Unemployed Imbeciles Gather to Protest

By Alan Caruba

I confess I have not paid much attention to the Occupy Wall Street protest. Watching New York cops arrest whole bunches of them on the Brooklyn Bridge for obstructing traffic was briefly entertaining, but it occurred to me I had no idea why they were protesting except for the fact that they were mostly young, mostly unemployed, and mostly led by the usual demonic Communists that have a beef with American exceptionalism.

As a sign of the times, Occupy Wall Street has a spiffy website, but it is filled with the most ignorant nonsense right out of the Communist Manifesto. Apparently the protesters have identified banks and corporations as the enemy. If you ask bankers and Wall Street folks, they will tell you the enemy is the federal government and they would be right.

Bankers and Wall Street want stability and predictability. They want to pile up money and loan it out to make more money or they want to sell stocks and make bets on which will go up and which will not. It’s called Capitalism and it works unless the government gets deeply involved in telling them what to do and picking winners and losers in the free market.

In the case of the most recent financial crisis, the government got into the home mortgage market back in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac were set up to purchase mortgages from banks in order to “stimulate” the housing market.

You can read the U.S. Constitution from beginning to end and not find the words “housing market” in there anywhere. The house of cards the federal government created, combined with the pressure brought to bear on bankers to make “ninja” loans (no job, no assets) resulting in the 2008 meltdown when the “bundled” mortgages turned out to be worthless and generally untraceable. Wall Street didn’t create this, Washington did.

Of course, none of this means anything to those protesting in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. It’s not a protest. It’s an excuse to party. Occasionally Leftist celebrities show up and shake hands with “the people” to give them a thrill. Then they go back to their tenured university faculty jobs, making movies and being hideously overpaid for doing so, and looking for a dictator to hug.

Journalists who have tried to determine what the protest is about have come up empty. Brad Knickerbocker, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, noted that “there’s no 10-point list of demands to be nailed Martin-Luther-like to the business and media establishment’s door.”

Cornell West, a Princeton University professor said, “It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands. We’re talking about a democratic awakening. We’re talking about raising political consciousness.” Yada, yada, yada.

West is apparently unaware that the political consciousness of Americans has already been raised by the worst presidency in the history of the nation or that Republicans are heatedly debating who they want to elect to replace it. Democrats, too, because quite a few are looking at Mitt Romney with something close to affection.

Andrew Goodman of The Wall Street Journal reported that “Many of the protesters are young. Joblessness seems to be a persistent theme.” No surprises here. Goodman reported that a list of grievances has been circulating among the protesters and, “Among the complaints: bank executives who received ‘exorbitant’ bonuses not long after receiving taxpayer bailouts” and, even I would be happy to protest that.

An October 3rd Gateway Pundit report has listed 13 Occupy Wall Street demands and they read like an Obama-inspired wet dream. They include a universal single payer healthcare system, guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment, free college education, a trillion dollars in infrastructure projects, a trillion dollars in “ecological restoration”, open borders migration, and the immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.

They are the demands of imbeciles.

You can find a lot of them camped out in lower Manhattan these days. Just wait until the nights turn really cold. They will go home to mommy and daddy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011