Is Wall Street Opposition "vain ritualised unconsequential protesting"?

Someone wrote so. The funny thing is the news that made him reflect so:

About 175 protesters arrested (Reuters)

Why is that funny? Well, you see, the contrast he was working up on in his article* was with protest really mattering because protesters really took a risk. The news that 175 protesters in one major city are arrested because they follow an example from another major city and that they are being held without police saying exactly what they are held for, does that suggest that the protesters are taking no risks? Does that suggest that the authorities regard the protests as unlikely to have any kind of effect?

Hardly.

It suggests they risk the lawlessness of law enforcers and that law enforcers do that because the protests are a kind of risk if not to them at least to someones or somethings they are trying to protect. We are not yet exactly at singing "John Brown's body" over someone recently hanged, but ...

Now, the writer suggests that the brokers of Wall Street would have an obvious countermove:

Financial businesses are already looking at ways to cut costs by getting out of the high priced glass canyons of lower Manhattan; dispersing the financial center into anonymous malls and office parks across a wider area (and perhaps in states that don’t have an income tax as zillionaires nervously eye possible changes to the federal tax code) looks much more attractive if Wall Street is going to be a target for protests.

Evacuating Wall Street is the obvious response to the OWS protests; look for the slow trickle of financial center business to less conspicuous — and cheaper — locales to quietly speed up.

So, decentralising Wall Street would make protests ineffectual? Try to make a big business deal in the things that Lyndon LaRouche so rightly has called "phoney money" and denounced for eating up the real money (the one that corresponds to production) up in Wall Street - who's stopping you? It is one in some thousands or tens of thousands of deals made each day in the same place. Try to make it in some small town of Oklahoma were some protesters come from ... you get the picture?

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Versailles
26-X-2011

*Look it up, by the way: The American Interest: Blogs: The Vain and Empty Rituals of Protest on the Street.