The Latest From The OWS Gang


Here I go again, leaning on DJ Redman and his article about “Occupy Wall Street.” BTW, I am also leaning on Kira Davis, Brian Evans, and A.F. Branco.

Economic Fairness

Called by fifteen of New York’s largest unions in an act of solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, the “occupiers” prepared to confront the banks and speculators further downtown who had hijacked (so they claim) the state for their own private interests. The “occupiers” spoke with a diversity of voices and held signs covering a spectrum of demands, but their demands can be expressed in one word: fairness (their definition of fairness). This is how mass movements start (so says Francesca Rheannon of CSRwire), with a range of voices expressing different elements of one underlying idea, economic fairness. (BTW, my comments are within parentheses)

From a less biased source (The Week Magazine) we learn that the original call for occupying Wall Street was from a group called Adbusters. The occupation of a park just blocks from Wall Street is growing. The occupation is also spreading to other cities like Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and smaller places like Mobile, AL.

What Is Their Message? What Do They Want? What Are Their Demands? a Manifesto

What is the message from OWS? OWS protestors are unified under an anti-capitalist message aimed at banks that hold their student loans and mortgages. Once you get passed the slogans, they have mixed messages for their protest. An anti-capitalist theme under the guise of “it’s for the people.”

What does OWS want? No one knows. The movement is “incoherent.” That old polemic, ‘People Before Profits,’ seems to capture their message fairly well. But the growing consensus among the protesters is that “government institutions are already so shot through with corporate money that making specific demands would be pointless until the movement grew stronger politically.”

This article lists the 13 demands that the OWS crowd has published. The list closes with, “These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.”

The Democrat Party Embrace of OWS

The Democrat Party and its head, President Barack Obama, have dropped their tentative embrace of the protest movement and have gone for full support of OWS’ methods and goals. Robby Mook, the executive director of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, sent out an official e-mail asking recipients to sign a petition in support of OWS. “Protesters are assembling in New York and around the country to let billionaires, big oil and big bankers know that we’re not going to let the richest 1 percent force draconian economic policies and massive cuts to crucial programs on Main Street Americans.” President Obama’s senior campaign advisor, David Plouffe, appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to emphasize that the White House supports OWS and Republicans do not. “If you’re concerned about Wall Street and our financial system, the president is standing on the side of consumers and the middle class.” Do Democrats really think the OWS crowd is so stupid that no one in its ranks will know that was one of Obama’s largest contributors?

99%

One slogan that is often repeated is that the OWS crowd is tired of having 1% of the population (the rich) tell the other 99% what to do and how to live. “We are the 99%,” the OWS crowd chanted, a reference to their insistence that most Americans lack the influence in their country’s political and financial affairs enjoyed by the elite 1%.”

Jobs?

I guess these “occupiers” have never heard about acquiring a skill and/or an education so they can actually hold jobs that (efficiently and effectively) provide goods/services for which people are willing to pay (so a profit can be made). Oh, no. They want the people who actually worked to acquire skills to now GIVE them “economic fairness.” And this article, “The Occupiers’ World Awaits,” by David P. McGinley, perfectly expresses my sentiments about the “occupiers” throughout the world – let the “occupiers” go to North Korea.

But that’s just my opinion.

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Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

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One Comment

  1. Testing…. mic check, mic check. Is the dealio that this site continues to censor respectful and articulate comments from Occupiers as responses to posted articles?

  2. You wrote: Do Democrats really think the OWS crowd is so stupid that no one in its ranks will know that was one of Obama’s largest contributors? >>>> Nah. We’re not such a stupid crowd ~ despite your assertions to the contrary. (Funny just how “clever” we all are one moment and what “simpletons” we all are the next, and then back to “clever” and so on and so forth. I guess if that’s the logic required to support the conservative talking points on OWS, well then it is. Fact is, we’re both… and everything between. Sorry I realize that does not help much with your stereotyping.) But, we understand it. Further, we also see the Obama administration “infested with Goldman Sachs alumni from top to bottom.” We’re doing teach-ins and educating; people are learning more than they ever have about the finance industry, corporations and government. They certainly know they’re being squeezed. They are engaging it now, across the country, learning “how so”. Think not? Okay. Underestimate us.

