Gimme Gimme Gimme!!!

Parody is often the gateway to the truth

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the so-called “Occupy Wall Street” protests taking place these last couple of weeks. Those on the left have been embracing this movement as a stick-it-to-the-man anti-capitalist infusion of Marxist energy desperately needed by their ever fading and ever failing political ideology. Those on the far right see it as a congregation of unwashed hipster d-bags looking for even more government entitlements above and beyond the generous largesse they already receive. Up until recently, I’ve been on the fence about this movement. It cannot be denied that there is a fundamentally unscrupulous bond that exists between Washington D.C. and certain corporate interests on Wall Street. After all, the current treasury secretary as well as his predecessor were both high-ranking executives for Goldman Sachs and both of these secretaries helped orchestrate massive bailouts and “stimulus spending” largely to the benefit of that company. So it would seem that there should by a massive popular uprising against Goldman Sachs and other finance companies who gambled with their shareholder’s money, lost big and then received a fat bailout check courtesy of the U. S. taxpayer. However, that does not appear to be what is happening.

After a few days of the Occupy Wall Street, a loosely knit cabal of the event’s organizers have started to publicly state what the movement is really all about. After reading some of these statements, I am no longer on the fence regarding this movement. I am now convinced those who have planned this event and those who are participating in it are idiots. I’m sorry, but there is no way I can put this kindly. Instead of being a well-informed group with a coherent agenda and relevant legitimate grievances, they come across more as being whining upper-middle class white kids who want a stack of new entitlements paid for by the beleaguered American taxpayer. They aren’t opposed to government bailouts at all. They simply want bailouts for themselves. There are several examples which exemplify my point.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

A guaranteed living wage is a guarantee for rising unemployment. The minimum wage has been the cause for unemployment and underemployment for decades since it forces employers to cut back on their work force in order to preserve a reasonable profit margin. While these Marxist sycophants regard “profit” as a dirty word, it is the sole reason for businesses to exist. Entrepreneurs go into business to make a profit, just as the rest of us working people go to our jobs every day to earn a paycheck. The very notion of guaranteeing a living wage to the unemployed is absurd. The very definition of a wage according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “a payment usually of money for labor or services usually according to contract and on an hourly, daily, or piecework basis.” If there is no labor or no services, there can by definition be no wage. Besides, what wage would they propose for the unemployed. Demand number one suggests a living wage of $20 an hour. Most people work their asses off for far less. Why would anyone pay that much to someone for doing nothing? While a working person is usually paid for 40 hours every week, an unemployed person is not working 168 hours every week. Does this person get paid for all 168 hours of not working? Or will he only be paid for 40 hours of doing nothing and the other 128 hours are just pro-Bono.If everyone regardless of employment status were making $20 an hour, it would be a short matter of time before the cost of living increased dramatically in proportion to this. Despite the fact that most of the Occupy Wall Street protestors appear to be reasonably well-educated, they were never taught the simple lesson that you cannot get something for nothing.

Demand four: Free college education.

Far be it from me to defend the scam and racket that higher education has become but I still have to call this one out for being the nonsense that it is. Many of the Occupy Wall Street crowd have expressed dismay over outrageous college loans that they could never pay back after graduating. My only response to this is “What were they expecting?” It should come as no surprise that if you spend 4 years in a pricey educational institution getting a degree in Multicultural Studies, Sociology, or some other utterly useless degree that you will be hard-pressed to find a job that will pay enough to adequately offset that debt. Making a college education free will merely shift the expense and the responsibility away from the student and place it at the feet of the taxpayer yet again. This demand will accomplish nothing but create a culture of extended adolescence in America far worse than the one that already exists. If one takes a close look at the majority of these protestors, they appear to be both well-educated and unemployed. Why is this? In all likelihood most of them studied subjects in college that would not amount to any sort of marketable skill-set in the real world. Making a college education free would do nothing to help the employ-ability of these individuals. All this would do is further subsidize the useless Marx-worshiping faculties at the university level who teach in utter nonsense subjects with more taxpayer dollars. In short, this would devalue college education and create an even greater financial bleed on the nation. A far better demand would be to cut the fat from university programs to make a quality useful education more affordable. Do away with humanities, social science, and multicultural awareness requirements for science, engineering, and business degrees. All these requirements do is pad the pockets of the useless sector of liberal arts academia.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

