The definition of fascism used by Mussolini is the “merger of state and corporate power“.
Government and the big banks are in a malignant, symbiotic relationship. And our economy now exhibits a merger of state and bank power.
Prominent economist Robert Kuttner said in 2009:
What we have is something perilously close to a dictatorship of the Fed and the Treasury, acting in the interests of Wall Street.
The government and banks use anti-terror laws to stifle dissent.
As Naomi Wolf reports, they joined efforts to violently crush the occupy protests:
The violent crackdown on Occupy [which was protesting the SAME THING as the Tea Party ... and the Boston Tea Party] last fall … was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.
[A newly-released document] shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens. ….
Plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target ….
The FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”….
[The executive Director of The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund - the group which obtained the document] points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it “police-statism”:
“This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a “Bank Fraud Working Group” met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its “domestic terrorism” unit. The Anchorage, Alaska “terrorism task force” was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan “joint terrorism task force” was issuing a “counterterrorism preparedness alert” about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the “Bank Security Group” – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to “National Bad Bank Sit-in Day” (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state’s Occupy members’ details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its “joint terrorism task force” aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.
Eric Zuesse notes:
The FBI was organizing against the OWS movement even before it was known to the general public, and they kept on their campaign against it, until it was dead.
***
The FBI’s police-state snooping and tracking of Occupy Wall Street … had begun even before most Americans knew that there was any such movement for the FBI to snoop against.
In other words, the reason why Barack Obama’s “Justice” Department refuses to prosecute even a single one of the mega-bank executives who profited so enormously from having defrauded both mortgagees and the investors in mortgage-backed securities, and who were bailed out by future U.S. taxpayers whose government purchased those remaining “toxic assets” at 100 cents on the dollar, is clear: we live in a police state, and these elite crooks control it. This is not real democracy.
Voters were given a choice in November between a President like that but whose liberal rhetoric is condemnatory of “Wall Street,” versus a professional stripper of corporations, whose rhetoric was overtly supportive of Wall Street. And voters chose the former. But this nonetheless is a police state, not an authentic democracy.
Mussolini would recognize it as fascism.
Fun bonus post:
Yves Smith notes that newly-declassified documents prove that the federal government treated peaceful protesters as terrorists:
The FBI deemed OWS [Occupy Wall Street] to be a terrorist organization and went into “guilty until proven innocent” mode. Many of the FBI descriptions of possible OWS actions or those of affiliated organizations like Adbusters consistently look to have taken the most inflammatory snippets and presented them out of context.
The FBI also seems to believe that there is no such thing as peaceful protest, that any non-violent activity has the potential to turn violent and therefore should be treated as violent.
In fact, according to Department of Defense training manuals, all protest is now considered “low-level terrorism”. And see this, this and this.
And an Army colonel has written a paper advocating military methods for “crushing” a Tea Party type insurgency.
Indeed, doing anything to challenge government or big bank policies can get you labeled a potential terrorist in America today.
Do you get it yet?
Big Brother is here, and he’s … very well armed.
That was never going to happen via any decentralized organizing principle. What OWS did was to completely, and without merit, convince (brain-fuck) a pile of gullible naive people that they can do something big, like put a great state power's financial system to its knees, via disorganized mass-blobbing and tweets.
Oh yeah, social media, Vive-la-revolution sisters! Never once wondering why people like Obama and Hillary Clinton and Panetta and all those other talking-heads of the TPTB, were gushing about what an important thing social-media has become to political change.
uh-huh, right, the state just loves monitoring social media. It's just like listening to your enemy's radio-comms, all of it, only much better, it's not even encrypted, and they know where the 'radio operator' lives, works, eats, shops, shits, and ... well, pretty much your whole damn story. Young US people have no clue at all about this and really shot themselves in the foot.
But in every war it's the same thing, the dumb die first and what survives is much smarter and more effective. What comes after OWS is long gone will have learned, and will become much smarter.
"and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61)."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crac...
HELLO?! Why isn't this critical point in the ZH report?
That probably didn't go over well with the despot - one of the key "community" organizers. Along with Andrew Stern of course, another devout marxist, enemy of the Constitution, and most frequent visitor to 1600 PA avenue during 2010.