    Regarding your struggle over what we’re all about. I’m not sure why the censorship of me was lifted but, it does not really matter. Don’t you, and the gang of writers here, find it the least bit curious that CDN would have an obviously educated, articulate, engaged occupy protester right here, commenting on your very site, but rather than assume your protester’s responses to your articles might serve, you would shout down your protester and censor comments and provide your own different non-answers and conjecture in some manner of feigned confusion about what OWS is? You certainly are a strange people.

    I think you know what we are. We are a Left Wing populist uprising. Go look up the last one, the four or five years worth in the mid 1930’s, see if you can figure out what the impetus for the New Deal was. This one’s different however. It’s the first ever of it’s kind in this country. It is, by design, leaderless; non-authoritarian. Brian Evens asks here, “As some eyeball this leaderless movement, could professional collective bargainers provide the direction this movement needs?” and Lieberman today offered his sage advice too…. apparently OWS should “pick its candidates now.” Well gosh, everyone, we seem to being doing stratospherically well in our current direction. Think not? We are exactly where we want to be we had a slower than wanted start for a couple weeks but obviously covering a lot of streets/parks now. And to Lieberman, please for god’s sake, please just finally go away… once and for all.

    Police use of violence (pepper spray, boots and batons, etc.) against people exercising free assembly & speech drives people to this protest movement. You would think our Mayors and Police Chiefs don’t understand that after 30 years of CNN broadcasting people across the globe… from China to the Middle East to Spain, being beaten-up by police, security forces and soldiers somehow does NOT register “people fighting for equity and democracy”? Somehow, violent force will quiet Americans? It certainly will rack up legal fees in lawsuits against cities, that’s for damn sure. You saw the recent restitution paid for RNC police violence right? Yes.You are a strange people.

    99%.>>>> It is not what you suggest but instead we are tearing down conceptual abstractions in artificial divisions between us. We reject your framework that divides us a hundred ways.

    Jobs? >>>> Right. 14 to 15 million of us, for whom there are no jobs. That would be our fault. Individually and as a group of individuals. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it. Is that the best conservatives have to offer in the way of job creation – suggest 14 or 15 million Americans go to North Korea?

    I’ll pass around your North Korea idea at my next general assembly meeting. You can be sure it will serve to motivate. When our numbers and our movement’s organization reaches critical mass and our demands cannot be shrugged, expect us.

    1. We’re working on demands draft. Trust us that we’re getting lots of ideas. Here’s a recent idea submission for our demands list:

      1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled […]

      2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about […]

      3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer’s own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can’t do both […]

      4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires […]

      5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company’s long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.

  3. I’m a Bible-believing, theologically and socially conservative Christian. I oppose abortion — abortion is homicide — and I’m active against the homosexual agenda. I’m 53 years old, married for more than 20 years, and I work for a living.

    I also support Occupy, both online and in person in Philadelphia.

    Why? Because the Bible tells me clearly and emphatically that God hates bribery and other corruption.

    I like capitalism; to me, socialism is based on an over-optimistic view of humanity. I like democracy, and I was in favor of establishing it in Iraq, because Saddam wasn’t cooperating.

    Unfortunately, what we actually have is a perversion of our beloved American ideals. The Founding Fathers would excoriate us. We have corporate criminals that go unprosecuted. We have too many politicians that listen more to money than to us.

    The plain sense of Scripture gives me a conscience about these things. Today, for example, I visited the campers and gave a fired-up, prophet-like reading of James 5:1-4.

    Please note that I do not, emphatically do not, condemn all corporations. Some of them are on the up-and-up, I’m sure. And I do not, emphatically do not, condemn all rich people, because some of them are sincerely philanthropic, great people. And I sure-as-shootin’ am not jealous of anyone’s success, as a really out-of-touch comment by a certain candidate suggests; I’m worried about my retirement but content with what I have, except for a perpetual desire to obey God more and more.

    When I visit my local Occupy encampment, I proudly identify as both a conservative *and* a member of “the 99%”. Then they make me feel welcome. Nobody tries to convert me to socialism or any such thing. You don’t have to abandon your conservative values to be part of Occupy, though I recommend that you stick to the core issues, as they have also been kind enough to do, so we can all avoid off-topic debates and divisiveness.

    Please try to do a more accurate job of describing what these people are about! I’m not saying you’re doing badly, just that you could do better. The public is not well served by inaccurate reporting.

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