Demands of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

An anonymous member of the group styling itself the Occupy Wall Street movement has authored a list of demands, including:

• Raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hour.
• A guaranteed living wage regardless of employment [I'd like to get some of that].
• Free college education [as a parent of two boys in college, I'd really like to get some of that].
• One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
• One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.
• Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." ... And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

So, on the one hand, our author is demanding that an additional $2 trillion dollars be spent on infrastructure and environmental remediation. Presumably, this is in addition to the $3.8 trillion that the federal government spent last year, of which approximately $1.5 trillion already was borrowed. This implies that the author is demanding that an additional $2 trillion be borrowed by the federal government. And yet, at the same time, the author also demands that all debt, including "sovereign debt" be forgiven and "stricken from the books." How exactly an additional $2 trillion of debt is to be incurred at the same time that all debt is being stricken from the "Books" is something our author does not feel requires an explanation.

The utter "Michael Moore" incoherence of this programme would be laughable if it were not for the fact that it was immediately endorsed by the leading lights of the Democratic Party. President Obama expressed sympathy with the protesters. They are, he said, "giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works … and that's going to express itself politically in 2012 and beyond." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif added, "God bless [the protestors] for their spontaneity. It's independent ... it's young, it's spontaneous, and it's focused. And it's going to be effective." Spontaneous indeed, if we understand that characterization to mean that the protestors' demands were made without prior reflection.

I find it deeply troubling that young people these days cannot seem to grasp that a default on debt is the breaking of a promise, a violation of a moral obligation. If we are not to keep our promises to repay our debt, why should we keep any of our promises at all? Why should we hold ourselves bound by any agreements? Why should we stay married? Why should we feel ourselves obligated to care for our children or our parents? Why shouldn’t we just dispense with all law and morals and live as animals in the wild?

The truly shocking thing is that many young people, never having read Burke or Bloom, never having experienced a French or Russian Revolution, would applaud a proposal to wipe civilization from the “Books.” They would welcome this brave new world, stripped of all hypocrisies, as “authentic” and would perceive it as a return to a state where we were once more “in touch with ourselves.”

Alas, once again the virus that has infected our society since the Sixties rears its ugly head. I had hoped that it would perish with my generation, the old Hippies, but, unfortunately, the fever is being rekindled by the likes of Obama and Pelosi and the rest of their amoral thugs.

I am left to hope in the American People, to hope that, yes, the activities of the Occupy Wall Street movement will have an impact on the 2012 elections, only not the one anticipated by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi.