Occupy Wall Street: Brief Update

Over the past thirty wonderful years, wages have stagnated.  One hope for making money was to buy as much house as possible with the belief that the value would increase indefinitely.  But, of course, it was just a bubble.  Even people who could maintain their mortgage payments built as big a house as possible in hope of riding the trend.  Can we fault these people for trying to make money in the most effective way available at the time, not real labor, but speculation?  After all, that's how a lot of big boys made it. Of course, the real sure thing was to  accumulate bad debt from people who couldn't pay, wrap it up in a bundle, cover it in a bunch of phoney baloney equations, and sell it to some other suckers.  I never participated in this nonsense and I've still lost net worth.  So, I think Wall Street deserves all the trouble it gets, inchoate or not.  I hope they're up to their pieholes in hippies and wiccans for the rest of their days.

The tea parties showed up and were immediately savaged by an openly hostile media who sought out or made up vicious 'bad news' from every gathering.... all to no avail.

This group shows up and the same media immediately endows them with respectability and refuses to give them the same treatment.

The TP groups showed up waving flags and acting respectable, cleaning up after themselves and behaving with social decorum. They were first laughed at, then scorned, then maligned and then feared as threats to the Republic.

And rightly so, because the TP groups were made up of people with 'skin in the game' - property, businesses, families, established ties to their communities, middle class and working class folk who actually make America 'work'. Once those types of people get moving, they really could have sparked a revolution.

But this rabble? They don't appear connected to their communities, they don't show respect for America or law (which is our respect for others' rights), and call for more wealth transfers from other citizens to maintain their lifestyle rather than calling for more freedom and liberty to create and enjoy their own wealth.

This rabble couldn't spark a revolution if they tried. Even if they were armed, they wouldn't know the first thing about armed revolution - whereas the TP people do. 

America is not a Bannana republic or European capital. Those places - virtually all of which are centralized governments ruling their countries from the capital cities - could be overthrown by rabbles seizing the totems of power and prestige. But America's cities are not where America's wealth is created...they're only where the wealth is traded and invested from.

Think about that. The wealth creators could just as easily move their trading floor and investment firms to the suburbs or found new cities than keep their activities on Wall Street or any other geographical fixed locale.

Revolution would require not mobs in down town squares but tens of millions of middle-class businessmen and middle management types operating from the suburbs in unison. In ways you cannot see or bomb or strafe. 

So in the age-old struggle between free people and any number of systems and groups of control and 'wealth transfer by force'. those who seize the cities and totems of power are merely seizing liabilities, not wealth and the initiative wealth provides.  

John's characterization of the TP as  "showed up waving flags and acting respectable, cleaning up after themselves and behaving with social decorum" is pure fiction. 

They disrupted meetings, made serious threats, and one spit on a Congressman.

The original TP engaged in vandalism and theft. 

If media is so hostile to the Kochpuppets, why didn't they cover the thousand people who were arrested protesting the tar sands pipeline at the White House?  This liberal, hostile media is a fiction sold by the oligarchs and the suckers who buy it.  The media is owned essentially by moneyed interests and is on a rather short leash.  It is an Orwellian triumph and a way to narrow the conversation to the right.  Look at how the media bought into the stupid Iraq War all the way to the New York Times.

The update editorializes the following:
Everyone who believes that a radical reconsideration of the economic and social policy priorities in the United States is in order — in the direction of more fair, equitable, and just distribution of resources for the flourishing of all persons, especially those most vulnerable in our country and around the world — can do something, from simply learning about the movement to getting involved in direct action on the ground.

No thanks.  The nation has already tried and failed in the radical "hope and change" economic policy of Barack Obama and the Democrat Congress,  Plenty of the nations wealth was distributed along arbitrary policitcal lines without producing economic growth.  The 2009 800 bvillion dollar stimulus legislation enacted by an Democrat majority Congess that greatly increased the public sector while failing to grow the private sector or create jobs in the private sector.  We need a sane economic policy that allows and encourages the private sector to grow and thereby create new and permanent private sector jobs.

We willl have federal election in 2012. Let the Presidential candidates and candidates for Congress, explain how they would grow the private sector  and create new jobs.   The nation does not need a protest movement based on radical unproven philosophies. The nation needs sound economic policies that expand the private sector and  are known to work in creating new jobs.  The nation has no need for more radical plans that do not result in private sector growth and permanent job creation. 

The neoliberal economic philosophy has been kowtowed to on all fronts  and by both parties for the last thirty years.  We are living in the result.  I believe that, privately, the promoters of that philosophy have lost the faith and their present course of action is to preserve prosperity at least for the few.  They seem to be doing well with that. 

Itr was interesting and informative to see the photos in this update posted by Tom Beaudoin.
Perhaps reacting to the comments that the Occupiers had no American flags to represent their expression of their feelings toward the country, they have placed one below the UN World flag-defaced, thematically I'm sure, and laid on the ground prostrate before the UN flag. Makes you wonder what they'll do with the flag next.
Remember when the young Americans of the Great Generation saluted and respected it? Died for it? Quite a contrast between the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima and these "occupiers."
Another sign says to help the poor, don't blame the poor. A great idea. Perhaps one way to help the poor is not to assist in robbing them of a decent education by enslaving them to our awful and costly public education system. Give them what the poor want, not what unions and their paid politicos say they want, the choice vouchers and charter schools which evaluate and reward according to teaching excellence provide. Don't rob them of a choice for a better life. If they do, they may be fit for nothing more than occupying rather than lives as productive citizens. 
Another sign says no nuclear, no carbon. I suppose the authors have not yet found out that the sole proven source of great quantities of carbon-free electrical power for the US utility industry is nuclear power. But this is not about logic or sensible, real world choices. It is about occupying the streets. Let's make sure the updates here include how many occupiers have been arrested along with how many TPartiers as time, occupiers, and Tpartiers march on. Last I heard it was close to 1,000 to somewhere around zero.
But in a sense, the comparison may be unfair: unlike most Tpartiers, many Occupiers have no fear of jeopardizing a job by arrests or illegal disruptions or tax-paying responsibility to protect, especially while we keep extending unemployment benefits.