I have been watching the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations and I was baffled by their demands. They ignored our Veterans Day Parade and demonstrated against the financial system instead. Thats their right and it is what makes the USA the last best hope of the world. But since I didnt understand their purpose, I decided to do my homework and interview them to provide background for this commentary.
Now, what I was wrong about was their response. As some of you know, I had organized a couple of Tea Party events. At those gatherings, comments and questions were welcomed. It allows varying viewpoints to be discussed and hopefully conversions to our opinions. Gatherings of this sort have two objectives: the first is to show solidarity and bring like-minded people together and secondly to proselytize those who are unfamiliar with your political position. However, that is not what these Occupy protests seem to be about. So today I gathered my information and went down to Main Street to ask the demonstrators what, why and how they planned to make changes to the system. There were six people at the corner holding signs when I arrived. My list of questions, which were taken from the demands made by the OWS leaders, included but was not limited to the following:
What and why are you protesting?
How do you define the 1 percent and 99 percent?
How much of the 1 percents money should be redistributed?
Do you know who pays the most income taxes and who pays nothing?
What is the cause of our massive deficit and economic crash?
Are you an ad hoc group or political party?
These are basic questions that anyone protesting the current economic climate should be able to answer and would want to share with an interested questioner. But the first person I approached was unsure about the whys and said his friend asked him to come down. He did say most of the people were from the Green Party. He walked away to get back to sign waving and I moved on to another guy. He was more voluble and said he was mad about the bailouts to the banks and the creditors. He said there should have been more regulations in place to prevent the crash. I responded by citing the regulations and protections supposedly afforded by FDIC, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I didnt get a chance to tell him I agreed with no bailouts and that the bailouts were promulgated by our government not Wall Street.
He obviously was terribly exercised about bailouts and spent some time explaining that point with exuberance. I had begun the conversation by saying that I wrote guest commentaries for the Journal and wanted to write about their protest and ideas for reform. In order to find out if he had researched the genesis of the mortgage meltdown, the root cause of the collapse of this house of cards, I asked about the effect of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and subsequent regulations enacted by FDIC, Henry Cisneros, Clintons Housing Secretary and the rewriting of lending standards that approved loans to people with no or bad credit, loans with mortgage payments of 50 percent of their income and that included seasonal and welfare payments in total income calculations.
The date of 1977 had barely passed my lips when he came unglued. He thought it was crazy to talk about 1977 when the housing crisis happened in 2008! So much for our grasp of history ! He called me a conservative right-winger and said that I was lying about writing a column.
At that point it was obvious that we were not going to have a substantive discussion of fact, so I left! If given a chance he would have learned that the top 1 percent earns 19 percent of income but pays 37 percent of the income taxes, top 10 percent pays 68 percent, and the bottom 47 percent pays no income tax.
Let us talk again.
Larry Tradlener lives down McElmo Canyon.
