Bruce Dazzling wrote:Buckle up.
Many links are in the original story, including one to this video:Who are the Occupy Wall Street protesters?
Washington Post Opinion
By Jennifer Rubin
From their endorsers, their mounds of trash and their signage, it wasn’t too hard to figure out that the Occupy Wall Street crowd is not composed of regular folks. The more we learn, the more it becomes just how fringy this rag-tag mob is.
In the wake of ECI’s ad highlighting the anti-Semitic elements within OWS, the Anti-Defamation League perked up with its own message denouncing the Jew-hating messages. And even the liberal blocking backs at the National Jewish Democratic Council had to weigh in: “As NJDC has repeatedly and consistently said over the course of years, anti-Semitic and abusive Holocaust rhetoric has no place in our political discourse—including at the gatherings surrounding the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ rallies and protests, where a handful of incidents have been documented. Invoking the Holocaust or engaging in anti-Semitic canards to make a political point is never acceptable.”
But the notion that extremists are a small sliver of the protests took a blow when someone bothered to actually find out who was out in the streets. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen writes in the Wall Street Journal:
On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.
Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.
The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%). . . . What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.
Schoen warns his fellow Democrats to keep their distance. “Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal. That’s why the Obama-Pelosi embrace of the movement could prove catastrophic for their party.”
None of this, I suspect, will keep the liberal media from slobbering over the protesters. Nostalgia for the 1960s protests is part of the explanation, and the liberals’ widespread antipathy toward the private sector (all those profits, all that wealth-creation upsets them) certainly factors in.
But you can’t help but think there’s some catharsis going on among the demoralized elites who insisted the One was vindication of their left-leaning philosophy. In the real world, however, the liberal domestic dogma (Keynesianism) and its foreign policy fantasies (close Gitmo) crashed and burned. It would be too much to concede conservatives’ criticisms were valid. So much more satisfying, then, to blow off steam with the hard left, excoriating directly and by implication the president’s failure to achieve liberal nirvana. Eugene Robinson writes, “The biggest impact of the Occupy Wall Street protests has been to provide a focal point for generalized economic and political discontent.” Actually, it’s to provide a focal point for liberals’ economic and political discontent. And looking at the unemployment figures, President Obama’s polling numbers and the prospects for the 2012 election, they have plenty to be discontented about.
Bumping this so it doesn't get lost on lonely ol' page 75.
God that really chaps my hide, but very expected and am quite surprised we haven't seen much of this kind of bullshit up to now. The problem obviously, with "conservatives" and the "free market" they worship is that these "liberals" and "progressives" who have some masked agenda is that the liberals are striving for an ideal of freedom for all regardless of these phony ass, cooked up political battle lines. Go to any conservative hipster megachurch and you'll see people who look and dress exactly like those in attendance of OWS. This article is such utter EFFECTIVE bullshit, it again allows us to peer into the murky psyches of the both who the water is for and the water carrier. You see the institutionalized contempt of the poor, the up to their knees in debt, human rights -- including the right for perhaps yes, a largely progressive movement -- laid bare. Yet, who then, if any progress is to be made, is gonna start the ball rolling? Those ensconced behind their riches or those who are just scraping by and have a liberal, permissive-of-all bent? To be true to our word as liberals, we first seek to do no harm.
This is the "Asking Nicely Phase". To deny that "shit is fucked up and bullshit" from any position on the "political spectrum" is to be a blind fool waiting for your next scrap and/or hoping at long last your 20 lottery tickets you bought last Friday night finally put you on your way to easy street. This isn't zero sum to the 99%, but is to the 1%. Jennifer Rubin got a table scrap for that driveby attempt (one of many, many more to come). How many more must become not only destitute but find themselves in the untenable position of being the victim of the stressor? Life is only so long and should not be spent in perpetual debt and confusion. Unlike our conservative neighbors who live within the same system, but have fallen for the macho god talk (well trained to never ask questions), the liberals are trying to fix this place borne out of ideals which each and every corporation drills from in order to mount any kind of product or PR campaign.
Who the fuck cares if OWS is "largely employed"? Good for them. All of us are scraping by in our own way and we are seeking to share what little power we have. That old term "writing on the wall" comes to mind. Well, the writing has been recognized by certain parts of the human species and are telling the criminals that we see them. None of these douchebags would want to live in a world that had no liberals. First off, we are the artists, we are the designers, we are the poets and the people who will seek to cheer you up for free. Secondly:
Small caveat: back in Denver before I moved away a bunch of people around town had these bumperstickers which read "Imagine no Liberals". It really made my blood boil to see that. Not because I was a liberal and felt in any way threatened, but because don't these idiots see the illogic in such a moronic statement? Sure, "get rid" of "all the liberals" and see what happens then. Shit socially would now shift and then there would still be more liberals, essentially members of your community who you still disagree with in perpetuity until we got down to you and something you disagree with and the authoritarian over you would one day deem that you were too liberal. Now who would come to your aid? Not the liberals you exterminated, but somebody with some kind of feeble compunction existing still in their soul, kinda like Darth Vader finally deciding to throw the Emperor into the pit because he chose finally to do the right thing. Kind of a reverse of the "then they came for me" maxim.
Imagine everyone on Earth living and let live always, with a view to doing the right thing and having the freedom and means to do so for their entire lives? Yeah, utopian as they say, but we should not cut off society's only means to make it happen. Thus, we are still around, water carriers and won't be going away. Keep making shit worse and you will find that your wish was actually a curse you couldn't find the time to process while the writing for all of us is sitting right there in front of you, on the wall.
Amen. . .
