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Thingish Things

Hangin’ with the Protesters

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Oct• 10•11

 

Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard

Must-read piece by Weekly Standard senior editor Matt Labash on his time with the politically scatter shot Wall Street “occupiers.” It’s a real gem.  Guaranteed to make you laugh. 

Here is an excerpt:

But on one of OWS’s many affinity-group websites, they did take a stab at quasi-officially listing their grievances. Get a snack. This will take a while. They are gathering, they say, to “express a feeling of mass injustice” on behalf of “all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world.” They are against corporations, which have not only taken your houses “through an illegal foreclosure process” and taken “bailouts from taxpayers with impunity,” but also “perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.” 

Corporations have additionally poisoned the food supply through negligence, profited off the torture of animals, held students hostage with college-loan debts, sold our privacy as a commodity, used the military to prevent freedom of the press, outsourced labor, blocked alternative sources of energy, covered up oil spills, kept people misinformed by controlling the media, created weapons of mass destruction to get government contracts, and perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad while participating in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas. 

 

My recounting, mind you, does not duplicate their entire list. And even if it did, their entire list keeps its options open with a footnote specifying that “these grievances are not all-inclusive.” So what do they want? Besides, seemingly, to complain a lot about corporations, the very entities that provide so many of the jobs that our economy is sorely in need of? What are they advocating, besides their right to assemble publicly for the purposes of bucket-drumming and eating vegan quiche in the free chow line? Well, according to another posting on OWS’s website, they want a universal single-payer health care system, a guaranteed living wage regardless of employment, free college education, one trillion dollars in infrastructure improvement, to bring the fossil-fuel economy to an end, to outlaw all credit-reporting agencies, and to see immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness for all. This is just a partial list, but they’re also going to be needing unlimited open-borders migration, too, since “these demands will create so many jobs, it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.”

But wait! Above that original posting is now an administrative note saying this is “not an official list of demands.” It is a forum post submitted by a single contributor and “hyped by irresponsible news/commentary agencies like Fox News.” It’s never been proposed or agreed to “on a consensus basis” by the OWS movement, so “there is NO official list of demands.” 

 

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