Occupy Wall Street

Freedom and Liberty – that’s why we write here at GraniteGrok.  The radical concepts that the individual was sovereign, that our Rights that stem from natural law and from God to each and every person, was the gift given to us from the intellectual firepower of the Framers of the Declaration and Constitution, and the actual firepower used against what was the most powerful nation in the world at the time.

Yet, since the Progressive era starting in the late 1800’s, those concepts have been under attack – that Security and Stability should be the guiding foundations of society, with non-partisan technocrats providing the expertise to bring us to political utopia.  And without the State to "guide" us, we can never obtain that "Heaven on Earth" of equal outcomes and being the best that they know we can be.

Milton Friedman, a Nobel winning economist, knew well that a free people making their own decisions based on their own self-interest (and for that of their families) and a free market (with voluntary transactions that tell the market which direction to take, based on the combined decisions of those freely made purchases and sales) could do more to achieve that than the top-down command structure that purports to "be for the 99%".  From Carpe Diem (via Cafe Hayek), these three videos speak volumes:

Redistribution of Wealth:

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From the LA Times:

Los Angeles officials have offered Occupy L.A. protesters a package of incentives that includes downtown office space and farmland in an attempt to persuade them to abandon their camp outside of City Hall, according to several demonstrators who have been in negotiations with the city.

The details of the proposal were revealed Monday during the demonstration’s nightly general assembly meeting by Jim Lafferty, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who has been advocating on behalf of the protest since it began seven weeks ago.

Lafferty said city officials have offered protesters a $1-a-year lease on a 10,000-square-foot office space near City Hall. He said officials also promised land elsewhere for protesters who wish to farm, as well as additional housing for the contingent of homeless people who joined the camp.

Expensive real estate to be offered there, Mayor!  It again shows the lack of a spine from our elected politicians.  Here you have protesters who have ignored the Rule of Law, tossed aside multiple ordinances as unimportant to follow (that would get me tossed into the hoosegow), taken away a public space from the actual public, inflated crime statisitics, public masturbation, drug usage, public sex, and more, have cowered the local government.

Or given them cover (take your pick).  OWS LA have acted like bullies, using the cover of "we are the 99%" to put a stake in the ground.  On a national TEA Party email list I’m on came this about the above news:

I’m working on a story about this and thought you all might like to see it as well. The idiot occupiers using taxpayer funded parks and sidewalks is one thing… but getting an entire 10,000 square foot office space to wage war against taxpayers, in a taxpayer funded facility?

Unbelievable indeed.

No, not unbelievable, as my response was:

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Ah yes, another edition from venturing into Occupy philosophy!  One of the more hard core folks had enumerated a number of things that Occupiers should be doing and to which I have already replied (here, here, and here).  Here were a couple of more of his tactics for how to overthrow our present American society:

6. Stop paying your credit card bills. Debt makes us all slaves to the interests of the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

7. When your home is foreclosed on, refuse to leave.

Credit card debt – agree, getting oneself into debt is a rather bad thing for one’s quality of life. You hate answering the phone, you can’t buy the things you want (or that you think you need), and none of your friends understand why you aren’t going out partying with them anymore. But let me get this straight:

1. You voluntarily agreed to the terms of the credit card company; you signed and they sent you a card.
2. In exchange for your voluntary agreement to their terms, they agreed to pay your vendor in advance for the stuff that you have bought (be they goods or services). They did so based on your word, your integrity, and your promise to adhere to a contract which you willingly signed. They completed their part of the agreement.
3. You went and actually purchased stuff.
4. Again, you voluntarily promised to pay the credit card company back for the funds they put out in advance. You also voluntarily promised to pay them the cost of the use of their money (interest).

Now, bluntly put, you are actively saying that you have no problem in not paying them back? In fact, you have broken your promise and have voluntarily decided to defraud those that have spent their money on your behalf. In actuality, "they" have not spent "their" money, they have spent their shareholders’ monies. Now, you may say that they are merely just big companies, but many 99% individuals, like Granny across town, also own their shares – you are stealing from them. Are you saying that it is justifiable to do so simply to better your own financial well being?

What about the stuff you bought?

