The “Occupy Denver” folks — in coordination with the SEIU, seemingly — protested outside Wells Fargo in downtown Denver this morning, about a block from my office. Naturally, I couldn’t resist checking out the scene.
Note the tie-wearing 1 Percenters on the right, greedily sipping their Starbucks coffee, which no doubt contains ground-up $100 bills as a garnish. 😉
After the jump, my Storify story with more photos and my live-tweeting of the festivities.
I still roll my eyes every time I see one of these Occupy events. It’s not that there’s not a valid point buried in there, it’s that there’s a tone-deafness to the cause and effect involved. Sure, Wells Fargo owes suitcases of cash (I’m sure they would take barrels of oil or kilos of coke) to the Government that it will likely never pay back. That’s wrong. But they didn’t steal it. The Government, in an ultimately un-American move covered somebody’s monumental mistake with other people’s money because they happened to belong to a special class that had access to the right circles of power. The injustice isn’t that they’re profiting from it, and it isn’t that they aren’t paying the Fed back. It’s that they got it in the first place.
When you make a mistake, you live with it, and you suffer the consequences. The same goes for banks, car companies, home owners. I’m a big fan of the concept of killing one to intimidate a thousand. The reason people haven’t historically acted stupidly on quite this scale is because failures happened and both people and institutions failed. You can’t have success without the possibility of failure and stringing things along without forcing people to live with the consequences only makes the next crash more severe. In this case, you have employees and customers of large banks that will continue with most of the same business practices that got them into trouble. They’ll grow and when the next mistake comes, the fallout will be worse. Repeat for mortgages, credit cards, etc.
There’s also a problem with the messenger, as usual. Semi-professional protesters and organizers don’t carry a lot of credibility in my book. When a significant slice of your life is protesting, demanding things of other people, it stands to reason that you’re doing that much less with the rest of it. The more you’re demanding of other people, the more you should be bringing to the table yourself. It’s not a sacrifice to make that a lifestyle it’s a form of dependency–of expectation on others for your own well-being. I feel sorry for them. And, by and large, the professional protestor class is what I see showing up for these events. The protests I respect are the ones who bring out people who are passionate about a narrow range of issues or one in particular; or, people who aren’t normally politically active but who are being pulled out of the woodwork by the strength of an issue.
Also, when you don’t shower or flush, you’re asking for the hose. Air dropping perfume is way too expensive and these people should know that there’s a recession on. I couldn’t resist–all this sober commentary was getting me down.