Krugman's army stirs up bulldust on Wall Street

As it turns out, members of the local branch are too busy to occupy our cities for long. As 20-year-old Indigo Davis-Sparke told The Australian, she couldn't occupy Martin Place past the weekend as she had to get back to acting school on Monday. That's the problem with copying the unruly bunch sleeping out in New York: the complaints don't translate so well here, especially when it's hard to work out what the occupiers of Wall Street are protesting about in the first place.

New York's Zuccotti Park has become the mosh pit of left-wing incoherence for those wishing to vent and rant about anything that bothers them. While it's tempting to see the occupiers as a harmless and humorous last gasp of the Left, the risk is that their grapeshot grievances will be pocketed for political purposes by those wielding power. If that happens, the present global economic pain will only grow worse and last longer.

Just as Twitter and Facebook helped build the Occupy Wall Street protests and its offshoots in Australia, so too YouTube and the internet helpfully exposes the inane nature of these protests. It's all there. The ravings of young people who feel they missed out on the protests of the 1960s, ageing hippies wanting to relive those halcyon years, unhappy college kids, the unemployed and a range of loitering performance art protesters who don't want to miss out on a free feed -- one guy who's been there for 12 days put on about 2kg ("I'm eating better than I do at home") -- not to mention the daily meditation sessions and rollicking singalongs.

Decked out in Nike shoes, sipping Starbucks coffee, hoeing into a Macca and networking on their iPhones, iPads and Macbooks, unacknowledged irony flows as freely as their anti-capitalist messages against big, evil corporations.

Writing for National Review Online, Charles Cooke uploaded a number of videos of interviews he conducted with various protesters. There's the long-haired bespectacled chap whose sign says: "I HATE STUFF TOO". When the interviewer suggests his demand is not very coherent, the smiling hippie happily agrees. And then there's Cooke's favourite, a young man whose sign says: "Throw me a bone, pay my tuition".

When asked why someone else should pay his college fees, the young man says, "just because that's what I want". As Cooke writes: "He has perfectly articulated a sentiment I heard repeatedly but was struggling to distil with anything like the clarity he achieved: that being that if there is something someone doesn't like about their life, someone else somewhere should change it. And if they don't, well then the American dream is dead."

The OWS protests resemble a UN-style sleep-out, with talk about general assemblies, communiques and consensus, endless platitudes about utopia, meaningless diatribes and no clear aims. For all their talk about democracy, their mangled messages ooze an illiberal air of group think.

When they repeat, in robotic tones, the words of speakers such as Julian Assange and Naomi Klein, they sound like a weird leftist catechism class.

Yet you can see why those on the Left find the OWS protesters so useful. Unlike the Tea Party, which had a distinct and very clear message, and if you didn't agree with smaller government, lower taxes and fidelity to the US Constitution, then the Tea Party really wasn't for you, the jumbled messages of the OWS protests are putty in the hands of so-called progressives.

Hence, the OWS movement can count on support from The New York Times, which tells us "public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself" and kindly offers to fill in the detail for us. The NYT ran a coaching lesson for the protesters with helpful hints from left-wing academics under the rubric of "what are they doing right and what are they missing?" And an October 8 NYT editorial set out a list of possible policy demands for the ragtag army: lasting foreclosure relief, a financial transactions tax, greater protection for workers' rights, more progressive taxation.

In fact, the Occupiers have been dubbed "Krugman's Army" in honour of the NYT's resident lefty economist and their biggest cheerleader, Paul Krugman. Krugman offers the occupiers a handy narrative of all that has gone wrong, a play in which bankers feature as the bad, greedy guys in all three acts. There is no mention of customer greed, where just about every American seemed to be borrowing money to buy one, two or more houses well beyond their means.

The unions also have embraced OWS and so has the Obama administration and other Democrats. It is precisely at this point that the OWS protests may start to do some damage.

While the OWS protesters lack the organisational skills of the Tea Party, which has successfully backed a number of candidates such as Marco Rubio from Florida and Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, the danger lies in US Democrats embracing the protesters for their own political purposes. And President Barack Obama has hinted he may do just that.

Unable to campaign on his poor economic record, Obama's early support for the army of malcontents has an air of class warfare campaigning about it. While the global financial crisis exposed the need for better regulation to replace inappropriate regulation, there are few signs Congress will act and encouraging class warfare certainly won't do the trick.

If the populist "we want stuff" message from the OWS protesters finds its way into the White House and Congress, then the US economy is in for an even tougher time than at present. With spending at record levels since World War II, a $US4 trillion ($3.9 trillion) federal budget and a $US1.65 trillion deficit, the path to economic growth is surely not pandering to a group of city campers who want stuff because, well, that's just what they want.

And as for the copycat occupiers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, no doubt the Greens will support their inchoate grievances as a sign of mainstream discontent validating the need for Greens policies. Voters, on the other hand, know better. With Greens policies such as a carbon tax already stamped on the Australian landscape, the ragtag protesters and their far-left supporters are a reminder that adding incoherence to incoherence equals more incoherence.