OWS gets Orwellian pigs and dogs
Orwell’s “Squealer” presents the Stalinist pigs’ well-known dictum: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
In true Animal Farm style, a powerful cadre has arisen within OWS having control over the group’s fat bank account. Sure enough, one OWS community organizer has rationalized: “At OWS, we try not to have leaders, but, in fact, that has resulted in our having many, many leaders.”
The leaders that matter, however, are actually quite few. New York Magazine reports on the tiny group that screens all requests for expenditures before they get to the General Assembly for discussion.
According to committee member “Mercury” John McGarvey, this means that OWS simply refuses to waste money on “idiot things.” So far, the drum circle has been rebuffed over eight grand for new drums, and the tobacco group—”teenagers selling hand-rolled cigarettes”—has cried foul as well.
Folks, what we’ve got here is a good old-fashioned ruling elite: the few decide what expenditures are “idiot things” or not, the few decide how the money will be spent, how much, and on what. It is OWS’s own one percent that controls the resources of the other 99.
And of course, every bureaucratic elite needs to police its monopoly; so, in come the dogs:
When I mention the drummers and cigarette sellers to him, Mercury bursts out laughing, and tells me about one agitator who bought a finance-style clipboard and started walking around the occupation, asking for donations. “We squashed him,” said McGarvey.
As the saying goes, “The government hates competition.”
Meanwhile, the committee has its own lawyer, a CPA, and a bank account kept in Amalgamated Bank—a move that has some occupiers crying hypocrisy. “Why is OWS putting people’s donations into the corrupt banking system?” said one.
The answer is simple: because some occupiers are more equal than others.
McGarvey quipped against the “idiot” spenders: “We have to be responsible.”
It would have been nice to tell everyone that at the beginning. The movement might have gone free market instead of socialist. But responsibility is a joke with this generation.
Soon the protesters will realize that the movement has grown richer without making the occupiers themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.