Occupy Wall Street . . . One Year Later

Demonstrations were staged in Lower Manhattan today to mark the first anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street and to continue pointing out the gross inequities of the supply-side economic theory that has wrecked this country for three decades and is already wrecking going into a fourth. For some reason, this demonstration actually made the TV news, which hasn't paid attention to the movement since the sleep-in at Zuccotti Park was broken up.  Perhaps the Kardashians weren't doing anything interesting enough.      

There's a reason why no one takes Occupy Wall Street seriously anymore; it's because Occupy Wall Street doesn't take itself seriously anymore.  Any political movement whose members register their anger with the system by marching across New Jersey playing guitars ought to be going out for auditions rather than trying to stick it to the man.

Occupy Wall Street began as a movement against the growing accumulation of wealth by the financial sector, which was fine by me, but as it metamorphosized into support for for a liberal domestic agenda, it slowly added more grievances about discrimination, political corruption, and the rotten way women are treated everywhere, among other things.  In short, it lost its focus, and it did so long before it lost Zuccotti Park.  This is why conservative activists are so successful.  They focus on specific goals of small government and lower taxes, and nothing else. They only go after abortion once they're in power.  That explains why the Tea Party is still going strong after having elected several right-wingers to Congress and why Occupy Wall Street literally became yesterday's news, being thrown out with the banana peels and coffee grinds.  And I'm sure some Occupy activists have protested against the exploitation of Brazilian labor to produce those bananas and all that coffee.  But that's all Occupy Wall Street activists do.  They protest, they march, they yell, they demonstrate, and they may have even played guitars walking on a bridge over the Delaware River saying "TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES" and cited the irony of that illiterate but still comprehensible slogan being rendered moot by the decline of Trenton, New Jersey's industrial base, but they rarely accomplish anything.

You will note that I called Occupy Wall Street a movement, not an organization. That's because they have no organization.  They're lucky I'm charitable enough to refer to them in the present tense, because while they may have celebrated the anniversary of the start of the movement, they really can't say they're celebrating the anniversary of the movement itself.  They were pretty much done by last Christmas.