SQUATTING ON WALL STREET

After last Saturday’s global OWS demos, some asked how long a leaderless movement could last. Answer: As long as the President of the United States wants, or needs, it to last. According to a Washington Post report, “President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.”

And so on Sunday, Mr. Obama found a way to yoke Martin Luther King Jr. to Occupy Wall Street: “If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there.” Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has praised OWS for its “spontaneity.”

Zuma PressCompared to this, Columbia University’s 1968 sit-ins were Periclean Athens.

What came to be known as Occupy Wall Street began several blocks from Wall Street itself, in Zuccotti Park, in downtown Manhattan. I spent a morning in Zuccotti Park this week. Let’s put it this way: I’d make a contribution to the Democratic House re-election committee to see Mrs. Pelosi lead the austere Steny Hoyer and a delegation of her House colleagues through Zuccotti Park. Spontaneity? Most of the people living atop the park’s pavement are virtually catatonic.

A conventional wisdom has taken hold that somewhere deep inside the Middle Earth of Occupy Wall Street there is supposed to be a serious cry for jobs. Maybe at an OWS demo in Detroit. But not in Zuccotti Park.

Spread across a city block, the park’s people have settled into a barely moving mass of down-market grunge “occupying” a marijuana oasis. Compared to this group, Mark Rudd and the Columbia University sit-ins of 1968 were Periclean Athens.

After a while, a New Yorker finally realizes what he is seeing: It’s the reincarnation of the squatters movement that occupied Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side in the 1980s. Starting in the Koch administration, Tompkins Square, between Avenue A and Avenue B, became a primary symbol of New York’s social and civil disintegration. Filled with illegal squatters who refused to leave, Tompkins Square and its surrounding neighborhood became a magnet for drug freaks, organizers of pro-Sandinista rallies, homeless people, bad musicians and a lot of very lost kids.

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The old Lower East Side ethos of the 1970s and ’80s has never disappeared from New York City, so no surprise that it is now living in Zuccotti Park, bringing with it a retinue of “activists” promoting bargain-basement progressive politics. Only in the modern era of nonstop media exaggeration of anything that isn’t normal could “Occupy Wall Street” transform into a global movement transfixing the world and eliciting the tender mercies of America’s political elite. Mayor Mike Bloomberg may be heading toward the same squatters hell once occupied by Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani.

New York City is spending millions on police overtime to protect OWS’s “First Amendment rights” in the park. I saw how it works. A guy got up on a box to wave a sign, “Google: Jewish billionaires.” This discomfited some of the Zuccotti inhabitants, aware of anti-Semitism charges against the movement, so an OWSer in an undershirt and porkpie hat poured coffee down the guy’s back, who called out to demand his constitutional rights from a bemused-looking senior NYPD official. The cops led away the coffee pourer, with drums beating in the background, the Constitution’s chorus.

It is a laugh to think the President of the United States would actually align his re-election interests with this motley crew. His serious base—say, the offices of MoveOn.org—normally wouldn’t allow these Zuccotti Park people inside their back door (because they’d never leave). But now they’re part of the Obama campaign.

Everyone keeps saying the OWS movement doesn’t seem to have a coherent or identifiable “agenda.” Who needs an agenda? With the whole world’s media in Zuccotti Park looking for meaning, every OWSer has a shot at addressing the world. An earnest woman with a camcorder bent over to interview a guy, who, lying amid boxes, attempted to explain “what we’re about.”

As for demon Wall Street itself, possibly the occupiers have noticed that the streets of New York’s famed financial district are filled mostly with modest working people who take trains from the outer boroughs or the ferry from Staten Island, not “millionaires.” The New York Comptroller’s office just predicted that 10,000 of them will lose their jobs by year’s end, having already lost 20,000 since 2008. Wall Street is so evil it’s annihilating its own people!

What we have is a complex $14 trillion American economy with a growth rate below 2% and nominal 9% unemployment the past two years. At such an awful level of growth, bad things happen to people at all strata of American life. The road up from sub-2% growth will be a steep climb. Drained of answers, an increasingly desperate presidency is traveling the country now, at the front of what is fundamentally a rolling circus called Occupy Wall Street.

Write to henninger@wsjcom