatch is offering his just-published memoir -- your own signed, personalized copy of it -- in return for a $100 contribution to this site. I hope it’s an offer you can’t refuse. The money will be a boon for us as we plan our future. The offer will last only a single week. To find out more, visit our donation page by clicking here. Tom]
On Wednesday afternoon, we marched out of Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have bedded down for the duration. Drums were pounding and shouts of “Whose streets? Our streets!” “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street,” and “This is what democracy looks like, that is what hypocrisy looks like!” rang out as we headed directly into New York City’s version of a police state. The helicopters with the high-tech sensors and high-resolution cameras hovered in the distant sky, the security cams peered down from walls, the barriers the police had set up hemmed us in -- no street, just sidewalk for these demonstrators -- and the cops, scores of flexi-cuffs looped at their belts, were lined up all along the way, while empty buses wheeled past ready for future arrestees. This was not exactly a shining Big Apple example of the “freedom” to demonstrate. It was demonstration as imprisonment and at certain moments, at least for this 67-year-old, it was claustrophobic. This is the way the state treats 15,000 terrorist suspects, not its own citizens.
Still, the energy and high spirits were staggering. The unions were out -- nurses, teachers, construction workers -- the bands were lively (“… down by the riverside, ain’t gonna study war no more…”), and hand-made signs were everywhere and about everything under the sun: “Crime does pay in the USA -- on Wall Street,” “When did the common good become a bad idea,” “4 years in college, $100,000 in debt, for a hostess job,” “Eat the rich,” “Arab Spring to Wall Street Fall” (with the final “L” in “Fall” slipping off the sign), “We are the 99%,” “Legalize online poker, occupy Wall St.”
Amid the kaleidoscopic range of topics on those signs and in those chants and cries, one thing, one name, was largely missing: the president's. In those hours marching and at Foley Square amid the din of so many thousands of massed people, I saw one sign that said “Obama = Bush” and another that went something like “The Barack Obama we elected would be out here with us.” That was it. Sayonara.
It’s as if the spreading movement, made up of kids who might once have turned out for presidential candidate Obama, had left him and his administration in the dust. Like big labor, the left, and the media, the administration that loved its bankers to death (and got little enough in return for that embrace) is now playing catch-up with a ragtag bunch of protesters it wouldn’t have thought twice about if they hadn't somehow caught the zeitgeist of this moment. (Don’t forget that the Obama administration was similarly left scrambling and desperately behind events when it came to the demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo last January.)
The best Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner could say a few days ago, when asked about his sympathies for the Occupy Wall Street movement, was: "I feel a lot of sympathy for what you might describe as a general sense among Americans that we've lost a sense of possibility." Really? White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley didn’t know if the movement was exactly “helpful” for the White House agenda. Truly? And White House press spokesman Jay Carney commented blandly, “I would simply say that, to the extent that people are frustrated with the economic situation, we understand.” Do you?
Suddenly, on Thursday, with news about the anti-Wall Street movement whipping up a storm, the Obama administration found itself out of breath and running hard to reposition itself. Vice President Joe Biden said, “The core is the bargain has been breached with the American people,” while at his news conference addressing questions about the movement the president added, “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel... [T]he protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”
Still, those signs with everything but Barack Obama on them should be considered a warning. Today, TomDispatch has something different and distinctly relevant. Back in 2003 at the time of the invasion of Iraq, Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer and activist, penned a series of messages from “the dead” for TomDispatch -- to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Laura Bush, and others. Eight years later, he returns with word from a man who died in the attacks of September 11th. His name was Salvador Allende, he was the elected president of Chile, and the “terrorists” on that day in 1973 were the Chilean military backed by the CIA. (Strangely enough, afterwards no one declared a global war on anyone.)
Now, Dorfman, whose remarkable new book , Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, is just out, channels warning words from Allende to Barack Obama. But mark my words, Allende’s isn’t the only warning to the president at this moment. Those kids in downtown Manhattan (and increasingly across the country and the world) are offering their own warning, and theirs, after a fashion, comes from the future, one in which his presidency could someday be seen as little but an irrelevancy. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Dorfman discusses the Occupy Wall Street movement and his own experience with democratic rebellions click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
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