Quote:
Originally Posted by
sammi jo 
Chris Hedges nails it. This is really the crux of the issue... the deniers will deny, and the status quo supporters will cry foul, but that won't change the reality.
Extracted: (emphasis mine)
Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fools paradise. They think they can clean up the messalways employing the language of personal hygiene and public securityby making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.
The rogues gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think its over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are cathartic and entertaining, as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.Full article here.
Glad you posted this. It demonstrates exactly the kind of nutbag, socialist, marxist, collectivist thinking that we're dealing with in this movement. Tear down the system! Death to corporations! Death to the rich who are raping the "collective wealth!" It's a thinking that 99% (yes, THAT 99%!!) of America thinks is 1) Insane and 2) Antithetical to the American tradition. It's a more spread out version of the G20 protests. Meanwhile, all of it is recorded and posted online via the creations of Capitalism itself...iphones, iPads, MacBooks, websites that need capital to run, newspapers and TV that rely on corporate advertisers. It shows why this "movement" is doomed. It has no realistic, clear message for change. There are but a few "members" that call for ending corruption, bailouts and crony capitalism. But their message is lost among the riff raff---the people that have always wanted to destroy the profit-motive system, individual freedom, the military, national borders, the limits of the Constitution, and really...America itself.
The real 99% are out there looking for a job, working two or three jobs, feeding their families, and voting for people they think will return this country to prosperity through returning to its roots of limited government and maximum personal freedom.
