Occupy Wall Street: Is Mad as Hell Enough?
Jules Witcover

Remember Howard Beale? He was the crazed television anchorman played by Peter Finch in "Network," who called on Americans to throw open their windows and shout to the world: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going take this anymore!"

Well, he's figuratively back in the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan, and in financial centers of other major American cities, bellowing his anti-authoritarian message to hordes of protesters figuratively seeking to "Occupy Wall Street" against the corporate and banking greed throttling the American economy.

But like the full-throated threat shouted from rooftops in the movie, it's not yet clear what the demonstrators -- House Republican Leader Eric Cantor delicately calls them "mobs" -- intend to do to back up their words. So far, no single Howard Beale, crazed or sane, has emerged, in keeping with the amorphous character of the whole phenomenon.

It all brings to mind a meeting at a Michigan campground in the early 1960s of the campus-oriented Students for a Democratic Society. The notoriously anti-hierarchical SDS of the Vietnam War era was similarly castigated then as an unruly mob -- and unwashed to boot. The attendees -- many of them intense graduate students from prestigious Eastern and Midwestern universities -- were deep in a free-wheeling discussion on how best to stop the war. In the midst of it, a volunteer from the mess tent arrived with a call for help in preparing the dinner meal for the throng.

A discussion within the discussion ensued on who should go and pitch in, whether they should recess to help or just send a delegation, and so on. The only agreement was that, whatever was done, it should be done "democratically" -- and so numerous votes were taken. I don't remember whether the "mob" ever got to eat that night or not.

Apparently, great progress has been made in the protest business since then, because a well-functioning soup kitchen of sorts has been set up at the demonstration site in downtown Manhattan. But without a clearly identified leader, and more importantly without a clear action plan to achieve a specific and practical objective plan, this latest public outcry seems a similar enigma.

SDS, to be sure, did become a force in the effort to end that war. So the comparison is not to say that the current protest is guaranteed to be either useless or insignificant. Like the tea party protest against big government and big spending that coalesced to push the Republican Party further rightward in 2010, the Occupy Wall Street effort certainly has raised a legitimate beef against the nation's financial sector as the country struggles for economic recovery.

But Occupy Wall Street has yet to find a path, as the tea party did, into practical political action within the controlling two-party system. Nor has its obvious home, the Democratic Party, found an effective means to get in front of the still-forming parade. President Obama, characteristically, has made gestures in that direction, but without stepping forward with any full-blown embrace of a movement aimed conspicuously at a segment of his own financial campaign support.

Yet if he hopes to be re-elected next year, Obama must rekindle the public passion that marked his election in 2008. Taking on faceless Wall Street is a challenge, but he has a readily available corollary in his argument against the Bush tax cuts and other breaks for millionaires and billionaires. It didn't work for him in 2010, but if this latest street protest takes greater hold, it could gain broader resonance with its participants and the country at large.

Republicans like Cantor castigate Occupy Wall Street as an example of blatant class warfare, their choice characterization of the glaring inequality between rich and the rest of us in today's American economy. That's what it is for sure, with the lower and middle classes finally pushing back against the moneyed class symbolized by Wall Street.

Organized labor, which has so conspicuously failed to restore its earlier political clout, is moving to embrace this new movement, with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pledging support at the Manhattan site. At least that's a start toward effective political action, much more likely to achieve results than merely shouting out an open window.