Full disclaimer- people who know me IRL often say that I am the most progressive friend they have ever had. I won’t list my bona fides… but I do consider myself to be a straight up New England liberal Democrat.
HOWEVER- I don’t agree with you on the redundancies. I find many young college students and grads shockingly naive and uneducated on various topics which relate to their activism.
You can argue that redlining is bad and that banks have contributed to segregation- both in housing as well as education. You can argue that traditional credit scoring almost implicitly puts working POC at a disadvantage. You can argue that banks and other financial institutions have a horrible record lending money to Black, Latino/Latina entrepreneurs- even successful ones- and that in turn, their startups have worse access to capital even when you control for size of the enterprise, customer base, cash flow.
BUT- do many of these young people understand that while the banking system may have problems- living in a country without a functioning financial sector (except for the black market, counterfeit, barter, off-shore accounts for elites, etc.) almost ALWAYS hurts poor people MORE than our flawed banking system? If Wall Street is the enemy (therefore it must be occupied, remember that?) who is the ally or friend? Not the countries which foster kleptocracy and outright fraud and gazillions of percent inflation… surely not, if you’ve studied even at a cursory level what the opposite of our “evil capitalist” system is, right?
I find these young people quite ignorant. They want to throw Molotov cocktails at the big bad institutions with no sense of what could or might replace them. And they have shockingly naive ideas about Cuba (for example). And zero sense of irony that while they are demonstrating for food and relief in Gaza, the Hamas leadership is living in luxury penthouses in Qatar on the money they have stolen from UNRWA and other relief organizations. They don’t know what happened to the agricultural infrastructure that Israel left for the Gazans when they withdrew in August of 2005. Agriculture is “boring” apparently (or maybe bougie?). Nevermind that it was millions of dollars of sophisticated agronomy, irrigation systems, technology for exploiting the sunshine and minimizing pesticides in high end greenhouses.
All destroyed. But some of our young people believe that international aid is somehow more valiant than a vigorous agricultural system which supports jobs and healthy food and an export economy?
I think Shawbridge has it right.