BrewCityAllstar | Oct. 18, 2011 at 3:48 p.m. (report)

jjrakman - That's about the most on-point thing I've read about the occupy Wall Street movement. You are exactly right on all fronts, and I agree completely. I would add one thing, however: what these people don't realize is that Wall Street is not just for the rich. The average working man's 401k, IRA, pension, etc. is pooled together and invested into funds comprised of Stocks, Bonds, and other investment instruments that are traded on Wall Street.

local_yokel | Oct. 18, 2011 at 12:55 a.m. (report)

jj -- Can you supply one quote from "all of those ridiculous propaganda flyers" you say are from SDS? I can wait.

jjrakman | Oct. 16, 2011 at 10:56 a.m. (report)

Are you serious?

If I'm not informed very well about the Occupy Wall Street movement, then I guess the authors who write all those ridiculous propaganda flyers that SDS and other miscreants litters our local campus' are to blame. If that's not their message, then they had better hire a PR firm to do their messaging for them, because at this point their message is schizophrenic.

But if that's not their message, then by all means fill me in.

local_yokel | Oct. 15, 2011 at 6:31 a.m. (report)

jjrakman -- I guess time will tell if you are right. But you do not seem very well informed about the Occupy Wall Street protesters. For instance, where did you get your silly idea that the protesters want to take "all of Wall Street's money?" And which of the protesters has have ever called for a centrally controlled economy or the elimination of private property?

jjrakman | Oct. 14, 2011 at 2:51 p.m. (report)

For some reason onMilwaukee.com's comments dont allow for the separation of paragraphs. So I apologize in advance, but this requires a lengthy response.

It may be about a lot of different things, but its about a whole lot of deeply stupid things. In America this nonsense all began at Occupy Wall Street, but do any of these people even know anything about Wall Street? Who exactly at Wall Street are they angry at? Are they aware that Wall Street isnt some dark smokey X-files-esque board room headed by Gordon Gecko? Do they understand the complexity and diversity of Wall Street? Do they understand that their accusations towards Wall Street are the direct equivalent of blaming the entire television industry for Martha Stewarts perjury? Do they not realize that what started in Greece and Spain is the collapse of socialism? Of course they dont.

Do they have any idea what theyll do if theyre successful? What happens if and when they get all of Wall Streets money, putting aside for the moment how monumentally stupid this notion is. What then will they do with the money? Since they will be the ones with the money, will they then have to promptly occupy themselves? But its doubtful any of them are capable of thinking more than three nano-seconds into the future.

Now, some of your comment focus on the weather, but my original comment was primarily about the nature of the people engaging in these clueless antics. There are four primary groups of people here.

The vast majority of these folks are college kids who seek excuses to miss class and hand in assignments late, with professors who are all too lenient to children who engage in these kinds of antics. Its the same reason that the SDS occupations on whatever space the Dean gives them permission to occupy, promptly ends on the first day of summer vacation. They have romanticized Woodstock imagery and seek to recreate the 1960s, being unable to develop a unique identity of their own. Theyre desperate to be thought of as wise without any regard to their lack of experience. It seems they believe that self-loathing and contrarian impulses are convincing substitutes for true wisdom. They arent.

The second group is the exhausted baby boomer-era hippies who simply refuse to let the 1960s go nearly half a century later and join the rest of the world in the 21st Century. This movement represents their last gasp to maintain some kind of relevancy in the modern era. Its a pathetic attempt to relive their youth, when they really ought to be spending their time easing themselves into the LaBrea tar pits, because their restrictive right/left-only world view is quickly becoming antiquated. They behave like the shell shocked soldier who just cant let the war go, even though most of them have left the counter-culture and became the culture through heading corporations of their own and helping to worsen our learning institutions by becoming educators.

If occupiers want to blame anyone they should be blaming the baby-boomers. They are the selfish ones who are leaving the next generation with more debt than any other generation before.

