Monday, November 21, 2011

Occupy Movement Clueless About Infrastructure

The Occupy movement's local offshoots are alienating their local neighbors with incoherent tactics.  A case in point is the DC movement's seemingly spontaneous decision to march on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in a call to fix America's infrastructure.  The only optics this march can generate are sights of angry commuters fuming at Occupy protesters who won't let them go home.  Occupy protesters like shutting down valuable infrastructure just to annoy productive people who have to make a living.  They set a precedent when Occupy Oakland symbolically shut down the Port of Oakland, sending an unfriendly message to businesses that need to ship goods through the port. 

I'd like to know how the Occupiers plan to pay for infrastructure upgrades once they transform America into a socialist workers' paradise.  They need to check out Soviet-made bridges for examples of workmanship.  Okay, maybe that's a bit unfair. 

The main structural deficiency here isn't the Key Bridge; it's the inability of the leaderless Occupy movement to differentiate between the original targets of their anger (Wall Street cronies) and the physical infrastructure a capitalist economy provides for the public commons.  I believe this new emphasis on infrastructure signifies the support of a living system that now provides the bulk of the Occupy movement's support.  That living system is the labor union movement.  Unions stand to benefit from federal spending on construction and stand to gain in potential negotiations with port employers if they can muster outside support for a work stoppage. 

Occupy is morphing into a dozen different things, none of which will pose any threat to corruption on Wall Street.