Godzilla vs. Rodan

I'm not a Godzilla aficionado but I do know that these movies represented the struggles between titans.  My picking Rodan (out of 20 or more Godzilla foes) as this giant Japanese lizard's combatant is because it is the only one I remember.  Nevertheless, I have chosen this metaphor to represent the battle of ideologies that is currently taking place here in the United States ... a battle between the Tea Party and the Occupiers.  If I may, I think the Tea Party represents populous opposition to big government sprawl whereas the Occupiers resent the growing disparity between fat-cat CEOs/universities and their employees/students.  Unfortunately, many Occupiers have extrapolated these resentments into a unthinking condemnation of capitalism.

To me, the Tea Party is opposing the bigger danger, a government that insinuates itself into every alcove of our lives ... destroying institutions and democratic traditions that have worked so well during the last 235 years.  This over-reaching government strategy clearly is working under the current Obama administration. Our economy has ground to a virtual halt, I think, in opposition to a hostile government that feels it can pick economic winners and losers ... and our credit rating continues to slip as we pile up gigantic sovereign debt.

The Occupiers, beneath the gusto of youthful exuberance and monstrous irresponsibility, do still have a few points to make.  Yes, the executives  of many of our companies have stepped over the line of economic self-interest (read "greed" if you wish) to the point where they are clogging their company's arteries with plutocratic plaque.  And this is because much of their firm's ownership is now in the hands of mutual funds, hedge funds and exchange traded funds.  These financial entities are so short-term profit oriented that they care not if executive salaries spiral out of hand.  I have addressed this dislocation in the past in a blog titled Turd on the Table. 

Also colleges have become burdened with administrative bloat and therefore pass these costs on to their students with spiraling tuitions which then translates into student loans that are crushing their graduates.  I contend that this inflation is as much due to the heavy hand of government intrusion into the economics of education as it is to generic growth (see: "Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble").  This problem too can be solved without a national revolution as advocated by the Occupiers.  In fact I suspect that, if the Tea Party has its way and our federal government is reined in, this problem will disappear within a generation.

So who will win this B-movie struggle?  Let us hope that it is, like it always was on the big screen, Godzilla (the Tea Party).  But I also hope that Rodan's (the Occupier's) rising out of that mountain egg also teaches some key lessons ... even in its defeat.