The OWS protests are juvenile in their behavior and conclusions.
Discussing national and worldwide issues with like minded fellow radicals and leftists does not make squatting on privately or publicly owned parks permissible, nor does it make those doing so the self anointed representative of 99% of the population. They are equally infantile in their demands, for example they desire bigger government but object to the not-yet-big-enough government that stepped in to bail out businesses and save jobs. They claim to support democracy but cheer our imminent abandonment of the Iraqi experiment in democracy that has cost us so much. They want universal health care and free college education yet they would create a punitive business climate which would shrink tax receipts. They want the top 1% to pay their “fair” share yet they are not even aware that 40% of our tax revenue comes from the top 1%. They want a “living” wage for all low paying jobs yet support open borders which undermine our current minimum wage and labor laws. In short, the children of boomers and hippies have come home to roost in and disrupt our public spaces.
Our leftist media and leaders unsuccessfully court the squatters despite the plethora of communist, anarchist, and other flags and symbols antithetical to our nation. Where the mainstream media once manufactured a gun totting white supremacist movement whose name was Tea, they paper over, excuse, and ignore the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism at Zuccoti Park and places like it around the nation.
That people are suffering we all are well aware. But it is not the professional activist off a commune in Brooklyn, the tie-die shirted college student supported by parents, nor the many pierced and sterling silver studded anarchist from the Pacific North West. From blue to white collar, from working class to paper pushers, from the skilled machinist to the IT expert, everyone is feeling the crunch of an increasingly slowing economy, but the policies of the OWS movement are anathema to growth.
Also atttending the OWS protest where vintage hippies, both those who seem to have never recovered from past psychedelic acid trips and those who became professionals but go on the weekends because they “did it in the 60’s”. In their glossed over version of history they pretend as if the hippies had anything to do with the Civil Rights movement and our abandonment of Vietnam. They ignore that the quintessential hippie social critique that marriage was dead and love should be “free” failed so amazingly that GBLT’s, the once shock troops of the hippie movement, now demand the “right” that is (not) marriage.
It’s an inverted world we live in when the children of the bourgeoisie get to exclaim how oppressed they are. All the while, these dirty-by-choice update their jejune daily thoughts on their instant gratification devices and services known as ipads and twitter, spreading their anti-capitalist message like a virus. The children of privilege, sleeping comfortably in their expensive 100% organic (read inefficient), free range, and “fair” trade alpaca wool sweaters get free food, and are tolerated by the city – something not accorded other squatters.
But these willing residents of our ersatzes Hoovervill’s are not poor, downtrodden, or needy. They are middle class, empowered, and indulged. They are lazy but smart and have created reverse Potemkin villages – a model of poverty and urban blight, a faux picture of the downtrodden and their desires. What they fail to understand and what the media and nation misses is not just that their demands are a hodgepodge of contradictory half thought hollers but that things are going to get much worse unless we address the fundamental issue of large government.
It is our expansive federal governments which guaranteed home mortgages and continues to back student loans, incentivizing the participation of those who will never pay them back and setting the scene for massive defaults and economic slowdown. It is our state governments who have almost no minimum criteria for food stamps that even lottery winning millionaires can continue to receive government assistance. It is our city and town governments who, in some cases, hire 2 bureaucrats for every 3 teachers they put in the classroom. These are but a few of the many examples of our government engaging in wild spending and economic intervention that harms our productivity because it requires punitive taxes that retard our nation’s economic recovery and growth.
That the OWS movement is against “free” trade, NAFTA, and labor law violations should not have anyone confused about it being for American workers. The OWS wants a nation that pays for all of its needs – free healthcare, free and universal college education, free and legal drugs, and a wish list of sectarian give away’s and goodies that are endless and that are payed for on the back of our dwindling workforce. Where once derided was the notion of Reagan’s trickle down economics, all Americans have born witness to its inverse. That when corporations and small businesses are taxed at greater cost and regulated to no end, they pass those costs on to the consumer.
Make no mistake, while the mood of disenchantment and dissatisfaction with the economy is shared by both the OWS protesters and the nation as a whole their economic and policy prescriptions are not, because most realize they would be disastrous. The OWS movement is a petulant child that when raised was never weaned off their parents child-centric pov and never forced to see the world for what it is. If the nation continues down the default path it is on, by ignoring our massive debt, this current economic crisis will seem like better days gone by. If we follow the OWS movement towards an even larger government, with an even worse punitive tax system, we will shed even more jobs and sink into straight out economic depression.
