George Rebane
Now the smelly, pierced, and entrenched ‘Occupy people’ (as described by Andy Kessler and others) will not move from their rancid encampments in San Francisco, Oakland, and other places. They dare the local authorities to remove them, and promise to resist when the attempt is made. When questioned about their protests, all their slogans and signs, claiming to represent “the 99%” that wants to bring down the established order, arise from being more than disappointed (aka pissed) that no one respects their expensive degrees in art and minority studies enough to hire them, and that no one told them that that would be the case.
And so some of them have now learned to answer that they are against “predatory lenders”, and that “corporations are not people”, and “money is not speech”. Their simple solution is to overturn the capitalistic underpinnings of the American economy that is seen as the source of all their problems.
In these crowds it’s hard to find one that can discuss corporate personhood and what benefits it provides a society, or what parts of it should be examined for possible revision. No one can translate the collateral effects of restricting spending one’s money to communicate – since it costs to communicate, rules on monies used to communicate will slide us toward a police state where only certain communications will survive as state approved ‘free speech’.
Not one can define predatory lending – understanding the roles of lender and borrower and the guaranteeing of loans is beyond their ken. They seem to conjure up images of a person innocently walking down the street who suddenly finds his pockets stuffed with unwanted money along with a draconian loan agreement to which his signature has been forged, and that person has no idea how it all came about.
And loonies on the left still tell us that the Occupy movement is just like the Tea Party movement. One of these seeks to conserve, preserve, and restore the country by acting within the law and its established constitutional underpinnings. The other wants to overturn the existing order and fundamentally transform the country by acting outside the law and bringing about change through revolution.
The Occupy movement has finally given the left a populist vehicle to voice and demonstrate their motives, means, and methods that differentiate them from those who seek to preserve America and continue its orderly and lawful evolution. And these same occupiers claim to be in the mainstream.
[24oct2011 update] Obama attempts to compare the Occupiers to the Tea Party movement in a lame and lying attempt to paint his demonstrators as just another expression of mainstream frustration with the world situation in general and the economy in particular. The video ‘Are the Occupiers like the Tea Party?’ sheds some light on the explicit differences between the two movements.


Leave a comment