Occupy Marxism, dummies.
Just look at what Stephen Harper's Federal Government did to peaceful protestors in Toronto a little while ago.It's very sick how they used the Provincial Government in Ontario to help jail hundreds and hundreds.It was literally a national disgrace how ordinary Canadians were treated by their politicians.Pick up on this type of abuse of power by big Governments by kindly visiting GlobalResearch.ca,you have an economic duty to keep up on corruption.
http://bcfreedom.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/how-it-all-happened/
A definitive article with all points as to how this came to be, and what to do about it!
The stifling of freedom of expression is rife in Europe and the US, using media outlets to run a sophisticated propaganda campaign to silence critics and change public opinion. Some people will say that this level of manipulation is impossible they are wrong, to truly understand how well people can be influenced we must look to the greatest exponent of marketing and manipulation Joseph Goebbels -
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
We can see from these quotes how Goebbels clearly felt it was quite easy to shape public opinion and even when you employ Storm troopers to attack peaceful protesters to paint the protesters as terrorists. I know that many feel that they would be immune to such trickery; no one is except by rigorous analysis of the facts and using the cleanest of sources for your information such as ZH all the while accepting that all information is suspect unless confirmed by multiple sources.
Let us leave the last word to Goebbels, however let’s remember appalling things a small group of men were able to do once they gained the levers of power.
“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”
- Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels
And to think of the advances in psychology since the time of WWII... we don't realize how deep of a mindfuck we've let ourselves sink into. The U.S. Govt has vastly greater resources devoted to propaganda than Goebbels ever had. It pervades through every aspect of our pop culture and daily lives. Protesting days are dead and done. How does one walk away from this toxic, unsustainable system we've built for ourselves? Where is the moral high ground?
TV and Hollywood plus the sh*t newspapers. You watch it - you support it. I bet people posting in this thread watch TV and support it like sheep. Hope and Change.
On the Friday before Christmas, while the media was focused on the funerals of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre and pre-Christmas retail sales figures, the Michigan Supreme Court quietly handed down a significant ruling that will affect nearly $3.75 billion worth of mortgages former Washington Mutual mortgages that JPMorgan Chase acquired from the FDIC after Washington Mutual went into FDIC receivership in 2008.
The Michigan Supreme Court upheld a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling from January that calls for a strict interpretation of a Michigan law that states that if a foreclosing party is not the originating note holder they must be able to show a record chain of the mortgage.
MCL 600.3204(3) states:
In Kim v. J.P. Morgan Chase, Chase claimed the requirements under MCL600.3204(3) do not apply because JPMorgan Chase acquired the loan “by operation of law”. What this means is JPMorgan chase is claiming is they don’t need to show a recorded chain of ownership because they acquired the note through their acquisition of Washington Mutual’s assets after Washington Mutual was placed into FDIC receivership in 2008. The Court of Appeals disagreed and said that a claim of “by operation of law” could only be claimed by the FDIC and that a mortgage assignment from the FDIC to JPMorgan Chase still had to be properly recorded with the Register of Deeds.
The Michigan Supreme Court in their 4-3 ruling states that the mortgages are currently unenforceable because JPMorgan Chase can not claim operation of law. The court ruled JPMorgan Chase did not acquire Washington Mutual as a corporate entity. Instead they acquired assets of the company through a third party. Therefore a chain of ownership must be recorded with the Register of Deeds where the property is located. However, the courts ruling did leave open the possibility that JPMorgan Chase could go back and record a mortgage assignment. However, JPMorgan Chase faces two major obstacles in doing so. The first being if when the FDIC has concluded the liquidation of Washington Mutual and damages owed to homeowners they may have already illegally evicted from their homes.
This ruling could affect as many as many as 40,000 Washington Mutual mortgages in Michigan that JPMorgan Chase acquired from the FDIC. It is unknown if JPMorgan Chase will seek damages from the law firms aka foreclosure mills that were either hired directly or indirectly by JPMorgan Chase to handle recording these documents and execute the foreclosures.
http://www.mfi-miami.com/2012/12/michigan-supreme-court-rules-3-75-billi...
