Facts About The #Occupy Leadership Vs. Why Some Moderates Are Supporting Them

In the past two weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests and based on some of the reaction been getting, I think that something needs to be clarified.

There are two separate and distinct aspects of Occupy Wall Street. On one hand, there are the facts about the founding and organizing forces behind the movement. On the other hand, there’s a separate issue of the popular support that has sprung up around the Occupy Wall Street movement. These are two different areas of study and almost all of my work, research and writing have been about the issue of who founded the movement and is organizing it.

But some supporters of Occupy Wall Street are taking my work very personally and acting as though by me writing about the founding and organizers, I am ascribing motives to all of Occupy Wall Street’s supporters. I’m not.

The founding and organization of Occupy Wall Street is not controversial. It’s not a "right-wing narrative", as some people called it. Anyone doing some basic research will come up with the same answers and timeline. I’m going to link to non-right wing sources in this paragraph, so if you have any doubts about the factual accuracy please do your own research and you’ll find the same set of facts. The genesis of the #Occupy movement was a blog post by Adbusters that called for 20,000 people to occupy the Wall Street area. This was picked up on in an August 2 meeting by a number of people associated with New York Against Budget Cuts. The hacktivist group Anonymous got involved a few days later. The initial organizers were anarchists and socialists and those are largely the people who are still running things on the ground in New York City.

Those are all facts. As I said, none of this is controversial there is no real dispute about it. Here’s Alex Pareene from Salaon…

It may be news to some that the leaderless Occupy movement didn’t spring up fully formed, but evolved with the help and aid of “anarchists” and radical anti-capitalists. It may be news to those people because they haven’t actually been paying attention: Of course there are veterans of the anti-globalization movement involved, Adbusters came up with the idea.

So, yeah. That’s what I’ve been writing about. What I’ve also been doing, however, is going deeper than just glossing over this point. I’ve been putting out specific information about the anarchist and radical anticapitalists who were involved, as well as trying to make a case why it matters. For example, I started talking about Lisa Fithian before Occupy related arrests were daily occurrences and my entire point was that the arrest were entirely predictable based on Fithian’s involvement.

Does this mean that everybody who supports Cccupy Wall Street is a socialist, communist or radical anticapitalist anarchist? No, of course not.

And this is where some people seem to be confused. I’ve been factually pointing out the origins of the movement and what I consider the practical consequences of those origins and yet some people personalize this. I’ve had people de-friend me on Facebook, even though I pointed out repeatedly that I was not talking about them.

So let me take a quick second to talk about them. Let me give my theory on the popular support for Occupy Wall Street, such as it is.

First, I know some people who are radical who support Occupy. That makes perfect sense to me. They should, really.

But there are a lot of people who aren’t all that radical taking the side of the Occupiers. These people aren’t particularly radical, don’t hate capitalism and would really just like to see some reform to solve the issues that they care about. I believe these people are being intentionally duped by the leadership who started this thing. And by the way, that leadership does not like you people very much. They have a fair degree of contempt for "the 99%", if you actually read their writings or listen to the speeches.

The organizers of Occupy Wall Street wanted to keep it "leaderless" and even demand less because this has an effect of making it hard to criticize. If you can’t pin down what the movement believes in or who is running it, it’s impossible to launch a clear attack on it. What are you attacking? Who? None of this is by accident.

So when I see someone say they support Occupy Wall Street, I don’t immediately know what they mean. I’ve spoken to people for whom Occupy Wall Street is about opposition to the criminalization of marijuana. For a lot of people, they think it’s about getting money out of politics. Others believe it’s about ending greed but not about the destruction of capitalism.

To pull a reverse Buffalo Springfield, nobody’s wrong if everybody’s right.

This is part of the reason I think it’s important to actually expose the origins of the movement and personalities behind it. You can agree or disagree, but at least there’s a handle. I believe this is exactly why people like Alex Pareene are so freaked out about trying to get specific. They want the movement to continue to grow — even though it’s not really growing that much — and so any specifics could actually make some people split off and leave.

But there’s something else going on with people support of Occupy; it shows what a dismal, complete failure President Barack Obama has been. Supporters of Obama’s 2008 election (and I’m one of them, don’t forget) thought that Obama was going to be the guy to come in and clean up Wall Street and solve the financial crisis. He’s done neither. I realize this a couple years ago and wrote a number of pieces about my disenchantment but some other diehards held on as long as they could. Today, you’ll hardly find anyone on the left will defend Obama’s record in this regard.

So if you cared about issues like financial reform, you now realize that president Obama will not be coming in to solve the issue. That means that a ragtag movement like Occupy Wall Street is really your last hope. If Obama won’t do it, maybe a popular uprising well. I wrote about this recently in regards to Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi now I realize it applies to a vast swath of the left-wing.

I think this explains the desperate, emotional connection that some people have to Occupy Wall Street. They really do see them as the only hope for solving problems that they care about. Never mind the fact that Occupy are a goofy, disorganized, smelly, ridiculous bunch of losers who so far proven completely ineffective at anything except grabbing a couple of headlines and getting arrested. As awful as Occupy is, that your posse and by gum, we need to keep faith

just to be clear, am I suggesting that all of the supporters of Occupy Wall Street are goofy or smelly or disorganized? Of course not. What I am suggesting, however, is that if you have actual concerns about financial regulation or the power of money in politics that you look elsewhere for a group was going to be effective in solving your problems because Occupy ain’t it.