OWS: Operation Wasteful Slacking

Ben Stein has produced some entertaining and trenchant commentary on Occupy Wall Street...

You poor kids. You are basically asking to be supported and taken care of by Mommy and Daddy. Wake up, kids. Wall Street is you, with all of your wants and needs and wishes, only they have the balls to go out and work for it. Sometimes they are crooks and sometimes they are fools -- but you know what? So are all of us. (Ben Stein – American Spectator)

Time has named him one of the Five Most Colorful OWS Celebrity Critics. Among his observations are that yes, he hates crony capitalism too, but sleeping in tents and crapping in parks doesn’t really do anything about it. He wishes the protesters would take more productive steps like doing actual investigative work. As for the outrage at the greed, he observed that you might as well get angry at people for breathing in too much air.

7 Deadly Sins -- Why Stop at Just One?

"You know what the worst deadly sin is? Spiritual pride or thinking that you're morally better than other people," Stein says. "That's what the Occupy Wall Street people are all about; thinking they're better than other people and that's a sin, too." (Ben Stein – Yahoo)

I agree.  Have the OWS screamers looked in the mirror?  Wrath and Envy are not pretty either.  And why just focus on greed?  Let's go after all the deadly sins!  Wrath, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, and of course, Greed are all corrosives, eating away at our society and destroying our souls.

The seven deadly sins, or cardinal sins, are so identified because they are believed to be the root sins from which all worldly iniquities branch out. As the plethora of morality systems throughout the ages testify, these sinful seven have haunted our human existence since the dawn of time. The beauty of this list is that one does not have to be a member of the big three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) to agree that they are bad. More importantly, if we could restore self-control to its rightful pedestal, we would have the moral authority to tell Big Government to go to hell next time it scolds us over salted french fries.

Make Yourself Useful

Stein used to write 7,000 word in-depth exposes on corporate fraud. "They were a lot of work but they eventually got some people prosecuted," Stein says. "They got some money recovered for stockholders." Stein offers that if the OWS crowd wants to do something helpful they should do the research necessary to direct and inform their discontent. (Ben Stein – Yahoo)

I would be cheering them on, and maybe joining them, if instead of extolling the virtues socialism and using bank lobbies as toilets, they hired lawyers and went about investigating the crony crapitalists and the politicians who love them. Stein has posited the possibility of grand internet clearing houses of information where tens of thousands of independent investigators could submit what they've found.  Lawyers and accountants could then collate the information and connect the grimy dots, shine a light on malfeasance, and perhaps get some crooks indicted.

The human bowel movement in the Guy Fawkes mask is losing steam anyway…

When Public Policy Polling took the temperature of Occupy Wall Street in October, “voters were split, with 35% supporting the movement’s goals and 36% opposing them.” As of today, the “split is 33-45, 11 points worse.” And it’s worse among everybody. The percentage of Democrats opposed to the movement “has risen from 16% to 24%. Meanwhile, both Republicans (from 13-59 to 11-71) and independents (from 39-34 to 34-42) have moved 13 or 14 points against O.W.S.” (Reason)

For every thousand lice-infested protestors beating the leaves, there is one dogged investigator hacking at the root 

Maybe OWS could grow up and make itself useful like Steve Croft at 60 Minutes. He's now braving a firestorm of criticism from Big Government's praetorian guard in the press over his expose on Congressional insider trading.  See Big Journalism’s takedown of Politico,  tongue bath giver to big government.  That Democratic Party web site lashed out at Croft with an especial wrath, exposing it as the  shameful purveyor of putrescent progressive porn that it is.

The first step to getting to the bottom of something is to face facts.  The left has not yet done that. 

Links to responsible journalists exposing crony corruption and congressional get rich quick schemes:
WaPo – Crony Capitalism Exposed
The Wonk Who Slays Washington
The Get Rich Congress

In an OWS World...

If you agree with OWS that more government control over the economy is the answer, then you must be willing to accept more Solyndras, more Fannie and Freddie failures, and more bailouts of businesses, banks and unions, as they gamble with your money.  


The result will be less entrepreneurship resulting in more expensive goods and services, lower wages, higher taxes and a lower standard of living.

