Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America

by Matt Kibbe

  But Mason’s bigger gripe seems to be with Bank of America, who offered her a credit card, a card she accepted and ran up. “I still have debt and I’m not paying it back because I feel like at this point, I have an obligation to try and disrupt and upset the financial industry, the credit industry. This industry is built off of the belief that it is okay to exploit poor people in order to make a profit,” said the Time magazine icon. But is her financial situation really someone else’s fault?

  Each paycheck that I would get, I would overspend. I got a credit card because I had no money and I needed a credit card to buy things that were essential to my life during this time. I had already spent all this money on clothes, make-up, accessories, and I got the credit card because I needed to [pay] my electric bill. Bank of American [sic] offered it to me, so I was like, “Yeah, of course—I’ll pay my electric bill with it.” . . . I think that some of it—most of it was feeling inadequate and insecure and feeling pressure to look a certain way. What I also think it was that you’re just surrounded by these messages telling you to buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume. . . . I frequently find myself walking around stores in the mall, ready to make big purchases, and buy impulsively just because I feel insecure.19

  What would Adam Smith do? The laws of justice, according to Smith, “guard what is due . . . from the promises of others.”

  Not so for Sarah Mason, who feels no compunction to honor a contract that she voluntarily entered into, of her own free will. “They make money off this bad shit, so why am I going to walk around and feel like this moral obligation to pay them back?”20

  There you have it. Government failure is certainly culpable for the financial dilemma of many Americans caught between a rock and a hard place. But individual freedom comes with a responsibility. With profit comes the potential for loss. With contracts come “what is due from the promises of others.” That should be true if you are Bank of America, too: in a free society, you don’t get a bailout when you take on too much risk, even if you have the best lobbyists in Washington, D.C. You go out of business, ingloriously scooped up at pennies on the dollar by a more financially conservative, properly managed bank.

  One of the most corrosive effects of top-down government, where winners and losers are chosen by someone else, is the destruction of the values that allow for peaceful cooperation among individuals. Individual responsibility is replaced with a sense that someone else owes you something. “If Bank of America gets a bailout, where’s mine?”

  Where is the sense of responsibility in Occupy Wall Street? What do they stand for? The closest thing to a central organizing principle is an overarching sense of entitlement. But who is entitled to what, and who has the authority to decide? The real questions in the OWS’s world of social justice are: By what standard are decisions made? Whose claims are legitimate, and how might you reallocate the wealth of some to the benefit of those deemed more deserving?

  THE DRUMBEAT OF CHANGE

  IN ZUCCOTTI PARK, REAL LIFE ILLUSTRATED THE TROUBLESOME TASK of doling out resources in a centralized regime. The group gathered there quickly created a “General Assembly,” à la the United Nations’ General Assembly, to come up with a set of demands and to allocate resources among competing protestor factions. The purpose is the pretense of true participatory democracy, but that’s not how things really work. These assembly gatherings quickly devolved into arguments over who gets what, and whose opinions matter most.

  According to a report by the Huffington Post:

  There’s no shortage of talking, and you never know who will take hold of the People’s Mic. Persuasive speakers on all sides can give General Assembly meetings a roller-coaster feel. Someone always seems to oppose a budget proposal, or have a strong dissenting opinion on something that seems on its way to sure passage. Just one voice joining the debate at the last minute has the power to sway the entire discussion.

  With every proposal, there are questions and there are concerns, and the process continues and continues. The facilitators say numerous times the group has strayed off process. Questions are sometimes ignored for being “off-topic” even when they aren’t, time constraints are cited and frustrations boil over. Occupiers curse, speak out of turn and sometimes they just keep on talking, despite “Mic Check” calls over them. Those on all sides alienate each other.21

  One seemingly inconsequential fight was reminiscent of the saga of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, where ability and hard work were replaced with a compensation system based on needs. The Huffington Post reported:

  On Thursday, the matter at hand was a proposal from Pulse—the group of drummers—for $8,000 for new musical instruments. They say they hoped to secure the funding after a $5,000 handmade drum was sabotaged and destroyed during a rain storm. They say that because they’ve been there since Day 1, they deserve the funding more than anyone.

  “We have worked for you! Appreciate us!” the leader of the proposal shouted angrily to the GA [General Assembly] in response to voices of dissent.

  After a long debate, the proposal was tabled. No funding for the drummers. After the meeting, one drummer cursed and yelled at GA members for their decision. He confronted another occupier and the two shouted obscenities back and forth; a physical fight nearly erupted but a peacemaker came between them.22

  Mediating the squabbling over who is entitled to what is apparently an essential part of managing any coalition of progressive interests. Van Jones himself lamented the dynamic in his Netroots Nation speech. Along the garden path to peace and love and social justice for all, there has apparently arisen a fundamental conflict between utopian rhetoric and the actual process of wealth redistribution in a centralized system.

  “We talk, ‘kumbaya,’” Jones said. “We talk, ‘Solidarity Forever!’ We talk, ‘Can’t we all get along?!’ But we have enacted the most individualistic approach to politics. ‘Why she’d get that grant!?’”23

  Why indeed. Was she more deserving than you? Only one thing is for certain in a world where someone else is doing the deciding: You don’t get to decide for yourself.

