How much capitalism can an anti-capitalist use in one photo? Capitalism sucks!! Umm, except Facebook. And Diet Snapple. Toshiba laptops. Trendy bikes. Bottled water…
[via]
[Update: This breaks it down. h/t LC Aggie Sith]
Wall Street Anti-Capitalism Protester FAIL
Tacky Raccoons 
Koch’s Tour got linked at an NYT blog, and she got multiple libtards in response to her awesome post about this very same thing:
http://teresainfortworth.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/start-the-revolution-without-me/
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LC– They are kinda clueless IMO. I liked the link.
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Thanks for the pingback! Love the site –
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Teresa– That wasn’t my observation – It came from the comments on the site where I found the pic. But hell, I’ll take credit. 😉
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Maybe he bartered for all that stuff.
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plane– A MasterCard keeps one from handling all that filthy capitalist money.
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An “elder” protester was heard asking, “What is this soap you speak of?”
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SG– Heard a reporter on KFIAM640 talking about the smell. Rock on dudes.
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Um … I think the point most of the protesters are trying to make is that Wall Street in particular and American big biz in general aren’t paying their fair share. Not that they shouldn’t exist at all.
I know it’s fun to say that hippies smell and are retarded and stuff like that … and the word “libtard” is irresitable, I understand …
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I got a hat tip at Tacky Raccoons???
MY LIFE IS COMPLETE!!!!
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Bill– Most of the protesters don’t know what the point is. Just listen to their spokesholes. “We’re here to organize, to provide a voice, to make a difference,” is a typical statement. They’re complaining about a market that has been manipulated by the federal government, and that market reacts.
The protesters don’t have a solution, at least the ones I’ve heard have no cogent means of expressing it. They’re pretenders who don’t understand their own hypocrisy.
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LC– My mistake. 😉
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Bunk — I think you need to listen a little more carefully. Not every action is about offering a “solution.” What you’re seeing in NY is a large & diverse group that agrees that the American economy is being crippled by the enormous concentration of wealth at the tip of the American pyramid (a well-documented fact), and the enormous power of Wall Street to capture government policy and harness it to serve a very narrow set of interests.
Again, I recognize that it’s delightfully funny to make up names for people with whom you disagree (“spokesholes”), but I think you have to acknowledge that just because someone opposes the economic policies that American big business has created doesn’t mean they oppose capitalism. If you check out the tumblr of OWS participants telling their stories, you’ll see that most of them just want to work a job that pays a decent wage. The most common complaint from participants is that they work like dogs and can’t get ahead – or that they can’t find work at all.
It’s never hard to find people who look or sound stupid – or who smell – at a mass gathering like this. But based on what I hear, the protestors represent a more informed opinion than you’d like to believe.
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Bill–
Please don’t patronize me, and I won’t browbeat you. Never once did I say I disagreed with the protesters (whose mouthpieces utter nothing but vapid rhetoric) but it’s intuitively obvious to the casual observer that they’re ignorant of basic economics. I can neither agree nor disagree with the protesters, because I’ve not heard anything resembling sentience from them. I just think they’re deranged simpletons.
Give me a iink to a vid where one of them can describe how they propose to fix things that they think don’t work, and I’ll post it here with a hat tip to you.
I’ll up it one. If you can come up with one interview of a protester who can explain their purpose of disrupting Wall Street businesses, I’ll post it on several sites, not just this one.
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Bill– Try these for a start.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50rpJ7EQWuI&feature=player_embedded#!
http://www.breitbart.tv/occupy-sacramento-protesters-have-no-idea-why-theyre-there-badger-reporter-for-asking-questions/
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“I can neither agree nor disagree … I just think they’re deranged simpletons.”
Come on, Bunk, make up your mind! It’s either one or the other, you know. Or perhaps they’re deranged simpletons with whom you agree?
Those folks aren’t there to “propose solutions.” It’s not a economics conference. It’s a bunch of people pissed off at the people who run the economy and dominate the government, and who’ve done a piss-poor job of it by every measure except their own bank accounts.
And if you think about social movements and how they work, they rarely start with well-organized people toting white papers articulating concrete positions. They start with pissed-off people pointing at what they think is the problem (see Party, Tea). It’s easy to find dumb-sounding characters at such an event. I could do the same thing at any fill-in-the-blank gathering – right wing, left wing, libertarian, anti-flouride ….
And here’s a hint – and if it gets your juices up you can imagine me delivering this in my most patronizing, elitist, libtard voice, perhaps with a whiff of patchouli, with tan old Grateful Dead bootleg jangling in the background – if you’re looking for an explanation of what makes sense about these gatherings, you won’t find it at Breitbart’s site.