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It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

– Sir Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister during WW II

Yet, there are those that would have us believe that Socialism / Communism is more perfect than our Republic (all of our flaws duly noted) even as they downplay the real poverty of their citizenry under their Marxist systems (even as the Lenins, Stalins, and Mao Tse Tungs murdered over 100 million of their citizens).

"America has to wake up to this new reality: the Cold War battle between communism and capitalism is back, only this time it’s on our front porch. It went underground in the 70s, got an education, put on a suit, bought a house and had a couple of kids. Then it used the schools to educate new foot soldiers and manipulated the pop culture to indoctrinate the next generation of fellow travelers who seek to create a new world order in the image of old world Marxism." Read the entire article, "The Revolutionaries’ Revenge" by Sally Zelikovksy at  and watch "The Occupation Manifesto" produced by Sally Zelikovsky, Steve Kemp, and Virginia Walters and listen to the Occupiers discuss their Marxist vision for America."

(H/T: Jack) 

Frankly, for all the bluster of improving the lot of the 99% as they say, the real movers and shakers, buried down a couple of layers, are all about merely changing out the 1% with their version of the 1%.  At least these folks are honest in what they believe and what their goal is – a complete repudiation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and of the Rule of Law / Right to Private Property / limited government embodied in the Constitution.

The Other McCain has a GREAT post on Marxism in context of the 17 year olds who were brought to the Occupy Denver / BlogCon11 confrontations by their teacher:

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Yes, it seems like I may be obsessing about this movement, but while there are some well meaning folks that are involved, there are also some folks that definitely have an agenda that does not mesh well (to put it kindly) with what the Founders had in mind.

For instance, there is one gentleman there that is, well, rather on the radical side over at Occupy NH who wrote a few things as to what he thought should be the future our our Government and Society.  He truly seems to believe that in order to wrest society back from the evil 1% (emphasis on evil), he wants to remake everything:

1. First, work on building alternatives to the state and corporations. We’ve already built an experimental alternative to the State through occupy general assemblies. We should build our own markets/credit unions and maybe even our own currency system to decrease reliance on overpowering corporate oligarchies.

Of course, I just had to comment on it:

1a. Experiments are fine, but many ideas never get out of the experimental stage as they fail to scale. OWS has yet to prove that the GAs (General Assemblies, where everyone gets a say on absolutely everything that needs a decision) can scale using its current methodologies. And watching OWS-NYC try to move from early protest to a fuller commune, even with the GA technique, shows that it is much harder to govern (even just themselves) than to protest. Watching it attempt to govern has been painful to watch (altruistic, though, they might be) as the darker side of life walks in and occupies them (the professional homeless) and throwing monkey wrenches into their "order". The same arguments

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If you talk with the hard core Occupiers, you will hear "we are the 99%" to differentiate themselves from the top 1% of wage earners of society.  OK, that’s nice – the top 1% do earn the most in our society (but also pay the most in income taxes too).  However, following the just pathway that Our Dear Leader Barack "I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money"Obama has placed them upon, they continue the hatred of the "corporate jet owners" and the millionaires and billionaires who have gone making "enough money" in that they do not believe that anyone in that top 1% has earned it fairly and squarely.  The OWS believe that the wealth of the 1% can only be obtained by stealing it from others with the willing collusion of  Govt (but they rarely blame Govt for their part in crony capitalism).

There is one person there that I would place in the more thoughtful category but is so anti-capitalistic, s/he (I don’t know which) believes that we "99%ers" are mere slaves – we have no alternatives.  Nor free will of our own, so it seems, because unconsciously, we are unable to make decisions independent of the dreaded 99%:

The state is being used today by rent seeking classes (including large owners of capital) to allow capital to command the labor of wage earners so they have few alternatives – like being the owners of the means of production themselves.

And in this, "capital" means those that have the bucks.  But what I took exception to was the phrasing and premise of the statement – that I, as a wage earner, have no control over my life except what the 1% allows me to think I have.  In effect, they believe that the 99% are mind numbed slaves, I guess.

Nonsense, as I wrote:

I can tell that a vocabulary lesson to this ordinary schlub is in order. ANY one in ANY class can be rent seeker – that is simply a person or organization (be it a corporation, a union, or a non-profit) that wishes to enrich themselves by using government (by manipulating taxes, regulations, statutes, or policies).

