There was an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (hat tip
View From the Right). It's called
What's Occupying Wall Street, and posits that the protestors have a point, but the wrong target. The WSJ writes:
In the matter of Occupy Wall Street, the allegedly anticapitalist movement that's been camped out in lower Manhattan for the past few weeks and has inspired copycat protests from Boston to Los Angeles, we have some sympathy. Really? Well, yeah.
OK, not for the half-naked demonstrators, the ranting anti-Semites, Kanye West or anyone else who has helped make Occupy Wall Street a target for easy ridicule. But to the extent that the mainly young demonstrators have a valid complaint, it's that they are trying to bust their way into an economy where there is one job for every five job-seekers, and where youth unemployment runs north of 18%. That is a cause for frustration, if not outrage.
The question is, outrage at whom?
The article then goes on to describe the massive job loss in the financial services sector and how more layoffs there are expected, and how the economy was ruined, not by Wall Street, but by the federal government:
...if anyone in the Occupy Wall Street movement wants an intellectually honest explanation for why they can't find a job, they might start by considering what happens to an economy when the White House decides to make pinatas out of the financial-services industry (roughly 6%, or $828 billion, of U.S. GDP), the energy industry (about 7.5% of GDP, or $1 trillion), and millionaires and billionaires (who paid 20.4% of all federal income taxes in 2009). And don't forget the Administration's rhetorical volleys against individual companies like Anthem Blue Cross, AIG and Bank of America, or against Chrysler's bondholders, or various other alleged malefactors of wealth.
That's right, hippie and commie morons. If you want to continue your parasitical existence, i.e. taking more out of the economy than you put into it, you need to keep your host healthy. Human mosquitoes [i.e. you] can be tolerated when they suck only a few drops of blood out of the host, but when the drops of blood become buckets, the host dies. When the host dies, the parasites die with it.
The problem for the have-nots of society is not that the haves took away their fair share of the goodies, but that the have-nots didn't earn a fair share in the first place. If they want a job and the opportunity to advance in society, they need to get their heads out of their nether regions and accept the immutable truth: the government destroyed the economy, not the private sector. To make things better and to heal our sick economy, the first thing you can do is to vote Obama and the Democrats out of office in 2012. As the Journal puts it:
Three years into the current Administration, most Americans are getting wise to the source of their economic woes. It's a couple hundred miles south of Wall Street.
Read the article here.
Here's a sign seen at the "Occupy Oakland" demonstrations. It shows pretty much what the "Occupy" movements are all about.
I found this photo at El Marco's photo essay of the "Occupy Denver" cockroaches. I changed the girl's sign with Photoshop so that it is more to my liking. See El Marco's original photo here.