Mark Steyn explains...

My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families on the "We are the 99%" websites have real problems.

However, the "occupy" movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable, lethargic pseudo university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. (Mark Steyn)

Indeed. Unrepentant capitalist Charles Gasparino reminds us that capitalism's predations on the proletariat are mere trifles when compared to the serial Marxist miseries that have stained humanity and snuffed liberty and the light of reason while slaughtering hundreds of millions:

Don’t try to explain to any of these protesters how those who sought to create a Marxist utopian dream of revolution also gave us the Stalinist purges, Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution and many other efforts to collectivize thought in the name of economic “justice.” (Gasparino)

Even the benign Western European democratic socialist model is collapsing. Germany is cutting back, and what's left of the safety net comes at a high price: Wage cuts, benefit cuts, compliant unions voluntarily  trading away worker bennies in exchange for no layoffs. Their tax system is grossly un-progressive, with consumption taxes hitting the rich and the poor equally.  A gallon of gasoline costs over six dollars, and everything else, including food and heating oil, is taxed at 19%, and that's on top of the income tax. 

"Call it Crapitalism"

Gasparino visited the socialist squatter's encampment on Wall Street, and came away with this observation...

Also absent was any notice of how the much-hated banks benefited not from free-market capitalism, which would have let them fail in 2008, but from crony capitalism that bailed them out.

The similar cronyism practiced by Trumka and the Obama administration -- massive spending on useless but politically connected businesses like Solyndra, paired with class-warfare rhetoric -- likewise has very little to do with free markets.  (Gasparino)

As John Stossel Says, Occupy Wall Street is Half Right...

If by "capitalism" they mean crony capitalism (let's call it crapitalism), a system in which favored business interests are supported by government, I'm against that, too.

But if they mean the free market, then they are fools. When allowed to work, the market has lifted more people out of the mud and misery of poverty than any government, ever.

I have at least found some common ground with some Wall Street protest supporters. Joe Sibilia, who runs the website CSRWire (Corporate Social Responsibility), told me, "You can't have an environment where people are betting on financial instruments with the expectation that the government is going to bail them out."

So we agree that Wall Street bailouts are intolerable. Now we just have to teach our progressive friends that truly free markets work for the benefit of all.

Free Stuff

Democrat party spokesmouth Debbie Whatshername Schultz declared the GOP presidential field "shockingly deficient," the other day.  All I could think of was, "yeah, and so is the Democrat presidential field."

Occupy Free Stuff!

James Taranto wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal about OWS entitled, What Anarchy Looks Like.

It's not a good idea to feed wild animals. "Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators" at San Diego's Obamaville encampment, reports Los Angeles's KNX-AM. "But when they stopped, the protesters became violent"

The KNX link describes how the feral pigs stole from them and vandalized their carts with blood, urine and graffiti. Now they are receiving death threats. Good citizens of San Diego are having a fundraiser to help them, but business owners around the nation are having similar experiences with OWS people.

This reminded me of a video I saw a few years back about illegal immigration. I don't quite get so worked up on the subject as this guy, but it is funny (F-bomb alert!). Reading the Taranto piece reminded me of this video. I think it applies more to the self-entitled moochers and freeloaders squatting in Occupy encampments across America. At least the illegal immigrants are working...

Bonfire of the Insanities

A photographer caught some wannabe jihadi jackwagon throwing rocks at the police and vandalizing property in Oakland while wearing a Palestinian-style keffiyeh.





Idiot's Intifada 

This just reinforces the stereotype of the "We are the World" American wacktivist wankers, imitating what they see on CNN, too lazy and too cowardly to put it on the line like Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and others on the left did back in the 1930's.

The Socialists of the 1930's went to Spain and fought the fascists; today's leftists bleat on about the Palestinians, Colombian campesinos and oppressive Middle Eastern regimes, but they don't do anything about them.

Like a twisted Civil War reenactment club, they instead dress up as hippies and don costumes of their favorite radicals, and assault their urban environs with fantasies of Latin American Revolutions and Arab Springs dancing through their fluffy little brains.  Until the dingbat in the Palestinian headscarf heads to Gaza and starts throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, he's just another pantywaist playing dress up.