I'm not sure if it'd work or not but it seems to me that any of these homeowners involved could go and record a sale/2nd mortgage with the county and essentially get a head of the 1st holder since they haven't properly recorded their interest in the property. It might make sense if done correctly and with someone they could trust if the 2nd holder forcloses.
Good catch Ben!
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf
Get ready for this.
The right to publicly protest in America is for all practical purposes dead.
Welcome to Tiananmen Square, USA.
now i a confused ;)
As a citicizen of the USA protesting is one of the least effective methods of change in my opinion. Cry all you want about TPTB otherwise take a stance and become TPTB.
Your choice, Welcome to the USA.
That's kind of the problem, the system is driven by money, and resists all attempts at reforming big money control and exclusive access. If policies are just for the 1%, and only moderated by that 1%, then does it not seem obvious to you that an appreciable segment of the otherwise not very smart 99% are going to get politically active and then violent when repressed, if treated like irrelevant pond-scum?
I mean, yeah, you could do it, it sounds like you're all for that. Just don't be surprised when you get shot in the neck while walking to your car, because that's one of the potential ramifications of a destroyed society full of dumb angry people, and crippled policy processes, and unaccountable policing by thugs, who then become so disrespected and hated by a large minority, to the point that they don't show-up for work one day, because they are too scared of what will happen to their family if they do. Then you'll want to be changing you're tune really fast.
Unstable situations lead to irreversible outcomes, and those outcomes are unknown and unpredictable beforehand, so why are you keen to maintain a process that will precipitate instability?
I'm responding because of these terms used so often by OWS and it's supporters...the one percent vs the ninety nine percent. The implication being, because someone is wealthy (the one percenters to OWS) they are inherently bad/evil.
Power and control are at the root of what TP & OWS could have ever agreed on, not wealth or money IMO.
Wealth is something one aquires over a period of time through their individual efforts. If gained legally and ethically they have every right to keep it and do with it whatever they want. Certainly, we can surmise that if they came by wealth in an honest manner the person will not change their stripes and become unethical or a criminal, all things being equal, can we not?
The problem I have always had with OWS was it's lack of focus on the law, the rule of law and what that actually means. I would hazard a guess most TP'ers saw the same thing. For example, you can't "occupy" a public place for an indefinite period of time (making it unusable to the public) and still claim moral or ethical superiority to that same public you offend.
The Federal Reserve, a mutually hated entity to be sure, is a creature of the law. The bank and car bailouts were creatures of law. "Shovel ready jobs stimulus" was a creature of law. ObamaCare is a creature of law...and so on. Law is made in DC at the federal level. It is there where it must be stopped.
That is the TP's focus, not whether someone is rich or poor.
Goldman, Morgan, Citi...none of them, have an army or a police force. You can argue that a faceless Wall Street controls the ones who control the army and police but it's still right there in the logic of the argument, it's still DC and the corruption of the people in power and control there, through what is termed, their laws.
Everyone (both sides) can see the corruption, however, for OWS to claim some "right" of the 99% to take (through the state) the wealth or profits of the car dealership owner, the boat salesman, the grocery store owner or franchisee (go down the list) because they fall into the 1% (200k, apparently, possibly revised upwards...lol) is, in fact, marxist.
All the while being goaded to go forward...by millionaires, trust fund babies and the college professors who feed off of them...it was a remarkable thing to watch.
--
Sorry, your point is lost on me. As far as I'm concerned the Federal Reserve is anything but a lawful entity. Or a US entity. It's a creature of Jeckel Island, not a creature of US Law. Same per the Hank Paulson show. Criminals passing laws via corrupt politicians, and a mountain of lies, and a TBTF coup, and public administration threat of financial murder-suicide, does not come close to equating to lawful or respectable, or honorable.
I made it clear down the page that OWS was a one-off organization that was just supposed to show up at Wall Street one day, and take over and occupy the site of WALL STREET. It was about Wall Street, Hank Paulson, the Federal Reserve, the TBTFs, the unpunished corruption. All the other arguments and baggage which people attach to it and over-react to ideologically, I'm not interested in. Nor what others then did with the protest-franchise 'brand-name' of OWS.
