Wandering around downtown I came across the fabled Occupy Phoenix movement. It's not going as awkwardly as elsewhere, but it's clearly having issues of its own as a group.
They consist of normal people from various walks of life, though unlike the folks I had seen back east there were no threats of death or weird individual cries for blood. On the other hand, they seemed determined to turn on eachother as people holding signs argued like mad over... something.
They were arguing about what it was they were protesting.
It's been said that the lack of any coherent leadership has led to some serious problems for the Occupy Wall Street program. Inconsistent cries from large crowds upset by the lack of jobs and the sluggish lending by banks, the same banks that got a zero percent interest loan from our tax dollars.
There's a lot to be mad about in this economy. However, I'm not sure why these same people who came out for the same reason cannot agree on their lists of grievances. If they were producing a manifesto I could understand the tension, but at least they're organized enough to put things before a committee.
The occupation itself is also kind of stymied by city law forcing them to protest within certain hours of the day or at least ensuring no one stays the night on city property. I suspect that the City of Phoenix has seen the chaos reigning elsewhere and intends to nip that in the bud before it happens.
My understanding is that a lot of students are marching in this, which make sense since their debt is ridiculously difficult to discharge and even after graduation there's no jobs waiting for them.
We're massive proponents of changing the special status afforded to Student Loan debt in a bankruptcy because at this point the obvious gouging in inflated prices for education that gets them into nothing. They have to fight for jobs waiting tables, slinging java at a coffee shop or delivering pizza, and while there's nothing wrong with those jobs they aren't what these folks willingly put themselves into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to obtain.