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PS I do think that this, via the International Business Times, is a a pretty fair round-up of what OWS is & stands for, policy-wise. These may not be proposals that satisfy everyone’s idea of how public policy should serve the economy, but they’ve all been practiced in this nation before, and they aren’t by definition incompatible with our economic system:
“Occupy Wall Street has emphasized a non-hierarchical structure, and that’s perhaps one reason they haven’t issued a formal list of demands, but most groups in the coalition appear to agree on several points: 1) increasing taxes on the rich/upper income groups — in the group’s phraseology, “the wealthiest 1 percent of society” — to get them to pay what the coalition argues is their fair share in taxes; 2) a large increase in federal spending to create jobs to lower the 9.1. U.S. unemployment rate, improve the nation’s infrastructure and education system and better-fund other social programs, such as health care; 3) protection for Social Security and Medicare entitlements; 4) new laws to strengthen unions, collective bargaining and encourage union memberships; 5) an end to corporate welfare tax laws and programs; and 6) some form of debt relief for middle/working class citizens and the poor.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/228298/20111010/occupy-wall-street-jobs-banks-financial-crisis-protest-protesters-activists-unemployment-unemploymen.htm
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Another interesting opinion, from the Motley Fool’s economics blog:
“… yes, to acknowledge a criticism tossed at Occupy Wall Street since it first began on Sept. 17: Some of the protestors are misguided and uneducated about economic issues. The early soundbites on television would have you believe that this was a sort of airhead-hippie convention (see: Erin Burnett), but don’t believe it.
“We spoke with a good number of highly articulate and well-educated people who weren’t there to simply shake their fist at The Man. They offered nuanced, pro-capitalist, pro-reform arguments for what they see as a financial system marred by conflicts of interest and perverse incentives.”
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/10/08/the-3-smartest-things-i-heard-at-occupy-wall-stree/
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And a final thought, from that redoubt of left-wing economic idiocy, The Economist:
“I am not by disposition a joiner, but I’m nevertheless inclined to smile upon attempts to stick it to the man, even if the attempt is quixotic or confused and the man in the end remains unstuck. The Burkean horror of social upheaval is fine in its place, but there is no apparent danger of upheaval. And who among us doubts that the man deserves a good sticking to? So why not try?”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-0
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Bill– Seems like you have a lot of time on your hands to cut and paste all that. I’ve heard no sentience from any of the spokesholes, whether on Breitbart’s site, on CBS/ABC/CNN News or elsewhere. Okay, I get it that they’re pissed, but they’re pissed about economic systems they apparently don’t understand.
If the intentions of Occupy X listed in International Business Times article you linked are correct, then I disagree completely, as they’re describing pure socialism – penalize the wealth producers to bring them down to the level of the lower classes. (Yeah, tell me when that ever worked. Ever hear of Milton Friedman?)
The other link to The Economist op-ed gets shredded in the comments section. The author didn’t even have the cojones to put his name in a byline.
Wall Street didn’t cause this mess, the democrat congress did during the Bush administration. Where were they then? So now they decide to throw childish tantrums and disrupt businesses across the nation. Pheeew.
Speaking of “pheeeew,” check this out. My friend Urban Infidel ventured into the filth twice now.
http://urbaninfidel.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-revisited-zucotti.html
P.S. I’ve actually spoken with Andrew Breitbart over the phone on unrelated issues. He’s a very cordial down-to-earth kinda guy, unlike the way he’s portrayed *ahem* elsewhere.
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Bill– Besides his famous oration of “The Pencil,” this is one of my favorite Milton Friedman polite smackdowns of the liberal mindset.
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Heh heh heh yer funny – – if what these folks are calling for is socialism, then socialism is what made this country great – all that stuff was heavily practiced in the post-WWII era that saw our nation become the richest, strongest, smartest and most innovative in the world. Of couse we’ve been moving away from that since Reagan, and in the last ten years the acceleration has been dramatic, which explains why a tiny percent of the nation has most of the money, and the roads and schools are falling apart.
So I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one, although it’s been fun talking about it.
FYI, I spent time reading & sharing because I care. I’m also a working journalist and I can tell you that Andrew Breitbart is an walking, talking insult to my profession. I’m sure he’s a nice guy when he’s not trying to destroy you for his own personal and ideological reasons. He’s also, as my venerable father would put it, a lying sack of shit. What he did to Shirley Sherrod alone should have been enough to discredit him permanently – that he’s taken even remotely seriously in the public discourse is a sad commentary on the state of the modern media.
And as for Friedman … not wrong about everything, but sure as hell not right about everything either. Ask Alan Greenspan …
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PS: “Wall Street didn’t cause this mess” ….
What caused the recession in 2008? Wall Street bought and paid for this mess, dood. Yeah, they dress nice and they don’t smell. They also created a pseudo-economy based on buying and selling empty boxes with the promise they’d one day be full (AKA mortgage derivatives & related financial instruments). Why do you think us taxpayers had to spend bazillions bailing them out? Was it because they were so successful? Um, that would be a “no.”
Go take a read of Michael Lewis’ “Big Short,” to take one example Unlike Breitbart et. al., he actually reports, rather than just making stuff up.
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Bill– The early colonists experimented with socialism, and found that it didn’t work. Remember the communes of the 1960s? They didn’t work either for exactly the same reasons. I really don’t understand why you’re wasting your time at this place, but you’re good for a laugh, I guess.
Who forced the lenders to sell mortgages to those who didn’t qualify for them? The democrat congress, spearheaded by Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosie and Harry Reid, and they did it by threatening lawsuits on the grounds of racial discrimination. The banks were forced to offer and grant loans to those who could not afford them, and those loans were bundled. The lenders reacted to avoid litigation.
Please don’t ignore the facts and play dumb with me.
Better yet, take your argument to a site that specializes in basic economics, and tout your stuff there. Be sure and link back after the smackdown.
All in fun, Bunk
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Oh, and Bill, I’ll re-invite you to write up a post in defense of OWS. Let me know if you’re up for it, and I’ll post it elsewhere so you can be famous. Honest.
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