There was a point to OWS, and damn good one, and it seems far too many people want to ignore that point. And that point has not gone away in the least.
"Sorry, your point is lost on me. As far as I'm concerned the Federal Reserve is anything but a lawful entity."
I don't think my point is lost on you as much as you proclaim it is.
One could have interviewed any 20 random OWS "protesters" at any given tent city in the country and they could not have told you what the Federal Reserve is, why it was created or how it operates. They wanted debt forgiveness from the very thing they couldn't even describe or even know where it was housed.
I also said understanding the RULE OF LAW is of equal importance to all. It holds that the king is the same as the serf, the congressman the same as the voter, the cop the same as the motorist, in the eyes of the law.
As far as I'm concerned, the one who asks government to stick a gun in the face of someone just because they have a penny more, saying its for "fairness", is guilty of conspiracy to commit armed robbery.
This is what OWS was asking government to do with it's ridiculous 99% crap wasn't it?
They didn't give a damn how someone became wealthy just that they were wealthy and they were not. Then to listen to milionaires come before them, presenting themselves as OWS just like them was, well, just too rich...lol.
http://www.mrc.org/node/38621
A marxist asking government to steal for them, what they have not produced is understandable and completely normal. An anarchist asking government to do the same can only illicit riotous laughes of irony from me.
Have to hand it to you, I applaud your patience.
Its wearing thin ;-)
WTF? I said in the initial comment, which you reacted so badly to:
So yes, your point is completely lost on me, you're just pushing a minor nit-picking grievance with one faction of the assorted OWS hanger's-on. That ideological stuff is theirs, and it is yours. It has zero to do with me - get it? My only reference to 1% and 99% was this one innocuous fairly obvious statement of the implications of minority control of policy, and the disenfranchising inevitable outcome:
To which you said:
Then you railed against the use of commonly used terms. Look around you! It's not just OWS or its 'supporters' that use the 1% v 99% terminology. Far from it. It's all over the MSM and Internet and right through US politics, economic, financial and social discussion, and it has been for a long time.
If you have problems with OWS or their supporters then rail against them. It's completely pointless berating me if you have minor and fairly inconsequential objections with respect to the broader implications of minority-policy control. What's up with that?
The point is, yes, you can disenfranchise people, the US is doing that, and now openly using violence and corporate-govt collusion to do this. But despite these people not being so bright, and maybe they feel entitled to some of your pie, they are still a fact of life. They aren't going away ever, and they are armed, and they will not be disarmed. There are more of them than you.
So the worse minority-policy-control makes the division, the weaker and more vulnerable the minority will be. i.e. as with any conflict, you better come to a political understanding with these people, no matter what you think of them, because like it or not, they are the United States of America, and their numbers of supporters, passive and active, are going to grow. No matter if you think they are completely wrong, dumb, or have bad hygiene and teeth, no matter what you think of their education or their state of mind and reasoning abilities, minority political state control and suppression will fail if you just treat them like feudal peasants.
(that said, some of them are a heck of a lot sharper than the minority realize so it's not a good idea to under-estimate their resourcefulness, or to step on them)
Tank Man never would have got past the curb if officer Tony Balony's Chinese cousin Officer Toni Baronyang had been there.
If your average Chinese Joe or Janes had a fine SKS rifle and some ammo, the situation may have been different. The military would be keeping their heads inside of tanks and such.
God knows we have to take firepower away from Americans. So many people are being killed and we don't appreciate death unless it is other people either real or virtual.
I sure hope other countries that face imminent death when they protest do not see your post. Pepper Spray is a major deterent for Americans?
The point is that peaceful protest are being broken up. Being tazered, sprayed, hit or arrested do tend to stop peaceful protest. When it gets to the point where many people will protest in the face of physical risk revolution is a serious option.
The Occupy domestic insurrection was an inherently violent domestic marxist insurrection conjured up by the likes of the despot and devout marxist Andrew Stern.
