Occupy This

The Naked Dollar visited Zuccotti Park today, site of the largest and now famous Occupy Wall Street protest. I am here to report what I saw. I will come back to the picture above, which was most definitely not an "Occupy" rally.

The approach looked like this:

Zuccotti park isn't a park at all, it's a plaza. I paced it off; the entire protest is about 100 yards long and forty yards wide. Okay, time to go in. The first thing I saw was the "library:"

Naturally, I was curious what books were inside. Adam Smith? Hmm. More likely lots of Alinsky and Marx. I couldn't find an opening so I unzipped one of the flaps (libraries are supposed to be welcoming, right?). Here's what's inside:

I think there's one bin of books there. The two people inside were passed out, so I didn't engage.

Here's "Legal," whatever that means:

And inside...

Some hard work going on, but hey, it was 9:30 in the morning. Here's the infamous "southeast corner," where the "infiltrators" are camped out...

The infiltrators are the homeless, ex-cons, druggies and the like who have sniffed out free meals and other handouts and have made themselves quite inconvenient. (The left only likes these people when they are an abstraction, a convenient revolutionary focal point. They don't actually want to see them at their fun camp out.)

And just in case you thought this was a mainstream movement, there's this:

And this...

This is a thoroughly Marxist crowd...but incoherent at the same time. Every protester seems to have his or her own priorites, like the owner of this sign...

These guys look comfy...

And unions seemed to dominate the crowd...

Another...

There's a trail of sorts that you can walk that loops around the entire affair...

Here's what I know, because I was there. It is a fetid place populated mostly by young, white kids who are apparently looking for meaning in their lives, but just don't have the education or intelligence to look in the right places. Incoherence and economic illiteracy was everywhere on display. (I didn't see it myself, but my favorite was a woman who had a sign that said, "Nationalize the Fed." When a journalist pointed out that the Fed was, in fact, owned by the government, she said, "Check your f**king facts!")

I counted perhaps 100 people who were up and about. There were around 120 tents as well. A random sample that I peeked inside of suggests that maybe half of these were occupied with about 1 1/2 people each. That's another 90 people, so let's call it 200 all together. Now, how many should we subtract for...

1. paid union workers
2. paid ACORN workers (that story just came out)
3. drug addicts, ex-cons, and homeless people just hangin'
4. media
5. tourists like me?

I'll bet the true activists numbered around 50. Granted, there are days when they get more.

And now, to my point. Go back and look at the first photo of the Washington Mall. That picture is of a Tea Party rally. The small circle contains enough space to fit not just Occupy Wall Street, but every other "Occupy" in country.

Get my drift? This is a small number of, frankly, pathetic people, and yet the media, and certainly the Democratic Party, for whom this is catnip, is in thrall of them. The day after the Washington Mall Tea Party rally the New York Times reported about it on page A21, but we get daily, breathless, coverage of this smattering of lost, incoherent souls in Zuccotti Park.

Enough.