Greg Djerijian on Occupy Wall Street

By John Ballard

Greg Djerijian (Belgravia Dispatch) rarely posts but when he does what he has to say is worth reading. His first-hand accounts of OWS are both sympathetic and smart. 

It's fair to say that he may be part of the maligned "One Percent" but unlike most of his peers he is, like Warren Buffet, a worm in the apple. 

Here are three paragraphs picked almost at random from a much longer post. 
Go there with enough time to ingest what he says and pay attention.
Djerigian's commentary is no salad. It is a main course. 

From afar in East Asia, I noticed Occupy Wall Street has done several things right, some a result of sheer luck (read: police over-reactions), others manifesting a measure of tactical skill. A couple of the initial pepper spray incidents went viral on YouTube, one showing very young women screaming hysterically while penned�or is the term for this �kettled�?�by bright orange police mesh. Here the �luck� of brute force helped create outsize publicity by a media that had mostly ignored the going-ons up to that point. After all, it cannot help looking like a failure of our society when generally hapless young women are being sprayed in or near their faces by male police officers twice their age simply about behavior surrounding access to public places. These could be our own daughters, after all, and it offends basic sensibility.... Another key moment in the growing tide of the movement was the incident of mass arrests in and around the Brooklyn Bridge... partly a result of the confusion among some of the protesters (to be sure, perhaps a convenient confusion) about whether or not they had been granted access to the vehicular lanes rather than merely the pedestrian pathway on the bridge. Regardless of the merits, mass arrests to the order of some 700 or so individuals on an iconic New York landmark will engender healthy international headlines, boosting the nascent protest movement�s profile very significantly, with this event likely having constituted the break-out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All this, incidentally, is rather a sad development for the Obama Administration. When Obama inherited a nation in deep crisis in November of 2008, with his race alone a historic pivot that inspired legions, I suspected then many hungered for true transformational change, something evocative of a Teddy Roosevelt domestically crossed with a transformational Mandela type figure on foreign policy. He largely squandered this opportunity, though I will certainly allow for the complexities of governing. Still, with respect to domestic policy, "change" means something beyond just issuing cheap populist rhetorical pot-shots about �fat cat bankers� but cutting to the nub of the real issues (hint: not a diluted Volcker Rule--itself a half-way house short of more dramatic steps like resurrecting Glass-Steagall--and/or largely theatrical Buffet tax, and perhaps breaking up some of the larger banks that still remain too big to fail, indeed are now even bigger post-ingesting the spoils of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch). As for international affairs, many in the country hungered for bolder progress than simply constraining the excesses of the neo-con wing and preventing the outrageous adventurism that would have accompanied a McCain Administration (though make no mistake, this was critical, and Obama does deserve due credit), but real "change", such as fulfillment of the pledge to shutter Guantanamo, pursuing serious investigations respecting how torture became acceptable Government policy, not allowing the Arab-Israeli peace process to ingloriously decay into near nothingness, or more than anything, cutting more forcefully our failed experiments in nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While I will readily confess I find it odd as something of a Burkean that I am sympathetic to these protestors, they are not looking to trot out the guillotines, in the main (though I did spot a "Behead the Fed" sign!), but rather, they have smelled the radicalism of body blows dealt to a representative democratic system presented by almost unfettered oligarch-like behavior among too many elites wholly disconnected from, yes, the 99% they speak of. They are acting to secure conservative aims of re-balancing a society that is becoming dangerously unmoored and increasingly bent asunder. They want accountability and dignity and prospects. Their leaders have failed them. So they have taken to the street to lead themselves. It will not be easy in the months ahead (the encroachments of winter alone will prove a big test), but they have started something that has real potential, and should be lauded for it, and indeed urged to carry on. If so, they may accomplish something, even possibly something historic. In this goal, in my view, they should not immediately fall prey to pressure that they must issue some long laundry list of �demands� that might risk ideologically ring-fencing them some and/or stealing the spontaneity of their movement, while resisting too close associations with old-line standard-bearers of the left like the unions. They have created something quite new, and should stoke it during these early days in a manner strictly of their choosing.