It is not just the top 1% that do it. My wife and I used to own a small daycare center and we accepted state assisted kids. There were times that my blood would boil when I would hear some of the single moms, standing in my lobby, talking about how they gamed the safety net programs to get more and more free (to them) stuff. And these moms did not work, did not go to school, but looked at me and said "I’m staying home because of my three kids" (that my wife and my teachers took care of during the day on the State dime, even as they admitted that the boyfriends were in one of their garages, sitting around drinking beer).

Yes, there were a few that actually used the services well – went to school, worked part time, and their kids were well behaved and well taken care of). They used it as a hand up instead of the former who used it as a handout.

Rent seeking can work from both ends of the spectrum.

Let me add this –

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Tthere is always a sense of orthodoxy among groups – even in those that proclaim they are anti-orthodox.  In this case, the local instantiation of Occupy Wall Street -> Occupy NH. who, pretty much, have decided that the current American orthodoxy of individual freedom, liberty, and free markets is to be protested, hated, and torn down.  As posted earlier this month, I’ve been spending time defending the Founders philosophy.  For that, and along with the others (like a number of Libertarians – Conservatives have run away from the fight), discussions other than "OWS approved topics and speech" were labeled "divisive" (me, an ordinary schlub, divisive?  Moi?) (lightly edited and emphasized):

…It is frequently found on OWS sites and chats. It is what keeps the Occupy movements going. "In this room we support OWS, but we don’t discuss the politics. Folks just to be clear, mods have opinions too, so we are not trying to stop you from having opinions and people you admire or don’t. I often agree with you, but we have rules to avoid conflict and division. And we leave politics out of our conversation. There are many irc channels where you can show your support of politics or candidates. But please not here. Thanks"

Leave politics out of it?  This whole movement, along with the TEA Party, is ALL about politics!  When I did the videos of Occupy Manchester, there was nothing BUT talk about politics.  Politics should not just be considered what happens when candidates try to get elected.  Or when difficult legislation spills over to the public and the call goes out to "leave the politics out of it" – at that point you KNOW politics IS what it is all about: differing views of how solutions are to be arrived at and what those solutions should be.  Politics is the grease that allow different groups to do things (as manners are to the interactions between individuals).

At Manchester there have been many who have demanded that their divisive talks be embraced. When posts were deleted, as is done consistently at OWS, for containing political and potentially divisive dialogue, the accusation was strong, CENSORSHIP. It has been stated at many of the GA’s and in online forums that NH is different, that the GA that meets in Manchester is free to do as they wish. This is not consistent with OWS.

"demanded that their divisive talks be embraced".  Yet, in the beginning, they advertised themselves as being open, inclusive, and welcoming to all comers.  Yet, these words from Sherry Gould showed that the marketing and the actual reality she wanted (being one of the "leaderless movements leaders") were two different things (one reason why folks who describe themselves as "mere facilitators" are never just such).

Well of course, I just had to ask (twinkle in my eyes):

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At the beginning of the month, Occupy Oakland had its shutdown of the Port of Oakland AFTER a small riot had damaged small a number of retail establishments, companies, and banks (previous post).  One of the Occupy NH folks put up a link with my response being gently:

Non-violence?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRij-_SnIMM&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra5ks-Ei9o0&feature=player_embedded

where the YouTubes showed the marauding Occupiers willfully destroying things, well, for the heck of it.  One respondent said the expected "agent provocateurs" and claimed "There was no rioting. There was and still is only a peaceful protest."

Yeah, and TV wrestling is real and not staged.  

I was challenged, however, by another in a wee bit more serious way than just a "sweep it under the rug":

Just curious about what your thoughts are of blockading the Port of Oakland, where business was shutdown for several hours?

BTW -the Boston Tea Party was an act of property destruction. How do you feel about that?

My answer:

There were many at the time of the TEA Party that were aghast that someone else’s private property was destroyed and there was more than a little controversy concerning it. After all, when you read the Declaration, 10 of the Articles concerned how the Crown was appropriating the private property of others because :

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