A recent conversation with my father-in-law resulted in him saying that all of these "Occupy" people are "communists". This is fundamentally accurate, and not a surprising reaction from a retired businessman; if the "Death to Capitalism" banners weren't enough to give the game away I don't know what is.
People are starting to get fed up and again hardly surprising given the hijinks in Oakland in the last few days. I don't know if there has been a sifting out of participants so that the most radical are the ones who are sticking it out, but the novelty has definitely worn off even when they're not destroying property and trying to kill public servants. The whole thing is devolving rapidly, the worst example being Oakland. The others (especially in Canada) are varying degrees of useless and just plain squatting, but they are certainly now doing more harm than any possible good.
This means that the continued presence of these communes in business areas is killing small businesses in the vicinity through intimidation, deliberate vandalism, and effective blockade of customers. These people are not fans of the crony capitalism that got the U.S. in the mess it's in, and are certainly NOT in the much maligned (with some cause, some of the time) "1%". One problem (there are many) with not having a set "aim" is the inability to see when things are going badly off-track, as they obviously have done now.
The lefties and fellow travellers pooh-pooh the conservative/capitalist concept of having some idea what the hell you're doing and trying to accomplish, but most of us aren't nihilist anarchists and we like Order. Civilization requires some structure and certainly some common ideas about how things should work, and certainly requires enforcement of basic concepts. The occupiers are discovering, like it or probably not, that when you get more than three people anywhere you start needing organization if you are sticking around.
Supplies and security come right after shelter (often before) and they don't just happen. They require organization and leadership, and you won't have the former without some version of the latter. Now as is my wont, I circle back to the original point.
Oakland's civic reaction to this, specifically that of the Mayor and City Council, has been and to the time of writing continues to be inconsistent, and therefore a guaranteed and de facto disaster. The police have been whipsawed by contradictory orders, and one of the predictable results of this is certain Black Bloc elements in the protest will exploit the resulting chaos, as happened last night (main link). Another is a drop in morale of the police as they realize that their bosses don't have their backs, and no good can come of that.
So, the Oakland Soviet has blockaded the third-busiest port in the U.S. and to "press time" it is shut down. It has been pointed out that this hurts all of the workers who depend on the port for their livelihood; this is where the true colours of the Occupy clowns is shown. It's not about "the 99%", it's about their vague concept that things should be "different". Different how, exactly? I've asked this class of person that question before, and as much as they don't like what's happening the only coherent answer you'll likely get is some variation of "revolution".
So far it's a polyglot of signs about all things except making money and paying taxes, but the black flag has already been flown; how long until we see the red?
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