Is There Hope for Occupy Wall Street?

Anthony Wile
The Daily Bell
Sunday, October 9, 2011
It is interesting to watch the expansion of the Occupy Wall Street movement. As I wrote last week, I hoped it would provide an opportunity for people to proclaim clearly thatcentral banking was the fundamental problem with the Western world today.

The article, “Blaming Wall Street is Wrong,” received wide play. The idea was that the emphasis on attacking corporations and Wall Street itself – a transactional business – was taking energy and focus off the real issue, which was central banking. Central banking, controlled by elite families in my view, is the power elite‘s dominant social theme. It provides the endless streams of money that support the elite’s ever-expandingNew World Order.

We seemed to have touched a nerve. The article was mentioned by Infowars, Prison Planet, the Drudge Report and numerous other media outlets. Alex Jones, in fact, announced he was starting a movement to focus on ways to protest not just Federal Reserve activities but the institution itself.
Unfortunately, a week later, Occupy Wall Street continues to be a kind of “mixed bag.” This, therefore, must of necessity be a “good news/bad news” kind of follow-up.
Good news: Occupy Wall Street has raised the issue of central banking and performed an increasingly serious educative service. It’s given libertarian concerns a platform which maybe able to support a serious discussion about central banking. Occupy Wall Street in this fashion, can be looked on as a beginning not an end.

Bad news: Occupy Wall Street itself continues to be a confused, unfocused protest. There seem to be too many dissonant voices, and increasingly they seem of the Leftist variety. In fact, unions, Democratic politicians and leftists of every stripe and variety are seemingly trying to reconfigure Occupy Wall Street in order to claim it for themselves.

Occupy Wall Street SHOULD be a good vehicle to use to protest central bank practices, first-and-foremost. Private banks and trading firms have been around for thousands of years, at least since Greek times. But modern, fiat-money central-banking has drastically increased the ruin of the West’s industrial and economic system.

Remove central banking and many of the rest of the problems of Western economics gradually go away or become less severe. Surely, there are abuses at every level of the Western economy, but the fundamental issue remains central banking. That’s where it all starts. Young people should be made aware of the truth about the system that dominates their lives and restrains the promise of their future.

It’s a bad system that leaves the control of the world’s money in a few (fairly anonymous) hands. It’s an economically illiterate one as well. Central bankers fix the price of money via interest rates and printing presses. No decent economist will try to argue that price fixing is anything other than an economic distortion, transferring wealth from those who have earned it to those who have not.

Unfortunately, one cannot massage a movement. Occupy Wall Street has managed to find numerous other windmills at which to tilt. We reported yesterday on a worldwide protest planned for October 15th. It is to be a “worldwide demonstration for global change.” The iconography and rhetoric sound suspiciously socialist – aimed at such targets as greedy corporations, corrupt government officials, etc. Nothing about central banks, though.

And then there’s this: Bank Transfer Day. Cadie Thompson, a producer at CNBC, has reported on a movement to remove all funds from banks and into credit unions starting on November 5. Here’s an excerpt from her article:
The Facebook page for the event states the following: “Together we can ensure that these banking institutions will ALWAYS remember the 5th of November! If the 99% remove our funds from the major banking institutions on or by this date, we will send a clear message and give the 1% a taste of the fear that we experience every day when we aren’t able to pay for our rent, food, medication, utilities, student loans, etc.”
So far over 6,500 people have RSVP’ed for the event. The protestors take issue with the Durbin Amendment, which is an addition to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that caps the debit interchange fees banks can charge merchants. The protestors oppose the amendment because they claim the banks will begin to charge their customers $3-$5 fees to off-set the money they will lose because of the interchange fee cap.

… This is a blatant attack on the 99% that cannot & will not be tolerated. In a stand of solidarity, on November 5th we will transfer our money & close our accounts with these major banking institutions to take our business to credit unions (or local banks if a credit union isn’t available) … Bank of America has already announced it will start to charge customers $5 a month for using their debit card starting next year.

Honestly, this is the kind of thing that makes you want to tear your hair out. The US and NATO have irradiated vast portions of central Asia and Iraq with depleted uranium weapons that have caused massive death and birth defects. There is famine in Somalia and drought throughout Africa.
The West generally is slipping into a Depression and China and Japan may not be far behind. Unemployment, thanks to central bank booms and busts, is horribly high and going higher.
But participants in the Occupy Wall Street demos “will not tolerate” surcharges on their debit cards. (CONTINUE READING)