Corporations, Occupy Wall Street and Sweet Irony

by guest blogger Andrew Roman

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Here’s a fact: American corporations –whether run by people with left leaning views (Ben And Jerry’s) or right-leaning views (Home Depot) – cannot show up at your front door and take away your constitutional rights. They cannot crush your liberties, confiscate your property, incarcerate you, threaten you or make you do anything you don’t want to.

That’s what government is for.

Corporations cannot, for instance, intimidate private property owners by saying there will be hell to pay if those owners decide they might like to tidy up their own properties currently being occupied by whiny, spoiled-brat, soulless, narcissistic, bottom-feeder scumbag protesters in Che Guevara t-shirts and grey-haired pony-tail types in dull tie-dyes.

That’s what New York City elected officials are for.

Here’s another fact, as pointed out by Dennis Prager on his radio program yesterday: History has shown, unequivocally, that anti-rich movements – no matter where they may they have occurred in this world, say, over the past hundred years or so (and well beyond that) - have resulted in nothing positive for the poor. Absolutely nothing.

When, asks Prager, has blaming the rich ever helped the poor?

It should be noted that these “down with the rich” movements have resulted in multiple instances of dictatorship and genocide (see Communism).

If someone could please cite the instance (or instances) when a society has thrived after a capitalist system has been removed, I would be most appreciative.

Just asking.

We constantly hear from these protesters and their supporters how the country is being taken over by corporations, but are never told how exactly this is happening.

What does that mean exactly?

How is America being “taken over” by corporations?

In what way?

I'd love someone to explain it to me.

And isn’t it funny how for all their griping about corporate-this and greedy Capitalists-that, these aimless unwashed, selfish parasites always seem to gravitate toward these evil centers of capitalism – bright lights, high-energy, hustle-and-bustle – places that were built by free markets? New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles – these are not exactly granola-crunching back-to-basics communes.

These are supply-and-demand epicenters.

As Rush Limbaugh pointed out last week, there were more people waiting on line for the new iPhone in Manhattan than there were protesting the "corporate fat cats" poised to make profits off of them.

City after city across the country – with their coffee bars, music shops, universities, parks, hookah joints – are swarming with express-yourself-any-damn-way-you-want artistic-types. These people don't exactly live in tent villas in the outskirts of these cities roasting pine cones, bathing in the creeks. Musicians, poets, activists, actors, political morons, university-brainwashed drones - they continue to flock to these places that would not exist if not for capitalism.

It’s where the electricity and Mac Books are.

That the current financial woes were not – repeat not – set off by the all-encompassing, generic boogie-man “Wall Street,” but rather by an ever-growing, ever-intrusive, finger-in-the-pie federal government, seems to be irrelevant to the excrement living on the streets of New York (and elsewhere).

Where is the Occupy Rich Rap Stars movement?

Or the Occupy George Soros movement?

Or the Occupy the Union Fat Cats movement?

Or – dare I say it – the Occupy Oprah movement?

In reality, there is no real clear objective or purpose in these Occupy Everything movements. There is nothing unifying these protesters except hatred for this country and its institutions. These are intellectually illiterate radicals, acting purely on emotion. They are incoherent, disarranged misfits hell-bent on making others suffer with them. Whenever they are asked what their purpose is, they recycle vague bumper sticker twaddle, without a clue as to what they are saying or why they are saying it. 

It just sounds good.

They are jealous, angry malcontents demanding things from everyone else, never considering what they might be able to give of themselves to improve whatever conditions they're protesting. The irony is that these squawking drones have been programmed to do exactly what they accuse “Wall Street” of doing – namely, get whatever they can get from everyone else at any cost. They are programmed to ask for - and expect - something for nothing. By virtue of their existences, they are entitled. They measure worth only in how things affect them personally.

Indeed, while they stand tall about taking from those who have (i.e., distributing other people’s wealth), they say they may have to get tough now that thieves are infiltrating their “camp” in lower Manhattan and stealing their stuff.

Sweet irony.

One gal complained that someone stole her expensive laptop.

From the New York Post:

“I had my Mac stolen -- that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was . . . get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!”

Crafty cat burglars sneaked into the makeshift kitchen at Zuccotti Park overnight and swiped as much as $2,500 in donated greenbacks from right under the noses of volunteers who’d fallen asleep after a long day whipping up meals for the hundreds of hungry protesters, the volunteers said.

“The worst thing is there’s people sleeping in the kitchen when they come, and they don’t even know about it! There are some really smart and sneaky thieves here,” Terrie said.

