Occupy at One Year

My article from the September 17, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Occupy at One Year

By Matthew Vadum

The violent anti-American radicals of Occupy Wall Street plan to celebrate the anniversary of their neo-communist movement today by shutting down the New York Stock Exchange and hitting dozens of corporate targets.
The anniversary comes days after an operative for the Anonymous computer hacker group was arrested for allegedly threatening a federal agent. Barrett Brown, a self-described spokesman for Anonymous, which is allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement, boasts that he carried out cyber-attacks against Visa and MasterCard.
These Bolshevik banditos plan to begin the day with occupying “Wall Street with non-violent civil disobedience and flood[ing] the area around it with a roving carnival of resistance,” according to adbusters.org. The group will “surround access to [the NYSE] with the People’s Wall sit-in” and then conduct “a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections.” Operation Latte Thunder will then “Storm Wall Street and demand it stop bankrolling climate change.”
As always the leaders of Occupy Wall Street are lying about non-violence. The violence is the whole point of the demonstrations. When he interviewed OWS protesters in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park last year Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen discovered that 31 percent of the movement supported using “violence to advance their agenda.”
And as Arnold Ahlert writes there have been at least “6,990 documented arrests in 114 cities across the nation directly associated with the OWS movement.” Apologists for the movement, especially the mainstream media, treat all these antisocial behaviors as freak occurrences, as if the Occupiers themselves were victims of saboteurs and dirty tricksters. “[B]ut thousands of arrests in hundreds of cities, coupled with instances of anti-semitism, sexual assaults (including rape), vandalism, and even murder can hardly be attributed solely to ‘fringe’ or ‘rogue’ elements ‘hijacking’ an otherwise peaceful movement.”
The reason the movement exists “is to disrupt the normal course of everyday life at every opportunity and to turn ‘one percent’ of Americans into literal enemies of the nation,” Ahlert writes.
It is true that the Occupy Wall Street movement has petered out since it was launched on September 17, 2011, amidst photos of defaced ten-dollar bills showing Founding Father Alexander Hamilton with black hair and a Hitler mustache. Its stated goal at the time was to condemn “greed” and “profit over and above all else” and to undermine economic freedom.
That protest was originally promoted as a “US Day of Rage” named after the so-called Days of Rage that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground, the terrorist organization of Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against “The System.” Leftists continue to insist that Occupy Wall Street was inspired largely by last year’s Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings against authoritarian Middle Eastern governments that many mistook for a desire for democratic rule. To provide cover for his radical friends leftist pseudo-intellectual Cornel West refers to OWS as “a democratic awakening,” the same expression he used to describe Hugo Chavez’s brutal communist revolution in Venezuela. Leftists say it’s not true democracy unless they win.
Last year’s US Day of Rage was heavily promoted by the Vancouver, Canada-based Adbusters Media Foundation, the nonprofit behind the “anti-consumerist” magazine. The foundation is funded by organizations associated with George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a radical billionaires’ club that wants to turn America into Greece. Soros is a convicted criminal who prefers Communist China’s government over America’s and who openly aspires to bring European-style socialism to the United States. He told Newsweek earlier this year that he was delighted with the violence and civil unrest percolating across the fruited plain. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible,” he said, echoing Saul Alinsky’s adage that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Since 2001 Adbusters has received $317,773 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation and $176,500 from the Glaser Progress Foundation, which was created by Alliance member and RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser.
Occupy Wall Street was organized by various far-left organizations including a constellation of ACORN front groups, labor unions, and anarchist collectives, and hailed by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, various Communist and neo-Nazi parties, and America’s enemies abroad. The movement came on the heels of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke called an “anti-banking jihad,” an SEIU-led effort aimed at destabilizing the nation’s financial system. SEIU organizer Stephen Lerner promised to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption.
Despite being endorsed by left-wing politicians from coast to coast the movement never evolved into a major player in U.S. politics today — but it has nevertheless had a lasting impact on the American body politic.
Through endless repetition of the terms “the 99 percent” and “the one percent,” Americans have begun to view their society through a Marxist lens. They have absorbed this central Big Lie of Marxist thought through a kind of osmosis.
And now this Marxist meme, long banished to the academy and union halls, is everywhere. To the delight of radical socialists it is impossible to turn on conservative talk radio without hearing hosts explain issues using this false dichotomy of the one percent versus the 99 percent. To use the loaded language of the Left is to accept the Left’s premises.
Certainly there has long been vague talk of “the rich,” “the poor,” and “the middle class,” but Occupy Wall Street somehow managed to get Americans to see their society in Marxist terms, something more than a hundred years of Progressive agitation could not do. This in itself is a huge and unwelcome development because it allows the Left to define and set the parameters of political discourse. Instead of talking about cutting taxes and reducing government spending, now right-wingers get distracted arguing about make-believe issues like income inequality and social justice. Only time will tell if this meme will fade away eventually.
But there is still room for optimism. Occupy’s very success has laid the foundation for its own destruction.
The movement has provided a valuable service to the American public. Occupy Wall Street has been a yearlong, Obama administration-approved, media-saturated exercise in consciousness-raising.
It has helped to remind Americans just how dangerous, lawless, and out of touch the modern, Occupy-embracing Democratic Party is. The anti-American Occupy Wall Street movement has also helped to reinforce the message of the patriotic Tea Party movement which supports Americans’ unalienable rights, limited government, fiscal restraint, and the rule of law.
For this, Americans who love their country should be grateful to the rabble of Occupy Wall Street.