Occupy Wall Street – Are you with it?

[Rob Halpern]

It is astounding the level of emotion, fear mongering, and hype that this has generated.

Look at some of the language used in these posts!

[Heather Smith]

Meanwhile, the super committee is meeting behind closed doors as they hash out a budget that will affect all Americans. Guess who gets to meet with them: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-super-committe…

Not all submissions, however, go through the official channels. Lobbyists are in frequent contact with super-committee members and their staffs, a practice that open-government advocates bemoan as special access.

The American Petroleum Institute, which is fighting Democratic-led efforts to close a tax loophole for oil companies, prefers personal contact and declined to submit a formal recommendation to the committee.

“Our conversations have been very productive,” said API senior tax advisor Brian Johnson.

 

 In regards to “these people”…include me. I speak for myself. Yes, I am protesting in my little town…no we aren’t camping out…it is pretty tame down at Friendship Square with a nice mix of individuals. Funny thing is…the fact that the movement is so organic seems to frighten people the most and they spend a lot of time trying to fit it into a box so that they can villify it. Go ahead….continue thinking what you want. I am going to continue educating everyone I know about the mass fraud that has occurred. Talk about emotional. Someone robs you…and the neighbor down the street points it out…do you call the cops or start calling your neighbor names?

[Steve Mercer]

No the difference between you and me is that I get politicians attention at the ballot box.  While you try to get their attention through media stunts called protests.  Until you have a Million plus march on Washingtion you won’t even register as a blip on their radar screen.  Meanwhile I will be working at my job ( a 7 day a week job no less)  making a living for me and my family and doing productive work.  I am one of the few people in this country that still actually produces something here in the states. 

 

s.

[Steve Mercer]

Hee Hee! (it keeps the conversation lively though does it not?)  You heard about the feller that fought the pig in the mud haven’t you?  (After fiight’n with ’em a while the feller began to realize that the pig liiked it thar!)

 

S.

[Steve Mercer]

No,  I just shoot the robber!  Then I call the police.

s.

[Boilerplater]

Smells like a Red herring to me.

[William M. Davenport]

Churchill said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”  You noted at one point that we are a nation of laws.  Churchill also said, “If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.”  DeTocqueville warned us 170 years ago that a regulatory cancer could consume our republic.  Our Founders shared your passion for disproportionate influence.  Their concern was government overreach however.  Perhaps you could consider focusing your passion on a bloated government as they did.  The API and other “special interest groups” are a necessity birthed by free enterprise to defend and protect the private sector against government overreach.  If you have a problem with special interest lobby groups, shout out for smaller government and then you’ll see the lobbyists diminished.  Or, if the government is our only hope:

1. Shout out for Congressional hearings on the outrageous costs of a college education and the absolute tax-exempt status they exploit.
2. Shout out for Congressional hearings on union abuses of tax monies and mandatory dues that are improperly channeled into influence peddling.
3. Shout out for Congressional hearings on how Congress forced banks to provide sub-prime loans for decades and how Congress now gets a pass on any liability for crashing the world’s economy.

Shout out for something based in the Constitution and the free enterprise system because the course you’re now on will take you to totalitarianism after you briefly pass through socialism.  Totalitarianism always evolves out of “progressive” movements.  

 

Afterthought:  The irony of edifying the rule of law and citing the wrongs of robbery while advocating socialism; it’s a little surreal don’t you think?   

  

 

[Jon Quackenbush]

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy.

[Jordan Lockman]

[William M. Davenport]

Put the bong down dude, you’re about to overdose!

[Jon Quackenbush]

It is quite simple.

• To stop the disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security
• To stop letting the sick die.
• To stop letting the poor go hungry.
• To stop letting families be tossed in the street.
• To stop letting the unemployed rot.
• To stop children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear.
• To stop letting the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs.
• To stop letting the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters.
• To stop letting torture continue.
• To stop letting teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed.
• To stop letting the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close.
• To stop letting the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. 
• To stop letting those who finance campaigns being the only ones who see their interests seen to.
• To stop endless war.
• To stop the insanity.

[Jon Quackenbush]

First of all that is impossible, and second, mockery is not flattering, nor does it contribute to the debate.

[Jarrod Katzer]

Yes. “Simple” is, indeed, the word. Solutions are not arrived at by reciting platitude and concocting an enemy to rally against. It feels good though, I know. You seem smart. Focus that intelligence toward engineering cooperative incentive to alter the real and few instances of mass greed. Making an enemy has been done over and over and never succeeds despite Hollywood claims to the contrary.

[Jon Quackenbush]

Did you expect an essay as a response?  I could go into more depth, however that isn’t required to make my point.  Do you need statistics to reinforce my “platitudes”, because I am capable of reciting them for you.

Truth is, I am not that smart.  I have fed the beast for a majority of my life, and I am full of regret as a result.  I have supported the institutions whom I now resent.  The truth is my friend, that we do have a common enemy, regardless if you concur, one I didn’t create it nor imagine.  Pretending it isn’t there isn’t going to help us man.  

The occupiers have not come to work within the system –we tried that. We are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform–we tried that. We know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. We have no faith, nor should we, in the political system or the two major political parties that are two sides of the same coin. We are aware the press will not amplify our voices, because they are bought and paid for too.  It is obvious to us that the economy serves only the oligarchs, so we are forming our own communal system– and it is a beautiful thing.

This movement is an effort to take our country back, and you may consider my embrace a contribution.  The cooperative incentive is to join with hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters who have reached the end of our vast well of patience.  There are work groups who make logistical decisions, and the general assembly gathers and makes large policy decisions.  I have been a part of it.  Let me tell you that it is pure democracy, and you are missing out on it due to your skepticism and disdain for a movement you clearly do not yet understand.

You seem smart.  Focus that intelligence in lifting up your fellow brothers and sisters instead of branding them as lazy malcontents.  I promise you you’ll feel good about it.

[William M. Davenport]

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” — Thomas Jefferson.

And they’ll do it under some variation on the sanctimonious “greater good” demagoguery.  If government was able to stop all the evil in the world (or even the list you’ve provided), government would be God. 

[Author]

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