“I had umbrellas stolen, a fold-up bed I brought because my back is bad -- they took that, too!”

Security volunteer Harry Wyman, 22, of Brooklyn was furious about the thievery -- and vowed to get tough with the predatory perps.

“I’m not getting paid, but I’m not gonna stand for it. Why people got to come here and do stupid stuff? All it does is make people not wanna come here anymore,” Wyman fumed.

Getting tough? Not going to stand for it? Stupid stuff?
 

I'm trying not to laugh.

 

How in the world can anyone associated with these protesters be taken seriously when they complain about the lack of civility taking place down there? Are they serious? Is it any less civil than sleeping, defecating and urinating in a public setting? Is it any less civil than disrupting the lives of everyone else who live and work in the area? Is it any less civil than going into privately owned establishments and causing disruptions to the point where the police are needed to remove them? Is it any less civil than their selfish disregard for the ever-escalating costs to the taxpayers? Is it any less civil than the profanities being lodged at people trying to go about their business, the anti Semetic signs been waved, and the public displays of sex?

 

Yes, irony, thy name is Occupy Wall Street.

 

Besides, why would anyone occupying Wall Street care if a laptop was stolen? Or money? Or anything?

Perhaps their call for the redistribution of wealth is selective.

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Bam's Jobs Bill Jam

by guest blogger Andrew Roman

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Same body, different suit?

Same septic tank, different commode?

(Make up your own and insert here).

Senator Mike Lee (R, Utah) used the phrase "Old wine in old bottles."

Last week’s jobs bill speech by President Barack Obama should have all but pounded the final nail into the pine box of Obama's presidency - that is, if there is any sense of order, common sense and justice to the universe. 

How bad is it for the president?

A Republican has just won Anthony Weiner's old seat in Congress here in New York City - a district that hasn't gone Republican since before anyone ever heard the term "social security." 

Babe Ruth was only in his fourth season with the Yankees the last time the Ninth District went GOP.  

The first licensed commercial radio station in the United States had been on the air only three years.

Ronald Reagan was not yet a teenager.

In bluer-than-blue New York, in a district that is at best 4 to 1 Democrat over Republican, that's how bad it's getting for Bam.

The Obama "jobs speech" - the highly anticipated, built-up-beyond-proportion, latest-in-a-long-string-of-America-saving-jobs-speeches from Brack Obama - was yet another one of those head-shaking "just wow" events. (I have them cataloged and meticulously cross-referenced using sophisticated database software).

Not that any of us in the thinking class expected anything less than what we received from the Chief Executive. Not that any of us believed for one moment that anything other than the same-old, same-old was coming our way from the podium of the House chamber.

It was simply one of those, "Wow, I can't believe that this guy is in charge of the whole shootin' match" moments.

If it weren't for the fact that the economic well-being of the nation hangs in the balance, one could almost feel sorry for the man being so far out of his league. If it weren’t for the fact that his experiments in nation transformation have resulted in the highest poverty levels in decades, one could almost take him by the hand, slap him on the back and say, “You tried, kid. But we gotta get some people in here who can fix this. Now, let’s go get some pancakes.”

All that's missing at the White House these days are the antlers and headlights.

While Barack Obama continues to make the job of conservative talk radio hosts tremendously easy, he makes America's economic recovery more difficult. It’s almost inconceivable to believe that he cannot see what he and his ever-encroaching big government ways are doing to this country. But once again, he’s peddling the same spend-spend-spend, expansive policies that have already failed - policies that also stunk up the joint when his predecessor, George W. Bush, implemented his own inane "stimulus" package. It was stupid then; five times as stupid when Obama did it the first time; and even more stupid now that the president wants to try it again.

If ever a man has personified - in spades (no slur intended) - Albert Einstein's over-quoted definition of insanity, it is President Barack Obama. If Obama's proposed jump start to an economy already paralyzed by the ropes of big government is to be taken seriously by anyone not under the influence, then Einstein truly had it pegged.

The logic of the President's thinking would have us handing out shots of Jack Daniels at alcohol anonymous meetings.

Seriously, are we to believe that nearly a half-trillion dollars in additional spending is all we really needed to get us over the hump? That the first Obama stimulus was almost the fix we required to bring us back to economic health? Were we really that close to the fix? Just a half billion dollars off? Did we miss it by that much?

