Occupy Wall Street: The Final Implosion and the Impact on My Politics

It seems Occupy Wall Street has finally imploded and died. I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Yes, I supported Occupy for a period of weeks, much to my shame. Once Occupy got away from a populist economic message and went off into far left nonsense it was doomed. Huge clue: Marxist teach ins don't fly in America. Neither does the over the top anti-Semitism that came to pervade the so-called movement.

The fact is that Occupy has been dead for a couple of years now. Those in the hard core left-wing social media bubble don't realize it because they've supported one another and somehow think lots of other people agree with them. These, of course, are the folks who think President Obama is a corporate sell out and who either stayed home during the 2012 elections or supported Jill Stein for President. How many votes did she get? Getting 0.36 percent of the vote is not making an impact. You see my point. Occupy had become another piece of the extreme left wing, and hard left politics are terribly unpopular in the U.S.

Occupy did have an impact. It made income inequality an issue Democrats and even some Republicans are still talking about. It deserves some credit for that. However, a "leaderless" organization (or rather disorganization) which tried to make decisions by "consensus" was doomed to failure from the start. An organization like this needs leadership, real leadership, that can keep it on message and keep that message narrowly defined. That's how things can get accomplished and how progress towards the worthwhile goals that Occupy started out with can be made. Right now the name Occupy is poison to anyone not on the far left. If you really want a populist, non-partisan movement with broad based support you need focus, first and foremost.

I had been drifting from right to left politically for a very long time when I joined Occupy, willing to devote time and resources to what I saw as a worthwhile movement against corruption, undue corporate influence and for needed economic reform. Since that brief period, since I became more tuned into left wing media and what the left stands for, I've been moving in the opposite direction. I fully expect to vote Republican for the first time in a quarter of a century in the 2014 elections. That's the one positive change Occupy did make in my life. Congratulations! I don't think that was the intent of the movement but it sure convinced me that was the correct and moral direction for me to move in.

[Drawn from a debate on Facebook,]

The Boston Blame Game: Left Wing Editon

[NOTE: This will eventually be a rare cross-posted to my blog about Israel and Zionism since it touches at least tangentially upon the issues there.]

Ever since the Boston Marathon bombings lots on lots of people on the Internet are playing a despicable blame game, blaming everyone and anyone they don't like for the terrorist attack; anyone except Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, that is. The conspiracy theorist version of the blame game includes claiming this was actually a U.S. government plot or an Israeli/Mossad "false flag operation". The right wing version often includes blaming Islam as a whole and every Muslim on the planet. For right now I'm going to pick on a left wing version: blaming the victims (the United States) and our friends in the world.

It's pretty easy for hard core left wingers to blame American foreign policy here: the use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and American support of Israel are used as prime examples. The United States is blamed, often solely blamed, for the loss of innocent lives throughout the Muslim world. Here is a dose of reality: radical Islamists have declared war on the West. When you're attacked you do have to respond. Anything else is perceived as weakness and encourages more violence. Are innocent lives are lost? That is the sad and tragic reality in any war. Yes, if we have a choice war needs to be a last resort. Sometimes, sadly, it is the only resort left.

The problem with radical Islam, something which is growing and spreading like a cancer in the Muslim world, is that people are taught to hate in their schools, in their mosques and in the media. Add a very large poor population, poorly educated or hardly educated at all, a relatively low literacy rate, and little or no access to other viewpoints. If the infidel or the American or the Jew or the Israeli or the European is made a scapegoat for all that is wrong in their lives the hatred is there. It doesn't require a drone strike or ill advised foreign policy to nurture that hatred.

Some ultraliberals, when referring to the Muslim world, talk about how we ignore or harm "the government(s) that represents those people". In the Islamic world there are only such representative governments in Turkey, Indonesia, and Iraqi Kurdistan, which is independent from the rest of Iraq in many respects. Everywhere else you have dictatorships and theocracies that vary only in the extent to which they brutalize their own people. The worst poverty I have ever seen was in a Muslim country I visited several times on business. If I took the time to describe what I saw your heart would break. The sad truth is those kind of scenes are repeated in many, many countries throughout the Islamic world.

The poverty I refer to wasn't caused by drones, by American meddling or by any other excuse used to explain the problem. Those issues are factors but, honestly, they are relatively minor factors. They serve as propaganda points for those stoking the hate. No American government policy included meddling in Chechnya, where the Tsarnaev's come from. Honestly, that excuse is nothing more than an excuse.

The conflict between a modern, tolerant view of Islam and the more radical and fundamentalist view has been going on for more than a thousand years. To blame recent policies, no matter how short sighted or flawed, is to ignore history. The principle blame here belongs to the terrorists, to the ideology they followed, and to those who promote that ideology and justify terrorism. A small dose of blame goes to the left-wingers who enable terrorism by blaming the victims rather than the real sources of the problem.

Wall Street South? You've Got To Be Kidding Me!

The left wing in this country has never been able to tell their friends from their enemies and attack both equally. Sometimes they go after their friends more than their enemies, much to the joy of the right. We're seeing something like that with the so-called "Occupy Movement" (who mostly gave up occupation of parks and the like last winter) with their March on Wall Street South. What is Wall Street South? Why, it's the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC next month.

The Occu-tistas seem to have forgotten that it's the Republicans who continually oppose all reform of the financial industry while support for reigning in the excesses of Wall Street come entirely from the Democrats in Congress. They seem to have forgotten that Republicans want welfare for big corporations (like the big oil companies, for example) while cutting any aid to the poor. The Republicans support tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans while voting down anything that might (gasp!) involve government spending to create jobs.

The Occupy crowd, which once claimed to represent a broad spectrum of the American population who felt abused by Washington and Wall Street alike, has once again shown that it has been diminished to a creature of the far left fringe. That's been obvious for quite some time now, at least here in Raleigh, where their Facebook page has advertised everything from a Marxist teach-in to a protest against a potential war in Iran and also against any sanctions against Iran. These people are as dangerous to our freedoms as the people on the far right they oppose.

Some Occupiers have been saying that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans for some time despite all evidence and all the voting records to the contrary. Folks on the left who held similar views in Florida handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush. In a state where the election was officially decided by 537 votes, 1.6% of the electorate voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. If most of those votes had gone to Al Gore instead he would have easily been elected President. Once again we face a close election and once again I fear the hard left, either by sitting home or by voting for fringe candidates, will hand the election to a now much more radical right-wing Republican Party.

I am certainly a liberal on some domestic issues and on social issues. Let me make one thing clear: I strongly support the Democrats attending the Democratic National Convention. I strongly opposed the leftist protesters outside who are, once again, aiding those they claim to oppose most.