Latte Leftists

Our pampered populists are latte leftists playing dress-up, too scared to go fight any real oppression. So instead, they attack the America that swaddles them in comfort and modern bounty.  They trash the municipalities that host cell phone towers and free WiFi for their iPhones and laptops.  The disciplined and humane police forces provide additional incentive to protest here instead of abroad. Instead of being thrown head first into a fetid, dank gulag bloody and broken, they are escorted into a bright clean cell where they can sip publicly funded hot coco until a communist party lawyer, pockets stuffed with wealthy liberals' guilt money, comes down to bail them out.

Rage Against the Reagan Revolution


This is not about fighting oppression. This is the left's poop throwing primal scream against the greatest president of the 20th century and his lifting half a billion people out of poverty.

Three decades later, the triumph of Reaganism is remarkable. In the United States and Britain taxes shrank, regulation, especially of the financial sector, was pruned back, and state companies were sold off. Even Brussels was nudged toward liberalization.

The impact on the rest of the world was even more profound. Soviet Communism collapsed, China converted to capitalism and entered the world economy, India dismantled its protectionist License Raj, and many emerging market economies in Latin America and Africa embraced liberalization as the path to growth.

One result has been an unprecedented global economic boom. Its biggest beneficiaries have been some of the world’s poorest people, particularly in China and India: Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank have found that between 1981 and 2005, the number of people living in poverty in the developing world fell by 500 million. (Chrystia Freeland)

The screaming OWS drum beaters are frustrated because the tea parties already have the anti-crony crapitalism turf staked out...

Palin’s remedy to crony capitalism is to double down on the Reagan Revolution — lower taxes and shrink government further. Progressives have not yet come up with a solution of such seductive simplicity. Their standard prescription — higher taxes, more regulation, a stronger social welfare net, and more investment in education — may be sensible. But it lacks the rallying power of Palin’s call to smash crony capitalism by depriving the elites of their political tool — big government.  (Chrystia Freeland)

Freeland sneeringly calls the separation of Wall Street and State "seductive simplicity," but that is the key to pulling our economy and our federal budget out of the crony crapitalist quagmire.  The "standard prescription" of the progressives will only exacerbate our economic misery by encouraging even more state-sponsored crony crapitalism.

OWS: “Unsafe and Unsanitary”

"Over the last week it was apparent that neither the demonstrators nor the city could maintain safe or sanitary conditions, or control the ongoing vandalism," Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said in a statement. (Alertnet)

It was bound to happen…

Fights Erupt Among OWS Protesters

Rapes and assaults among the squatting socialists have overtaken loud drumming and gender inequality as the primary concern at Occupy Wall Street. Solidarity for solidarity’s sake ain’t workin’ out so well.

Defecators, urinaters and masturbators shut down Occupy Madison…

A neighboring hotel's staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters. (Cardinal)

Hell’s Kitchen

Liberal propaganda outlets deny it, but the kitchen staff at the squalid Wall Street camp is fed up with the moochers. The NY Post has direct quotes from some of the “Hell’s Kitchen” workers:

“We need to limit the amount of food we’re putting out” to curb the influx of derelicts, said Rafael Moreno, a kitchen volunteer. A security volunteer added that the cooks felt “overworked and underappreciated.” (NY Post)

Welcome to the 53%, you drumming dummies!

These unwashed Marxists and academia agitators are learning what responsible people who live in the real world already know: Open the door to bums, deviants and freeloaders, and soon the responsible working people will tire of carrying everyone else. An old lady way back when called this phenomenon, Atlas Shrugging, I think…

When you hoist the freak flag, don’t be surprised when the freaks show up

They are also seeing the downside of fluffing your ranks with false solidarity. Letting in anyone and everyone has its disadvantages. We’re not all good people. There are murderers, rapists and generally bad people among us, and any group must police its own ranks if it wants to maintain its legitimacy and safety.

This is why the tea partiers have not joined the anti-capitalist unwashed rabble collectively known as OWA.