Why not get this economy roaring back with a vengeance? Why not a trillion dollars more? Or five trillion more? While we’re at it, why not raise the minimum wage to $18.50 an hour? And tax the rich at a 70% tax rate? (Even if those Americans making $500,000 a year or more were taxed at a full one hundred percent, revenues wouldn’t even cover the entirety of this year’s deficit. There’d still be $500 billion left to fund somehow).

We already tax the rich in this country.

Yet, there’s a block of taxpayers – approximately 47% - who pay no federal income tax.

“Fair share” anyone?

The President’s rhetoric is tired. He talks about tax cuts in his new plan to get Americans working again, but what he’s proposing aren’t genuine tax cuts. They are temporary tax credits (which means the money is being swiped from elsewhere only to be redistributed) to the tune of approximately $500 a year for the average middle class American family. That’s a whole $500 a year. That’s about $42 dollars a month, or about $10 extra bucks a week.

Shopping malls beware. The stampede’s a-coming.

How does taking money out of the economy and returning it in nearly infinitesimal chunks to other people who did not earn it jump start a flailing economy? When did it ever?

The last Obama tax credit – the one that brought the payroll tax down from 6.2% to 4.2% - really got things moving, didn’t it?

And now, he wants to do it again?

Genuine tax cuts are obviously great - nay, necessary ... but they have to be the right kind of tax cuts. Minuscule credits at the expense of the job creators in this country will prove to be, as it always does, nothing more than ineffective, feel-good, campaign-fodder class warfare. 

It will solve nothing.

And don’t think for second that Democrats will back this “jobs bill” without additional stimulus spending tacked on.

Bank on it.

And why didn't the President actually - and finally - define what "fair share" means in regard to taxing "the rich?" What an opportunity it could have been for him for set the parameters of the debate. He could have told us once and for all what the fairest level of taxation for the "fortunate" among us is.

And notice how the President used the word "fortunate" to describe the wealthiest Americans, as opposed to "hard working," "creative" or "successful."

That simply would never do. It would alienate and/or offend.

That's because good fortune suggests randomness and chance - the luck of the draw.

Creativity, innovation and hard work, on the other hand, place the onus directly on the individual. It suggests that wealth may actually be deserved and earned - an anathema to Obama and his equality-over-liberty ilk.

Think about this: The left believes that government is the answer to almost everything, that only government can get things right. But look around. Government is practically everywhere in the form of taxation, over-regulation, the takeover of private industry, and so on. The size of government continues to grow. Yet, there are now 22 million children living in poverty, according to Government figures. There are now more people without health care coverage than there were last year. Unemployment is fixed at around 9%. There was absolutely no job growth in August.

And yet, the President wants more government?

Oh yeah, it's bad.

Paging Mr. Einstein.

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Modern liberalism with Paul from the Times

by guest blogger Andrew Roman

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Generally speaking, to me, Paul Krugman – the ever-embittered Princeton professor and New York Times columnist - is a largely irrelevant, morally-bereft wordsmith whose perpetual lack of depth is equaled only by his moral depravity.

His hatred of anything and everything on the right, without ever acknowledging that perhaps conservatives sometimes have genuinely noble motives, is so overt that he has become both the living embodiment and a parody of the twenty-first-century liberal. It is impossible to imagine a conservative satirist who could be any more outrageous than the embarrassingly “legitimate” Krugman. He is a genuine humiliation - a knee-jerk emoter of fast fodder and ideological graffiti ... and now, a bona fide coward to boot (which I will explain in a moment).

To be a conservative in Krugman's pitiful and morose universe means that one's motives are always sinister - inescapably driven by selfishness, greed and any number of phobias and "isms."

In a blog posted Sunday, the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Krugman wrote:

"What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons." 

While I consider myself a reasonably intelligent human being, capable of grasping even the most shallow concepts of today’s leftist, I have no idea what he is talking about in most of that paragraph, even after reading it several times.  I mean, literally, I haven't a clue what he is saying.

“Deeply shameful?”

What was deeply shameful? Who was deeply shameful?

What is it I'm supposed to know but won't admit?

Huh?

My inability to comprehend him aside, I would like to help Mr. Krugman out on one point that I can speak to. For the sake of accuracy, I ask: Who really made 9/11 and its aftermath a "wedge" issue?

Let’s summarize with these two rhetorical questions: Wasn't it just about every Democrat who believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? And wasn't it just about every Democrat who supported military action against Iraq until it occurred to them that George W. Bush was a member of the other party?

A rudimentary look at the record will show, unmistakably, that it was the left that made 9/11 and its aftermath political, not the right.

