The Only Good Occupation... The Only Good Occupation... Is getting a job. So you won't have to leech off Mom and Dad anymore. Is taking responsibility for your own neurotic hangups, and not blaming your gnawing feelings of inferiority on the most miraculous, creative, and popular economic system in the world -- including the parts of China, India, and Russia that actually work. Is learning about capitalism, before revealing your fathomless ignorance to the world. And no, Das Kapital is not about capitalism. Is getting a job. So look, kids. Lotsa luck, kids. Don't forget to grow up. Meet the Oakland Developer Who Used a Shotgun to ‘Discourage’ Occupy Rioters. Oakland developer Phil Tagami stands with Bishop Salvatore Cordileone after presenting the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce’s “Oakland on the Map” award to the Cathedral of Christ the Light during the Chamber’s 105th annual meeting, June 23, attended by 350 Oakland business leaders.
(Image: The Catholic Voice) Although some businesses have been targeted and vandalized by Occupy Oakland protesters, there is at least one businessman who refuses to be intimidated. Phil Tagami is a well-known Oakland developer. Late Wednesday night, instead of going over paperwork or brokering deals, he was forced to defend a downtown building where he personally oversaw $50 million worth of renovations. He also has an office there. “We had people who attempted to break into our building,” the landmark Rotunda Building on Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall, Tagami said. “I was standing there and they saw me there, and I lifted it – I didn’t point it – I just held it in my hands,” Tagami said.
Occupy Wall Street and the Founding Fathers. Is the Occupy Wall Street protest our generation's version of the Boston Tea Party? Would George Washington, if he were alive today, eschew Mount Vernon in favor of a tent in Zuccotti Park? Not a chance. Much of what the Occupy Wall Street movement seeks isn't new. The Founding Fathers -- particularly those who participated in creating the Constitution -- rejected many of the very ideas that the protesters espouse. Take, for example, the "demand" of Occupy protesters that governments simply extinguish "all debt on the entire planet[,] period. " This is beyond foolish, but even if one (charitably) construes this demand to be primarily concerned with debts involving student loans, consumer credit, and home mortgages, it is still the type of idea that the Founders decried.
In The Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that the principal benefit of the Constitution's configuration was its tendency to stymie "wicked projects" such as a "rage for ... an abolition of debts. " Careful, OWS Envy-Mongers! The One Percent Have Got Your Number. With the OWS Envy-Monger crowds growing more rowdy and violent by the day, the nation is stunned by the depravity, laziness and childish lack of self-control ubiquitously on display. But the One percenters in the big, high office buildings are on to this crowd in a way that ought to make the uncouth rabble-rousers down in the park very uneasy about what they're wishing and hoping their Democrat enablers can make come true.
Yesterday, a close friend -- an independent businessman himself for decades -- sent me via email the photo of a flyer, which was purportedly dropped from an office building in Chicago by the Board of Trade down upon the crowd of protesters. There is no author attribution, so for now, this re-publication remains anonymous. However, I would gladly print the name of this author -- if he or she should come forward -- so that the rest of us adults in the country could give that great American a round of vigorous applause. We are Wall Street. Nothing New under the Sun: OWS and '60s Radicalism. In his review, Glenn Beck said, "This book has taught me more about our history than any I've read in years.
A Patriot's History of the United States should be required reading for all Americans. " I agree. (Except for the "should be required" thing. I don't want anyone requiring me to read anything, no matter how good.) The thing about this book is that it does not only deal with an outline of events in our history, but it instead fills in the background details of what was happening in, around, before, and as a consequence of those events. Rather than a slide show, it is a verbal video of our history. One striking result of my reading this book was a recurring sense of déjà vu in our national story. Neither was just a spontaneous, grassroots emotional outburst. Writing about the Free Speech movement on college campuses, authors Schweikart and Allen observed: [C]ampus violence was not a case of emotions getting out of hand, as is sometimes portrayed.
Their aims were the same. Ms. Greedy Occupiers. I have been interested in and amused by the Occupation Protesters. Does anyone else see the dichotomy of this phenomenon? I am still not sure of the total scope of their issues, but there is a common thread in most of the protests. They are against greed and the accumulation of wealth. There is a strong thread of animosity toward the free market and capitalism. One the one hand there is the presumed evil person or group of people (corporations), who evidence their evil by accumulating wealth, which is demonstrated against. Whether it is being prejudiced against prejudiced people or greedy toward greedy people, it is a double edged sword. By simple definition greed is excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions. It is interesting to explore the complications of this situation and to try to force the reasoning into a logical matrix.