Theyre angry because they cant get a job? Well guess what. The reason that a college degree is no longer a guarantee of employment, is because graduation is no longer a guarantee of competence. The school curriculum spends half its time pushing Marxist detritus and other such social justice snake oil, rather than spending the time to teach students knowledge and skill that will actually help them outside of academia in the real world.
The third group is the miscellaneous malcontents and intellectual vacuums, some of whom are paid activists from the Working Famlies Party, who are angry at their own inability to do something with their lives, and want to blame everyone else for their own problems. After all, are they sprucing up their resume, or attending a job fair? No. Theyre laying around in parks and in streets producing little more than clouds of fruit flies. Who in their right mind would hire any of these people? They can barely run their own lives and they want the keys to government? How marvelous.

The fourth group is a tiny amount of union thugs who have Cloward-Piven fantasies of becoming the next Vladimir Lenin.

Now, it may not matter to them that JP Morgan Chase is one of Obamas top 10 campaign contributors, but it should. Right now, they have an ally in the White House who approves of their behavior with a wink and a nod. Obama has already lost most of his Wall Street campaign contributors (go figure), and if he loses the election, they lose that ally, so this is yet another example of their blatant lack of forethought. In fact, do they realize that Obama received far more in campaign contributions from corporations during the 2008 election cycle than did McCain? Doubtful. By the way, the downtown branch of JP Morgan Chase is closed tomorrow.

The general ideology were hearing and reading from these useful idiots can be boiled down to this, House me, feed me, clothe me, pay my tuition, take care of me, I need! I need! Its a refusal to accept the responsibilities of adulthood, to take care of oneself, and a desire to be taken care of by others. They also cry out for despotic regulation. Good parents know that children often crave discipline. So we can safely say that this is a movement that embodies adolescence and ignorance.

This becomes even more blatant with their clueless criticisms of capitalism. Have any of these people ever heard the word gulag before? Do they realize, that every nation that has ever conformed to the Marxist model of government has ended in atrocity and poverty? Have any of these braniacs bothered to read The Black Book of Communism published by Harvard? Probably not. Theyll just continue to parrot the hashish induced propaganda published by outfits like SDS.

Fat Cat CEOs are an easy mark to villainize in the movies, but it represents a shallow 2-dimensional understanding of capitalism. What about the grandmother who sells her knitting on etsy? Or the 10 year old girl with a lemonade stand? Or the student who sells their textbooks at the end of the semester for beer money? Or the occupiers who sell their schwag on eBay? These are all capitalists too.

Theyre under the misconception that bringing about a socialist or communist state will alleviate their responsibility to work for a living. Nothing could be further from the truth. They will still be expected to work, only with the elimination of private property, their earnings will be stolen by force for the greater glory of the state. So theyll have to say good bye to their iPads that they own, because thats what it means to have a centrally controlled economy. Generations of immigrants from all over the world including my own grandmother who escaped from the former Soviet Union risked their lives to escape the very kinds of policies that these uneducated occupiers are clamoring to impose here in America. Most of them are too young to remember when the Berlin Wall was still up. How when folks snuck through cracks and holes in the wall, they were sneaking one way, to get out, to escape. No one was trying to get in. Folks from Cuba try to sail the ocean to America on pallets. None of them are attempting to flee Florida for Cuba.

They want to blame Bush and everything right of center. But do they not know that Democrats had a fool proof majority in both houses and the white House for two years, and were able to pass anything they pleased? If they think that this is democracy looks like, theyre right. Democracy is mob rule, its two wolves and lamb voting on what to have for lunch as Benjamin Franklin might say. So thank god we have a constitutional republic as opposed to democracy, because democracy looks like a nightmare. Particularly when one side is unable to tolerate losing elections, as is evidenced by the unthinking barbarism in the Madison protests.

If you think the status quo is wrong, then move to Cuba or Zimbabwe or some other socialist/communist cess-pool where the polices you support are already in place.

99%? What a joke. Its more like 27% who have a favorable opinion of the occupiers according to CNN. The remaining 72% consists entirely of bongo drums, cow bells, and didgeridoos.