Next, what does he mean by the revolting phrase "fake heroes?"

Again, "What?"

What a disgusting, reprehensible term to use to describe honorable and noble public servants faced  with the monumental task of having to maintain order, protect citizenry and stand strong after the worst terrorist attack in this nation's history. It takes a special kind of piece of crap (pardon me) to call these men who put their country first as "fake heroes." It is absolutely disgraceful, by any reasonable measure.

Honestly, it's difficult to take anything seriously from a columnist who comes across more as a sulking, narcissistic adolescent than a thinker. Hell, Krugman himself couldn't even handle the "shameful" ceremonies and commemorations surrounding the ten year anniversary of 9/11, as evidenced by his pathetic blog, without sounding like he needed a lexapro milkshake; how do you think he would have handled the mayhem and carnage a decade ago? And what would he have done to make the ceremonies on Sunday more palatable to him?

Additionally, what would the criteria be for a real hero according to the Krugman Handbook of Life and Other Maladies?

Note Krugman never defines what he actually means by "fake heroes." 

Not that it matters.

The phrase is catchy enough to serve as intellectual ammunition for the bumper-sticker and college-debate-team set.

And what's this "raced to cash in on the horror" stuff?

Again I ask, "What??"

Krugman sounds like a hormonal teenage girl emoting into the pages of her diary.

How exactly did Kerik, Giuliani and Bush "cash in" on the deaths of nearly 3000 innocents? And what does Krugman mean that they raced to do so?  

Is Krugman suggesting that all three were too quick to respond to the horrors of that day? That they (and presumably others) were fueled by selfish and sinister motives in putting themselves out in front of the cameras and microphones as much as possible during an ongoing state of national emergency? That they were in it for personal gain while attempting to lead in a time of crisis?

What a sack of excrement Paul Krugman makes himself out to be.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but isn’t one of the liberal anti-Bush talking points the fact that the president actually  took too long to react to 9/11? Wasn't that the complaint? That he spent too much time reading to the children before doing anything?

Krugman continues:

"A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?"

This passage might as well be comprised of random consonants and hodgepodge vowels strung together in some sort of semi-coherent cadence, because, once again, I truly don't know what the hell he is saying.

Who behaved badly? In what way? In what context?

And what was "happening," according the Krugman? What was it the pundits should have understood?

"Corruption"?

What in the world is this man talking about? I'm not kidding. A raccoon with a brick tied around its tongue, submerged in a vat of canola oil would be more coherent. 

Mr. Krugman calls this particular blog entry "Years Of Shame."

Again, what "shame," Mr. Krugman?

Being the leftist he is, he undoubtedly meant to say that any shame surrounding the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath should rest with us, the United States of America (or at the very least, conservative Americans). 

But if there is some sort of shame to be had, shouldn’t it sit with the Islamic world? After all, is it unreasonable to think that good Muslims would be ashamed of what evil Muslims did in the name of their religion?

And that’s the key: “Committing evil in the name of Islam.”

You'll never hear anything like that from the left, however. 

It was the Germans who bombed London in 1940.

It was the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

It was the British who attacked colonial positions at Breed's and Bunker Hills in 1775 .

But it was generic "terrorists" who hijacked four airplanes and used them as missiles against targets in the United States in 2001.

Krugman goes on to say that the memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned, but never explains how. He says the nation, in its heart, knows it.


We do?

What do we know?

What a miserable, angry man Paul Krugman is. 

Unfortunately, his "everyone-on-the-right-is-bad" routine is not an isolated way of thinking on the modern left.  How many major liberals (from politicians to pundits) actually believe conservatives want to do what's best for the country but are simply going about it wrong? 

Go ahead and make the list. I'll wait.

It's always personal with Krugman and his smear merchants. It's always about greed. It's always about people like me hating some group. It's never just a plain old disagreement in policy.

By contrast, I (and every other conservative I know) do not think everyone on the left is sinister simply because they lean that way.  We do think, however, they are damn wrong ... and we have history on our side to prove it. (Remember, many on my side were opposed to both stimulus packages: Obama's and Bush's. Liberalism is wrong, even when implemented by Republicans).

I will give credit where credit is due: Both former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden gave moving and perfectly appropriate speeches on Sunday.

Good for them. Well done.

By the way, is it any surprise that Krugman did not allow anyone to comment to his "fake heroes" blog? He said he did it that way for "obvious reasons."

A moral moron and a coward.

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