Folks tend to forget that devout marxist and "Occupy" domestic insurrection organizer Andrew Stern was the most frequent visitor to 1600 PA avenue during 2010.
Well, I don't know about the insurrection part...but some of them don't seem to be as "peaceful" and as "downtrodden" as advertised ;-)
"The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.
Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy (LOL), Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.
People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.
Or as the apologists for OWS now like to say, "allegedly extreme"...lol.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/bombmaking_in_the_village_LoRDqNzP02SDZyfC1pLVXN
I'm not sure how else one would characterize it. Attempted marxist domestic insurrection, perhaps? Clearly, marxist class warfare was the key underlying theme and the organizers were exclusively marxists.
It was definitely an anarcho-marxist movement. Many of them, spoiled, pampered bourgeois children, having the time on their hands to be led around by the rings in their noses...jewelry of course, that their parents bought for them.
I was not impressed by them, their parents or the assorted college professors (who leech off them) or the leftwing statists (who encouraged them) or the hypocrite hollywood/media set who spoke for them, then went back and laughed at them for being so naive.
Yup, for about 30% .. another 60% being government and private security/intelligence types and a 10% of assorted leftovers of all stripes (rough estimates)
I agree that there really wasn't much worth observing or taking note of .. beyond the action of the whole in mix. That continues to draw the O2 of pixels on its own much like a cover up (usually as amateurish as the events surrounding the whole of the Occupy pie) of a whoopsie of whatever magnitude. These sorts of sordid situations are usually best approached with the jaundiced eye of realpolitik in that one must expect the worst of another in form and function before one can begin to grasp the situation.
Between you and George I do believe that winning approach is being employed admirably. Rock on!
Miles...so good to see you again!
Well, I don't know about the percentiles but there is no doubt that no one ever overdosed on heroin, committed suicide, murder, rape or theft at a TP event ;-)
I think the two groups are worlds apart aside from the sickening realization that the corruption at the top levels of this government has reached epidemic proportions where law is invented (or ignored) for the sole purpose of looting the public treasury.
There were many inside OWS who had no problem with the public/private "financial concept" of a Solyndra (green energy) even as they raged against a machine that had produced the Community Reinvestment Act which had just imploded under their noses.
These things are all done by law and could not have passed without the support or acquiescence of the majority.
Never have the words of Mencken been so dead on...
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
Well, they got it good & hard...maybe they should quit asking for it so much...lol.
heh heh heh
Great to see you too nmewn!
Well, I don't know about the percentiles but there is no doubt that no one ever overdosed on heroin, committed suicide, murder, rape or theft at a TP event ;-) - nmewn
Sounds like nearly any day, be it on Wall Street or Main Street. No wonder the two worlds have so much common in common.
It seems to me that a "feature" of human governing systems is the inevitable actualization of devolutionary chains of responsibility with corresponding centralizing chains of authority. All part of the balance between chasing highest potential numerators via achieving the lowest common denominators.... ;-)
Fortunately, no matter the Xanax, Adderall and more, humans, absurdly brilliant to simply absurd always find a way to color outside the lines.
The tough part about being an officer is that the troops don't know what they want, but they know for certain what they don't want - Murphy
http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-war.html
A fabulous New Year to you and yours! Cheers
Miles...you've always had a way of placing your finger upon it.
Responsibility.
The shirking of it, misplacement of it, the ignoring of it...until (like its co-companions, liberty & freedom) it is removed, so as to not be a burden on anyone.
Happy New Year my friend ;-)
"Responsibility."
you mean i can't have my cake and eat it too, without at least cleaning the dishes afterwards?
shit, where's my GE robotic housekeeper?
"a "feature" of human governing systems is the inevitable actualization of devolutionary chains of responsibility with corresponding centralizing chains of authority. All part of the balance between chasing highest potential numerators via achieving the lowest common denominators...."
explains both TP & occupy in a nutshell
nice one miles...always a gift to read your voice.
Exactly, NMEWN. As I posted above, the Occupy thing was a false flag to confuse Joe dumfuck. Joe would see brian williams, david gregory and katie couric talk about violent tea partiers and believe it without question. When occupy displayed elements and attitudes attributed to the tea party, the two would be "connected" by the media. Joe Dumfuck; who listens for 30 minutes a day absorbs it all. He just wants to get to sunday to watch the game.
