Goldmark: OWS occupies attention, for now

I went down to Zuccotti Park near Wall Street one morning last week to see what was going on.

It hasn't been clear to me what the objectives of the Occupy Wall Street group are, or what the real significance of that ongoing demonstration might be. So I wanted to see if taking a closer look would help.

Many were still in their sleeping bags when I got there; a few were munching on breakfast served from an orderly kitchen. There was a fair number of police, some visiting demonstrators from Laborers Local 108, and a lot of journalists, many of them foreign.

One young man I talked with said he commuted to Wall Street from Newark at 5:30 a.m. every day so he could "be with the occupiers." I asked an older man what the message was, and he answered: "Tax the rich so they pay their fair share." Then I asked him: "Beyond that, what's the message?" He replied: "No GMOs," referring to genetically modified organisms. I know a little about GMOs and further conversation established that he did not, so I moved on.

The folks in Zuccotti Park are in touch by Twitter with many who agree with them but who aren't at the site. That's how their number grew one morning from a few hundred to 10,000, one person told me, when they thought the police were going clear the square under the guise of having it cleaned. It's like a demonstration with reserve units that can be called up.

Significant demonstrations usually have clear messages that help dramatize a situation. Sitting at lunch counters that wouldn't serve black people and getting arrested for it was a good example. But the Occupy Wall Street group writes proudly in its literature that it doesn't have a uniform message -- and that it will not be "hijacked" by any special interest. For me, that puts these demonstrators in the countercultural camp and makes them less a force for powerful change.

But the overall drift is pretty clear, and they are saying what many are thinking: The economy is in trouble, too many people don't have jobs, the fat cats are getting all the breaks, and the government is too often part of the problem rather than the solution.

In October 2011 in the third year of economic doldrums threatening to turn a lot worse, the Occupy folks aren't sounding a clear bugle call to action. What they're doing is drawing attention to the fact that a lot that's wrong with the economy has to do with basic fairness, and that no one seems committed to protecting the average family and throwing the book at the big guys when they take advantage of the little guys.

In that sense, the temporary prominence of the Occupy demonstrators is the result of a vacuum. A growing part of the public senses that a double standard is at work: The wealthy folks get bailed out while a lot of low- and middle-income homeowners see their houses foreclosed on and their standard of living drop.

But no one on the public stage has stepped forward and explained what's going on or what we ought to do about it. The Republican primary candidates all moan that things are terrible but avoid saying anything serious about how they would deal with it. President Barack Obama, while he has proposed some small steps in terms of jobs, hasn't laid out a program for getting us out of the economic ditch into which we've tumbled, and he hasn't acted to make sure we're all going to be treated fairly going forward. His program to protect homeowners from foreclosure and help them refinance their homes has been a dud, and the recent revamping looks like too little too late.

In the middle of this rising anger by the public and pathetic dillydallying by our leaders, the new voices that say the emperor has no clothes can occupy center stage -- for a while.

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.