  In the fictional Atlas Shrugged, and in the all-too-real catastrophic experiments in socialism put into practice across the world, this is what happens. Where the edict “to each according to their contribution” is replaced with “to each according to their need,” the disastrous results leave most of society—the 99 percent—jobless, angry, hungry, and destitute.

  APPLES AND ORANGES

  DESPITE VIOLENCE, PROPERTY DAMAGE, AND LACK OF A COHERENT “set of demands,” Occupy Wall Street has been celebrated by the media as a legitimate counter to the Tea Party movement. Indeed, the Time “Person of the Year” write-up that accompanies the image of Sarah Mason favorably compares the cause of Occupiers with that of the young street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose death triggered a grassroots revolution against an oppressive, autocratic government regime. According to international development economist Hernando de Soto, Bouazizi “was a repressed entrepreneur” who struggled against arbitrary government rules and corrupt law enforcement—all insurmountable obstacles that prevented him from earning a living for his family:

  For years, Bouazizi had endured harassment at the hands of deeply corrupt petty officials—most notably, the municipal police officers and inspectors who lived off street vendors and other small-scale extralegal business-people. The police officers helped themselves to the vendors’ fruit whenever they felt like it or arbitrarily fined them for running their carts without a permit. Bouazizi complained about the greed of local officers for years. He hated paying bribes.

  But on Dec. 17, 2010, this otherwise uneventful life took its place in history. That morning, Bouazizi got into a tussle with town inspectors who accused him of failing to pay a fine for some arbitrary infraction. They seized two crates of pears, one crate of bananas, three crates of apples, and his electronic scale—worth some $225, the entire capital of his business. A muni
cipal police officer, a woman named Fedia Hamdi, slapped Bouazizi across the face in front of the crowd that had gathered at the scene. With his uncle’s help, Bouazizi appealed to the authorities for the return of his property. But he got nowhere—a common outcome in a society where small-scale business-people were treated with contempt by local officialdom. One hour after the confrontation with Hamdi, at 11:30 a.m., he doused himself with paint thinner and immolated himself in front of the governorate building in Sidi Bouzid.24

  Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire because someone else, a government agent, took his stuff, the means of his livelihood. There was no path to justice, no rule of law that existed, no legal recourse available to Bouazizi to get his private property back. The false equivalency between Occupy L.A.’s Mason, whose spending spree landed her in trouble, and Bouazizi is striking, to say the least.

  FRIENDS AT THE TOP

  THAT SAME Time COVER STORY SCARCELY MENTIONS THE IMPACT OF the Tea Party. Indeed, all the accusations wrongfully hurled at us were conveniently absent in the mainstream media’s coverage of this purportedly “morally superior” protest movement. Accusations of racism, for example, were cast heavily (and unfairly) toward the Tea Party, but legitimate claims of anti-Semitism within OWS were largely ignored. Van Jones was first in line defending OWS’s values, saying the movement’s “moral clarity” excused its bad behavior and utter lack of policy clarity.

  Vice President Joe Biden—who referred to Tea Partiers as “terrorists” simply for being opposed to a bad piece of legislation—got all introspective when analyzing the OWS movement.

  “What is the core of that protest?” Biden asked at a Washington Ideas Forum in October 2011. “The core is: The bargain has been breached. The core is: The American people do not think the system is fair, or on the level. That is the core, is what you’re seeing with [Occupy] Wall Street. Look, there’s a lot in common with the Tea Party. The Tea Party started, why? TARP. They thought it was unfair.”25

  Biden voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program when he was a senator. But now, he feels our pain.

  President Obama himself is sympathetic: “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street. . . . So yes, I think people are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”26

  Even when the Occupiers occupied an Obama campaign rally, disrupting his speech, the president refused to distance himself from them, while they handed out a statement that read: “Over 4,000 peaceful protesters have been arrested. While bankers continue to destroy the American economy. You must stop the assault on our First Amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.”27

  Obama didn’t exactly defend OWS—to do so would have been to alienate the majority of Americans who find their behavior repulsive. But he did play to their complaints. “Families like yours,” Obama said, “young people like the ones here today—including the ones who were just chanting at me—you’re the reason that I ran for office in the first place.”28

  Obama’s willingness to play ball with OWS raises important questions for 2012: Should Democrats hitch their political wagon to Occupy Wall Street? Can Barack Obama, the king of crony capitalism, win reelection by pandering to radical progressives after having offered his crucial vote in favor of TARP in 2008 as a U.S. senator, and after having codified “too big to fail” into law two years later as president? Can congressional Democrats, having spent the past three years attaching Republicans to so-called “Tea Party extremism,” now embrace without consequence the radical demands, blatant anti-Semitism, violence, and property damage of OWS?

  Who knows, maybe cognitive dissonance is a good political strategy for the Left.

  But they join in common cause out of desperation. Since the first Tea Party protest, the Democratic/progressive/big government coalition has been searching for its own Tea Party. Van Jones in particular is worried that we have successfully stolen the Left’s strategy playbook. OWS is just part of a broader effort by Jones to regroup after the devastating electoral repudiation of President Obama’s economic agenda on November 2, 2010.