Funny thing about Joe, from what I've seen; him being a number of my friends and family, Joe hates taxes, hates govt, hates stupid regulation and most of all hates to be enlightened.
Joe thinks people like Bath house barry O are cool. They like him. They think he means well. Don't confuse joe with the facts, you just make him defensive and anger him.
Brian, David and Katie love folks like Joe. So do the organizers of occupy.
With any luck at least some of them have learned their lesson. But I doubt it.
"The Socialist Phenomenon" knows no bounds in space or time. Reference Shafarevich's work on the subject in "Socialism in Our Past and Future":
http://www.savageleft.com/poli/hoc.html
There is literally nothing funnier than people who wail and gnash their teeth about the alleged takeover of America by evil socialists as they get fucked in the ass by crony capitalists. LOL! Please...continue!
None of them have learned a lesson or ever will, its over their heads...up twinkles...lol.
An OWS camp was across the street from a conference I was attending. It was a hundred 16 to 20 year old tattoed and pierced kids flying full coloured 6 ft Lenin flags. I would call them overly eager and easily instigated. But instigated by whom? Others might call them fodder. I noticed 3 other things being: 1) 10 am to 6 pm schedules for seminars on conflict resolution, non-violent passive protesting, etc. 2) A dozen police around the perimeter taking notes endlessly. 3) A couple of stout mid-20 native youths stationed near anything of value (I suspect they were Iroquois Warriors there for more than just the bountiful tail). Oh to be young again, I digress. I put forwwrd that greater powers enticed/used the OWS event to observe the watchers reaction. Like Reagan's silent majority a well armed middle class voter is patient, waits, and keeps his powder dry until he can the white of the enemies eyes.
Another analogy: A well armed profssional gambler sits and watches a two colluding cheaters across the poker table ripp off everyone. Predict the outcome when thpatience to continue watching wears out.
whatever one's personal opinion on occupy, ya gotta admit that the showdown in oakland between police & protestors made for epic television:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcxkiaFY0Y
This article is just annoying. Labels and definitions are twisted. Important distinctions are glossed over.
How the author manages to confuse Tea Party (independence, honesty, constitutionalist, small government) with Occupy (socialism, big Nanny State, blame projection, "tax the rich") is a whopping mystery. THEY'RE IRRECONCILABLE. The original, authentic Tea Party movement was hijacked by a handful of Republican astroturfers who attempted to paint Sarah Palin and a few others as something analogous and representative in Washington, but sanitized and dumbed-down for marketing by mass media. The closest that the real Tea Party ever came to manifest in mainstream politics was Congressman Ron Paul. Nobody else came close.
'Occupy' protests were hardly "peaceful." Oodles of online vids show people behaving like lunatics. Please don't ever mistake 'Occupy' for the Tea Party.
There are other points in this editorial that could be ripped apart, but this isn't the place.
When people lose everything ... they lose it.
It's not confusion at all - the "author" (term used loosely) intentionally conflates the two in order to advance, what appears to be, his counter-liberty, counter-prosperity, counter-Constitutional marxist agenda.
And he does it under the moniker of "George Washington".
I ask: Is there any insult to liberty more vile? With the exception, perhaps, of the despot shedding crocodile tears in Newtown, CT.
ZH is apparently visited by Occupy supporters, judging by the negative scores for conservative-principled comments. ZH performs a public service by assisting socialists to Self-Help. :o)
Indeed; thanks for lightening things up a bit.
For better or worse, when it comes to marxist domestic insurrections against the Constitution of the United States, I've got unhedged zero tolerance.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...but you're okay with domestic insurrections against the Constitution of the United States by the banks, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Supreme Court??????? PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me that you don't think "Marxists" or any other kind of "socialist" bogeymen are an actual threat to the United States...THE MONSTERS ARE ALREADY HERE, MORON...and they're definitely not "socialists"...Jesus fucking christ...
Point taken. "Socialist" is just a different button to be pushed.
"Crocodile tears" <-- Very good