Occupy Encinitas today

Occupy Encinitas is back today at noon at 101 & Encinitas Boulevard. The first one, a couple weeks ago, had a good turnout of at least a few hundred. It was the only Occupation in North County that day, and drew people mostly from outside of Encinitas. Today's is likely to be smaller because there are five Occupations from Del Mar to Oceanside.

The Occupiers have a legitimate grievance. Wall Street made themselves filthy rich, crashed the economy, and then got bailed out at our expense (don't believe the "TARP was repaid" canard -- TARP is trivial compared to the trillion-plus dollars printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve to lend to the banks at 0%). The new crony capitalism literally is privatized profits and socialized losses, and the banks get away with it because they own the politicians of both parties with very few exceptions (Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul being among the few). I've written more about this here.

Unfortunately, the Occupiers' legitimate message is being drowned out by the crazies. A small minority of mentally ill, druggies, thieves, racists, etc., is causing some problems, but that's to be expected in any large group. The bigger issue, though, is that a large plurality if not majority of the protesters are radical leftists who don't just want to stop fraud and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington, but want to smash capitalism completely. Calls for free education and a government living wage for all are monumentally naive fantasies of unlimited resources in a very resource-constrained world. These dreamers don't know it, but destroying free enterprise would make things a lot worse for everyone. I've been to the Occupation, and unfortunately, many participants appear to have similar utopian socialist dreams.

Wall Street is crooked, as are its lackeys in the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and Congress. You don't have to be a Marxist to want to change that. The problem is not capitalism, it's crony capitalism.