  But this is Hope and Change Part II: The Empire Strikes Back. Even Jones has grudgingly conceded that we have outcrowdsourced, outorganized, and outperformed the most sophisticated community organizers on the Left, starting with the president himself. According to Jones, the Tea Party is “an upgrade on what we did”:

  They have their own groups. They have their own causes. But they came up with a meta-brand too, called the “Tea Party.” And they affiliated to that. . . .

  It’s about a principle of liberty, in their mind, and their meta-brand got 3,528 previously existing groups, all with different names, all with different causes, to affiliate to something called the “Tea Party.” They operate off of an operating system called the “Contract From America.” The Contract From America was written by 100,000 people, as a wiki. . . .

  They talk rugged individualism . . . but they have enacted the most collectivist strategy for taking power in the history of the Republic. Because they use an open-source meta-brand that they all share, they wrote their document as a wiki, and they’re based on a principle and a value.29

  Jones’s new political initiative, called Rebuild the Dream, is attempting to re-create the Contract from America with his own ten-point policy platform, called the Contract for the American Dream.30 The idea for the Tea Party’s Contract from America was simple: create a web-based social media forum where anyone could submit and debate ideas. Despite a tip of the hat to the 1994 Republican Contract with America, this contract was fundamentally different. This document originated bottom-up rather than top-down, created and vetted by the people in a decentralized and transparent marketplace of ideas. Rather than being crafted by a few powerful politicians in a conference room, the planks of this political manifesto were crowdsourced—generated—by hundreds of thousands of Americans. The Contract fit perfectly within the mindset of a decentralized movement.

  Between September 2009 and January 2010, hundreds of thousands of people submitted and debated more than 1,000 ideas. By February, a final online vote culled the list down to the top ten ideas. Candidates for federal office were asked to sign the Contract, just like the 1994 Republican Contract, and Mike Lee, then a little-known challenger running against incumbent senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, was the first candidate to sign in April. The Contract from America ultimately played a defining role in electing a massive class of freshman legislators. A team of Brigham Young University political science professors, after conducting a statistical analysis, determined that “candidates who adopted the Tea Party label themselves by signing the Contract from America [saw] their vote shares increasing by more than 20 points” in the 2010 Republican primaries.31

  Jones’s Contract, on the other hand, is a predictably progressive wish list of big government initiatives that “fix” problems by spending more money we don’t have, taxing the rich, and giving bureaucrats more control of our lives:

  “INVEST IN AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE.” (Translation: Spend money we don’t have on projects we may or may not need.)

  “CREATE 21ST-CENTURY ENERGY JOBS.” (Translation: Spend money we don’t have on so-called “green jobs;” subsidize alternative energy that is less reliable and more costly.)

  “INVEST IN PUBLIC EDUCATION.” (Translation: Spend even more money on education, even though evidence shows declining performance from increased funding in government schools.)

  “OFFER MEDICARE FOR ALL.” (Translation: Finish the job Obamacare started; socialize all healthcare provisions.)

  “MAKE WORK PAY.” (Translation: Give labor unions more power and force businesses to pay union workers more than everyone else.)

  “SECURE SOCIA
L SECURITY.” (Translation: Make future retirees pay more and more today for less and less retirement security in old age.)

  “RETURN TO FAIRER TAX RATES.” (Translation: Punish wealth and job creators by imposing higher taxes on them, even though the top 1 percent currently pay close to 40 percent of all income taxes.)

  “END THE WARS AND INVEST AT HOME.” (Translation: Savings from lower defense spending should be spent on expanding government programs. Don’t even think about reducing the national debt or giving the money back to the taxpayers who earned it.)

  “TAX WALL STREET SPECULATION.” (Translation: Keep taxing investors until they fail. Then, bail them out.)

  “STRENGTHEN DEMOCRACY.” (Translation: Impose further campaign finance regulations that limit the free speech of individuals, but not special interests like public employee unions.)32

  Jones thinks that he can out-Tea–Party the Tea Party because collectivists, like those drum circle protesters, are naturally drawn to a collective strategy, community-based action and, apparently, a redistribution of wealth from each according to ability, to each according to need. But there’s nothing new here. Crowdsourced or not, Van Jones’s progressive agenda strikes a remarkably familiar note. We’ve heard this tune before. In his book Liberal Fascism, required reading for anyone that wants to understand the roots of progressivism in America, Jonah Goldberg listed a few of the planks of the radical progressive Father Coughlin, the radio demagogue and vociferous advocate of FDR’s agenda of expanded government power and executive branch control.33 Goldberg argues that Coughlin’s leftist rants often “sounded like he’s borrowed Mussolini’s talking points,” but the radio evangelist eventually became disenchanted with the Roosevelt administration for not going far enough, fast enough down the Road to Serfdom. “Finally, on November 11, 1934, he announced he was forming a new ‘lobby of the people,’ the National Union for Social Justice, or NUSJ.” The sixteen principles of “social justice” included: