Participants at the Occupy sites are trying to make sense of their world. Some describe how everything that started out “cool and clean” but somehow everything has turned to “s**t”. For reasons they can’t understand, protesters have to watch each other while they sleep, to protect them from other protesters. For incomprehensible reasons deaf men or women get raped. But don’t worry, everything is still gender-neutral. One man thinks all the problems will go away once Maoism is established in America. It’s great, don’t you know? There’s nothing in Communism to worry about since even Stalin was good, having only been vilified by the authors hired by Capitalism.
Welcome to the minds of the 99 percent.
Whether you take the attitude of contempt, pity or sympathy, you’ve got to admit that these guys are bound to have a hard time in life. The individuals in these videos probably have a hard time understanding why the sun rises each morning, let alone comprehend why their life seems as bad as it is. In some sense, the persons depicted on YouTube coverage of Occupy are permanent cripples; the kind of rabble that “Maoism” gladly uses and dispenses with like toilet paper, once they’ve served their purpose.
They are the kind of crowd that never figures it out, ever. And how are these wrecks of the earth going to fare if, as the American Enterprise Institute argues, a new economic tsunami is poised to roll across the Atlantic from Europe?
Even if nothing else goes wrong, President Obama will almost surely face the most challenging reelection environment for any American president since the Great Depression. … The eurozone is falling into recession, with the region’s economy probably shrinking both this quarter and next. IHS Global Insight sees no growth at all for 2012 as a whole. This stagnation dramatically raises the odds of a messy default by Greece with financial contagion spreading to the rest of the eurozone and then America. The San Francisco Fed puts the odds of a U.S. recession at more likely than not, concluding “the fragile state of the U.S. economy would not easily withstand turbulence coming across the Atlantic. A European sovereign debt default may well sink the United States back into recession. … The odds are greater than 50 percent that we will experience a recession sometime early in 2012.”
How bad a recession? Bad enough that Barclays Capital thinks unemployment could hit 12 percent and home prices could fall another 7 percent. But whatever the impact of recession on jobs and housing, the reality that the economy would again be “back in the ditch” might be enough to guarantee Obama’s first term would be his last. While Europe’s problems aren’t Obama’s fault, voters would hold him accountable for an economy too weak to withstand overseas shocks.
That the Occupy crowd will fare badly there is no doubt. But the American Enterprise Institute is mistaken if it thinks that they are going to ‘hold Obama accountable’ for a depression. Tremors from Atlantis, the trilateral commission, Nazis from the Moon, maybe. But connecting the dots is not something the Occupy legions has any talent for. And Obama knows this; has known it from the start. The objective of the Occupy program from the beginning has been to create a trope; to create one Big Class Warfare Dot that they can blame when their world falls apart. To create something large enough and easy enough to remember for when they reach into their pockets and come up with air. For when they grope for the next word after “bummer”.
By choosing Wall Street as the locus of hatred the President has selected his target well. It is mythical and because it is an actual street, it seems real even though it is single most abstract thing in the economic world. But it is through the portals of the financial system that the economic demons will pile through. It is made to order for what will probably happen next, if the Eurozone collapses.
And what happens next, 99%?
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