Buck Sexton - Occupy: American Spring: The Making of a Revolution

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Occupy: AMERICAN SPRING

The Making of a Revolution

Buck Sexton

Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink

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Copyright 2012 by Buck Sexton

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First Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink ebook edition April 2012

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ISBN 978-1-4516-9561-8 (eBook)

November 15, 2011, 1:30 a.m.

Zuccotti Park, New York City

I sidled up behind a mob of about fifty furious Occupiers. It was the night of their eviction from the park. Police floodlights lit up the sidewalk like a movie set, and two surveillance helicopters hovered in the blackness above the Manhattan skyline. Occupiers, mostly white twenty-somethings, stood face-to-face with a phalanx of helmeted NYPD officers with batons at the ready. They alternated between screaming profanity at the cops and encouraging them to switch sides. Hundreds of them had already been arrested.

In a coordinated police sweep, the City of New York had taken away the Occupiers Zuccotti Park home base earlier that night. OWS distress calls shot out across Twitter and Facebook around midnight. After a core group of about two hundred had been arrested for refusing to leave the park, the remaining Occupiers had gathered on its outskirts. They were determined to take back the private property that never belonged to them in the first place. I maneuvered just behind the groups as they looked for an opening back into Zuccotti.

Moments later, more Occupiers were thrown onto the hoods of police cars and the pavement. Others moved corner to corner, hoping to out maneuver the police and then make a last charge on the now cordoned-off Zuccotti Parkbut it never happened.

After hours of roaming the streets of lower Manhattan with the mob, I followed them to nearby Foley Square as the sun began to rise. They held a General Assembly meeting and decided to regroup. It was time, they decided, to process video clips and get the word out across the globe about what had happened that night. After two months of political theater, their physical eviction had finally come, but they knew well that the real battlethe one of public opinionwas only just beginning.

What Do They Want?

On September 17, 2011, a ragtag rabble of left-wing protesters gathered in lower Manhattan to protest Wall Street excess and restore fairness to the system. In a matter of weeks, the small group had spawned a global protest movement that eventually became known as Occupy Wall Street. It now seeks to steer American political discourse under the banner of the 99 percent.

Most Americans were led to believe that the Occupy movement was spontaneous, nonpartisan, and primarily the result of public anger at Wall Street banks and economic inequality.

As someone who has been with Occupiers at every major event in New York City and has spent countless hours among them, I can tell you this: All of those claims are completely false.

When you dig down a few layers, you see that Occupy Wall Street is largely a Trojan Horse political movement. Its true agenda is driven by the deepest ambitions of the political left, rallying its factions to go all-in. The antiWall Street rhetoric is a smokescreena very effective onefor a much bigger and more radical slew of political objectives that elevate the state over the individual.

This is not to say that the financial sector hasnt let Main Street down, or that Americans shouldnt be upset about Wall Street corruption. There is genuine and justifiable anger over the role that Wall Street and the U.S. government played in the financial collapse. We still havent gotten to the bottom of that story. But thats not what the OWS movement is really all aboutat least not when the ubiquitous livestream cameras are turned off and the media has gone home to sleep.

What Occupiers see at stake is not so much Wall Street reform, but the entire progressive agenda of the postWorld War II era. They believe that the anger and hardship of the masses can be focused and used to power a great leap forward, a New, New Deal, and they feel that now is the time for that leap to happen.

Thats the simple truth about the Wall Street Occupiers: They know the Nanny State is at a tipping point. Statist regimes around the globe are collapsing under the weight of outsized entitlements. This has spurred a fundamental transformation in the way Western democracies view their own future. Does the economic collapse signify that the welfare state is a failed experiment; or does it prove that the government needs to do more, that the safety nets need to be expanded even further?

OWS very much wants to provide a simple answer to that question. Yet, once you get past the signs and talking points and bumper sticker slogans, you begin to realize that its solution is not simple at all.

First and foremost, the Occupiers want stuff. The movement is less about what bankers have than what the Occupiers think they should have, courtesy of Uncle Sam and U.S. taxpayers.

While the Occupiers themselves are a diverse bunchat least when it comes to their motivations for standing in a parkthe one thing that nearly all of them agree on is that government should redistribute more goodies to people like them. The complaints over the 1 percent are just a convenient pretext to demand more benefits from Washington, D.C.

More Is Not Enough

To really understand what OWS wants and why its demands are so unreasonable, its helpful to first take a step back. Our government has become a giant grab bag, a massive system of carrots and sticks that serves primarily to punish success and reward the lack of it. Those who create, earn, and prosper are continually and increasingly vilified at the hands of those who want more stuff: Unions want to keep their unsustainable contracts, students want their loan debts erased, homeowners want their underwater mortgages forgiven, and socialists want free healthcare, housing, and education. The list goes on forever.