Let us call the "Occupy" campaign what it really is: a campaign. It is an organized mobilization of civil disturbance that appears to be proceeding according a script. It has substantial financial backing (the "protesters" are being paid). It has the full attention of the media, which begin every newscast with enthusiastic reminders of its existence. It has the "support" of municipal services unions. Such support includes the refusal by NYC Transit Union members, who normally drive the City's buses, to transport to jail miscreant protesters who have been arrested. The miscreants, in turn, support the unions by creating conditions which provide City employees with copious and well-compensated overtime (one month in, unionized NYPD officers have been paid $3.5 million in overtime on Occupy assignments, according to the Mayor's office).
"Occupy" has made such notorious municipal Nannies as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg render himself so completely docile to it that he won't even bother to clean the pollution-filled park where the would-be-world-changers have set up their tent city. You can bet if they were a congregation of homeless they would have been unceremoniously shooed from the park without attracting more than a passing remark from the media.
The timing of this campaign is unfortunate, distracting the media as it does from those other campaigns -- the presidential ones. On that note, have you noticed that Occupy the World has many of the earmarks of the last presidential campaign? Let's run them down (the similarities, that is):
As noted, it's clearly well organized. Its ground soldiers are of the same demographics that were so effective last time -- young, energetic, college students who got paid to be obnoxious and demanding. It is a media darling, as was the last campaign to Change the world (it even has an irresistibly easy-to-repeat slogan). Union support? Check! Left-leaning billionaire support? Check! International support? Check. Headlines today was that Rome was billowing smoke and 40 policemen had been injured in a sympathetic "Occupy" event.
We would go so far as to say that "Occupy the World" is really just Obama 2008 2.0 with an edge -- a potentially dangerous edge. The danger comes from the fact that these protesters-for-hire aren't pretending to be nice idealistic youngsters, like last time. They're on the offense now, "occupying" this place and that place. They aren't quite on the warpath, but they are wearing the warpaint and looking restless.
Occupy's raison d'etre is, of course, specious. Likely none of its paid participants has seen his life savings disappear in a failed corporate experiment. Safe to say that none has been evicted from the family home; or suffered any other devastating loss of equity. Even those for whom this campaign isn't a first job can't possibly have worked long enough or paid enough in taxes to justify a claim to anything besides the right to vote. Or to hold a job. Or, of course, to peaceably assemble. Or to remain silent, which is our suggestion.
Beyond being globally obnoxious, this group is willfully denying civil authority, and that affects the rest of us. They have told the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, that they will not let him clean the park in which they are exercising all manner of bodily function. But the rest of us pay taxes to have our parks kept clean (and sanitary) so that we can enjoy them with friends and family. At some point, the rest of us are going to demand that the city fulfill its obligations to us. And that might just involve a confrontation with the obnoxious professional layabouts.
Which brings us back to the dangerous edge of the Occupy campaign. Being as it is a boilerplate production of the "student movements" of the 1960's, it doesn't, ah, take a weatherman to know that the wind is blowing toward increasingly destructive civil unrest.
Given the very direct lines of influence that connect the misguided mob known as "Occupy" to the Obama administration and its leftist friends in all manner of high places, if you don't fear for the Republic, you're not paying attention.