This would effectively destroy the savings of every working person the world over. The author of this demand has absolutely no clue what damage this proposal will bring. The way loans work is not difficult to understand (unless you’re a Marxist). So for the benefit of the economically illiterate Marxists who penned this idiocy, I will explain the process as simply as I can. There are some people in this world who earn money and save money. In some of these cases, these shrewd and frugal individuals either place their money in a savings account that earns interest, or they invest this money in stocks, bonds, or money markets which pay dividends. In the case of savings accounts, banks and lending institutions lend portions of this money and charge an interest rate to those who borrow it. Those interest payments go back to the persons who were wise enough to put their money into savings. This is money that honest and hardworking people have earned and have saved for their retirements, the education of their children, or perhaps for just a rainy day. Regardless of why this money was saved, this money and the interest it accumulates belongs to those who have earned it and not those who have borrowed it and refused to pay it back. To “wipe the books clean” as the demand states would be wholesale robbery from those who save by those who borrow. It would be a 65 trillion dollar heist. That’s 65 trillion dollars in collected GDP from all nations erased. That would be 65 trillion dollars of the earnings and wages of those who tirelessly earned it wiped out by those who borrowed money they knew they could never pay back. This demand is completely unconscionable.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

This one is particularly funny in it’s rampant absurdity. A credit reporting agency is a private entity that essentially keeps track of a person’s financial reputation. These entities are essential in establishing the trustworthiness of a borrower. If someone cannot be trusted to pay back a loan, they should not be allowed to borrow more money (or raise the debt ceiling for an entire nation *hint hint*). As a microcosm of this, imagine that within your own circle of friends there is one person who consistently borrows money from you without paying it back. One day he asks if you could spot him $100 for various expenses. Suppose that he already has borrowed a total of $1000 without paying any of it back over the course of 2 years. It’s already clear that he is probably not going to pay back the $100 he is asking for since he’s already borrowed a sum of $1000 in bad faith. If you decide to deny him this request he’s likely to go to another friend to ask for the loan. If this person is a mutual friend it might not only be advisable, but it may in-fact be an ethical responsibility to give this other friend the heads-up about the borrower’s reputation for not paying back debts. To outlaw credit reporting agencies is to facilitate a lifestyle for freeloaders to live way beyond their means at the expense of those who lend money. That money comes from somewhere. It was earned by someone who worked for it. Once again this would be wholesale robbery from the earners by the borrowers.

The more I read about the Occupy Wall Street movement, the more I find myself disgusted by it. This is not a push to bring political corruption to heel. This is not an indictment of the corporatist alliances the U. S. federal government has fostered to funnel taxpayer dollars into the pockets of favored corporations. This isn’t a call to smash the Mussolini-style protectionism that has made the free market nothing more than a fantasy in this country. This is not a call to bring jobs back to U.S. soil by making it affordable for companies to actually do business here. This is a call for the government to once again rob Peter to pay Paul. Nothing more and nothing less.  While some of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s grievances may be partially valid, I find it very telling that many of the grievances that should be rightly directed towards the U.S. Congress and the executive branch of the Federal government are instead being directed towards the so-called fat cats on Wall St. If a burglar breaks into your home and steals a diamond bracelet and then gives it to his girlfriend who do you blame. Do you blame the burglar or the girlfriend? This movement however, cannot align itself against the government. They are depending on the government to carry out their demands. The simple fact of the matter is, the Occupy Wall Street movement is yet another Marxo-Facsist movement whose ultimate ends are to have a massive centralized government take by force from those who have earned and redistribute to those who have not.