Some years ago I walked into the home of a friend who had a religious program playing on TV. » #Occupy Says: “We Are All Scott Olsen.” Agreed! - Big Government. » Jesus Would NOT #OccupyWallStreet - Big Government. » The Occupiers Are Part of Obama’s Plan - Big Government.
Don’t EVEN Get Me Started, Mythical Bootstraps College Student. Dennis Miller: ‘I’m No Longer The Biggest Loser On Wall Street’ OWS: Easy Prey. They are as dumb as bag of rocks, unable to articulate any strategy or goal. They are violent and cowardly at the same time, in the manner possible only to mobs. They are supported by both the Nazis and the communists -- quite a trick, even in this day and age. The whiff of outside direction and funding is too strong to ignore, with a mild but distinctive tang of paprika. As Mark Steyn pointed out, the idea originated in Canada.
(Nazis, commies, and Canadians. Now that's what I call a hat trick.) When has such an easy target been presented by the left? There have been comments, coverage, jibes, and what have you, but mostly with the tone you'd expect in response to any everyday left-wing barbarity. At this point, any attack on the 99ers automatically hits the Democrats. What is the problem here? This is one of those things where it's likely that a number of explanations is required. These are all (except perhaps the last) virtues, and should be accorded the respect due to virtues. Ed Driscoll » The New York Times’ Epic Fail. Yes, I realize you could fill whole books with the subject of that headline, but let’s look at one story in particular. I started to get slightly huffy over this passage on Occupy Wall Street in the New York Times… There is a through-the-looking glass element to some of the criticism.
The Daily Caller reported that based on photographs, the Occupy forces were almost exclusively white (numerous studies and polls have shown the Tea Party, too, has proportionately few members of minority groups). The Tea Party, too, was vague about its frustrations in its early days, or contradictory, as in the sign at one rally that was cited as evidence that the Tea Party itself was uneducated and uninformed: “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.”At Tea Party protests you could find the kind of one-off cranks that conservatives have found at Occupy rallies — Tea Party organizers would explain them as fringe-y interlopers. Kate Zernike of the New York Times, are you in the room?
» #OccupyFannieMae: Government Policy Caused the Subprime Crisis - Big Government. » Exploding the Myths & Lies Behind the #Occupy Turnout Numbers - Big Government. » Backlash: Law-And-Order Republicans Using #Occupy to Raise Campaign Funds - Big Government. The Occupiers' World Awaits. It's called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka communist North Korea).
In North Korea, there are no evil corporations or banks to ruin Occupiers' lives, because another pair of collectivist cretins, Kim Il-sung and his creepy son Kim Jung-il, got rid of them long ago. In fact, along with ridding North Korea of everything other than the glorious state, the Kim Klan has either already met most of the Occupier's nattering demands or simply made them superfluous.
For demands one (that is not a typo -- there are a lot of demands in demand one), "the restoration of the living wage," North Korea has followed the Occupiers' proposed playbook and ended "Freetrade [sic]" by creating a trade-free society. Additionally, in North Korea, there is no need to slap "trade tariffs" on imports of "cheap products" to "level the playing field" because the Kims have created an import-free society as well.
Demand two, "a universal single payer healthcare system," was instituted way back in 1948. How Conservatives Occupy Wall Street. But let us take these young skulls full of mush seriously. Let us not merely sneer, as Jonah Goldberg did, about folks who want the "government to work on the same non-hierarchical, consensus-based, extremely deliberative form of direct democracy that they're using down in Liberty Plaza.
" Or at Ezra Klein's report that "[d]ecisions are made by the NYC General Assembly, which Nathan Schneider describes as 'a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought.'" Lefties since time immemorial have longed for liberation and equality through this vision of a world without hierarchy. Today's generation has watched lefty documentaries like The Corporation for inspiration. It's the way that corporations got the courts to define them as "persons" back in the 19th century, by piggy-backing on the Fourteenth Amendment, that offends the left. It was back in the 1940s that thinking Marxists realized that our problem wasn't just corporations.
America's Children Come Home to Roost. Thousands of vampires with PhDs labored for decades to perfect the art of sucking the souls from America's trusting young, and then hustling them into the slavery of terminal stupidity. How obedient these foul-smelling young wretches are! How touchingly eager they are to please! They sit on the ground in kindergarten formation, obligingly parroting whatever hellish nihilism oozes from the "microphone leader's" lips: "Everything is possible!
You can have sex with animals! " Up go the "happy hands" in dutiful response. They so want to be good! A British paper informs us that Bard College students are gracing the Occupy Wall Street throngs in New York, playing hookey on their $57,000 a year classes. Attention Bard parents, who thought you were shelling out a fortune to put a little artsy sheen on your precious darlings! President Botstein now explicitly funnels campus funds and resources to ISM, which trains students on Bard's idyllic grounds to take "direct action" against Israel.
Marxist Mayhem in Wall Street Protests. In 1951, when the horrors of the Red Terror, Siberian gulags, and Auschwitz death camps were still very real, author Eric Hoffer wrote in his acclaimed book, The True Believer, that the "monstrous evils of the 20th century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.
"1 British economist John Maynard Keynes noted in 1919 that Soviet socialist icon "[Vladimir] Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. ... Lenin certainly was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. Life imitated art recently when U.S. U.N. 1 The True Believer, Eric Hoffer (Harper and Row, 1951). 4 Marshall R. » Lech Walesa Not Attending #OccupyWallStreet in New York After Discovering Hard-Left Organizers - Big Government. Marx Was Right - Woodstock to Zuccotti Park. But the similarities between the dreamers of Camelot generation and those of Hope & Change are interesting and illuminating. Both were inspired by a president who as a young U.S. senator had gained the public's attention through the publication of a very well-ghostwritten book. JFK's Profiles in Courage was written by Ted Sorensen, Obama's Dreams of My Father by Bill Ayers.
Both men were young and photogenic, with nice-looking young families. Both could play on an unassimilated alienation from mainstream America -- JFK as the Irish Catholic immigrant, Barack Obama as the son of a black Muslim. And both made their mark by communicating a message from their ghostwriters as if it was their own -- JFK by study and a skill at extemporaneous speech, Obama with the help of a TelePrompter because he is lazy. Let me tell you a real sob story. Like the rest of my generation, I was aware of the Woodstock Festival, but I did not attend.
P.S. Guess those Libyans learned something 25 years ago! Occupy Wall Street and the Chicago '68 Riots. As the man said, those ignorant of their history are condemned to repeat it. How much worse are those who deliberately ignore it? Deliberately ignoring their own record is a liberal specialty. The ideology could not exist without it. There is scarcely a major event of the last century that matches what liberal mythology has to say about it -- the Depression, WWII, the civil rights movement, the Cold War... They have suppressed, ignored, and hidden the facts about each of these events and more, instead constructing a glittering façade in which liberals are always right, always heroic, and always victorious. One episode they're ignoring today -- and a particularly ignoble one -- occurred from August 23 to 29, 1968. The Democrats met in Chicago, supposedly under the benevolent control of the Daley clan, to nominate their presidential candidate.
What they couldn't grasp (and in large part still don't) was that the '60s revolt was aimed as much at liberalism as anything else. J.R. The Revolutionaries' Revenge. Each person interviewed in Oakland had the same story to tell, and if you listen carefully to the video from the main stream press, it's this: capitalism is the root of all evil. According to the Occupiers, Big Business has corrupted our government, corporations exploit workers, the rich control everything, the top 1% own somewhere between 30% and 60% of all wealth, the disparity between the rich and the remaining 99% is growing and the property-owning bourgeoisie is responsible for that. The workers need to take control of the means of production and mount a revolution to overthrow capitalism by expropriating property from the bourgeoisie.
The workers need to rise up (fist pump), redistribute capital more equitably and establish a Marxist paradise -- slaying the neo-liberalism dragon and enthroning the worker, all in the name of "economic justice. " We can pretend this isn't the case by sticking our heads in the sand, but facts are facts. Still don't believe me? From MoveOr.org emails: Wall Street Is Shovel-Ready. A Lesson about Crony Capitalism for the OWS Crowd.
The OWS Dream. America's Orwellian Liberalism. OWS and the Progressive Fantasy. » Capitalist Confronts #OccupyLA - Big Government. I Am The 1%’: Wall Street CEO Debates #OccupyWS. Our New Hero: A Day In The Life Of #OccupyWallStreet Protesters. Glenn Beck: Occupy Protesters 'Will Come For You and Drag You Into the Streets and Kill You' Glenn Beck: Glenn warns of upcoming unrest with Stephen Lerner audio. October 12, 2011 - WINGLESS, BLOODSUCKING AND PARASITIC: MEET THE FLEA PARTY!