Occupy LA: 30 Tons of Trash and Treason. Tea Parties: Zero Trash and 100 Percent American.

Occupy LA's used props 2011

Michigan Tea Party 2009

Big Banks Got Rock Bottom Cheap Loans of $1.2 Trillion on Worst Day in Dec. 2008, and Limbaugh Denies They Were Bailed Out

TARP was meant as a diversion from the real action going on behind the scenes, and the diversion is still working on the dunderheads like Rush Limbaugh.

He continues to be fixated on TARP, but ignorantly so. TARP was at least 10 times smaller than the real bailout which put taxpayers at risk.

Just today we have learned that the biggest banks made $13 billion in profits from the Federal Reserve's emergency loans, profits which small, well-run banks all over America did not get to enjoy. In fact, contrary to Limbaugh, the well-run banks got the shaft, having to pay advance premiums for FDIC insurance to cover all the failures, which last time I checked have cost $80 billion, mostly on the backs of the customers of the banks, you and me, who will end up paying the bill as banks pass their cost of doing business on to us. Part of that cost of doing business has been subsidizing the bad behavior of the top five or six 800 lb. gorillas like Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Our fascist government picked winners and losers both through TARP and the Fed's emergency lending programs. We do not have a free market in banking. And Rush Limbaugh aims to keep it that way.

What is more, TARP recipients continue to be delinquent in paying dividends under the TARP program, as reported here in The Chicago Tribune in October:

[M]ore than 170 U.S. banks ... have missed approximately $275 million in TARP dividend payments to the government through August.

It is a myth that TARP has been "successful" in the sense that everything has been "repaid". It has not. TARP funds alone still not repaid come to $93 billion as of right now. Add in $183 billion more for Fannie and Freddie.

I nominate these as Rush Limbaugh's most ignorant comments to date:

European banks are teetering on the edge. The Italians went out and they sold bonds and they can't pay them now as they're maturing. The euro might collapse. It is real trouble. And, meanwhile, US banks did not get bailed out. Not the big banks, not the Wall Street banks. They did not get bailed out. 

We have so many lies and myths being told that people believe. Most of the big banks were forced to take TARP money so as to avoid there being a stigma. The banks that needed TARP money were the local mom and pop banks all over the country that were in trouble. The big banks, Wells Fargo, these guys were forced to sign a paper agreeing to take X numbers of millions of dollars, billions, maybe, I forget the number, but whatever it was, just to make it look like everybody was in the same boat. But the big banks paid it all back. These Occupy people are protesting something that never happened. The big banks did not get bailed out. Taxpayers made a profit on the money they were forced to borrow. Other banks did get bailed out, the little mom and pops, but the big ones did not. 

Europe is teetering, Italy, Spain, you name it, and what do we get on the Sunday shows?

It is the ignorance of the Tea Party about state-sponsored banking and the bailouts which has allowed Occupy Wall Street to occupy the vacuum the Tea Party has left about this most important of unresolved attacks on American capitalism. Unfortunately the attack on American style capitalism is now a two-front attack. On the left are the socialists of the Democrat Party who want effectively to nationalize the banking system and outlaw risk. On the right we have the liberal consensus from the era of Franklin Roosevelt which is an ad hoc echo of European fascism which pretends that banking is free enterprise while making the taxpayer responsible for its many and frequent excesses.

Too bad for America that the demagogues of both the right and the left keep you from hearing the truth.   

Dear Occupy Wall Street,

Sincerely,

The Taxpayers

'Utopianism Attracts Goofballs as Light Attracts Moths': Occupy Wall Street's Anarchist Origins

Matthew Continetti here makes a persuasive case for the reemergence of the anarchist movement in Occupy Wall Street for The Weekly Standard:

When he looks at the world, the utopian is repelled by two things in particular. One is private property. “The civilized order,” Fourier wrote, “is incapable of making a just distribution except in the case of capital,” where your return on investment is a function of what you put in. Other than that, the market system is unjust. ...

If Charles Fourier emerged from a wormhole at the Occupy Wall Street D.C. tent city in McPherson Square in Washington, he’d feel right at home. The very term “occupy” or “occupation” is an attack on private property. So are the theft and vandalism widely reported at Occupy Wall Street locations. The smells, the assaults, the rejection of the conventional in favor of the subversive, and the embrace of pantheistic spirituality flow logically from the utopian rejection of middle-class norms. The things that Mayor Bloomberg found objectionable about the encampment in Zuccotti Park​—​that it “was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community”​—​are not accidental. They are baked into the utopian cake.

Glenn Greenwald Gets Hysterical About Law Enforcement Against Occupy Wall Street

Here.

Robocops. Sadists. You get the picture.

Never once does it penetrate that true believer's mind, the qualitative difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Everywhere the former goes there is crime; everywhere the latter went . . . nothing but law and order, followed by an historic electoral change across America and in the US House of Representatives.

Greenwald can keep repeating that OWS is about peaceful protest all he wants, but it isn't. And we're all tired of it and support the police in preserving the rights of all citizens to unimpeded access to all public places without fear of harassment and intimidation.

The denizens of UC Davis chant "Our university!" as if to say it's their turf and the cops are trespassing, but it isn't, and they aren't. It belongs to everyone, students or not. But especially to the taxpayers.

Winter's just a few weeks away, as is the 100th anniversary of Amundsen's spectacular south polar expedition.

The world could use more clear-headed achievers like Amundsen, but I doubt they'll come out of Occupy Wall Street, or UC Davis . . . or Salon.

31 Percent of Occupy Wall Street Protesters Support Violence to Advance Agenda

Doug Schoen has the results of his survey, here, concluding that Occupy Wall Street is:

a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal.

Rush Limbaugh, Boob Extraordinaire, Attacks The Basis of Western Civilization

In a long, truly embarrassing, tirade against studying Greek and Latin and all things Classical, here. 

Calling all that useless and worthless because some student studying Classics is worried her degree will prove to be so and said so at Occupy Wall Street:

Now, do you think somebody going to college, borrowing whatever it is in this case, $20,000 a year to get a degree in Classical Studies ought to be told by somebody at a school that it's a worthless degree?

In this Rush is the typical American utilitarian, for whom any field of study which doesn't get you a job and a career in that field is useless and worthless.

The lumpen barbarians aren't just occupying Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street Protesters in Madison Really Are Jerk-Offs

You always knew they were a bunch of wankers:

A neighboring hotel's staff alleged voiced concerns about having to recently escort hotel employees to and from bus stops late at night due to inappropriate behavior, such as public masturbation, from street protesters.

Reported here.

Marines Embrace Occupy Wall Street, Threaten Tipping Point.

Because one of their own got injured, not on substantive grounds.

Story here:

So I ask all of you, can you too sense the tipping point? When will enough be enough? If not now, when? I feel the problem is that the average Joe citizen is ignorant and comfortable. These, in addition to selfishness have become the standard for the majority of the population. As long as people are comfortable they remain silent. Well, I’m really . . . uncomfortable and I’m sick of seeing this . . . happening. The Occupy protests that are going on are our first glimmer of hope.

Probably never heard of the Tea Party, or Oathkeepers, or the November 2010 elections.

Jarheads. Hard on the outside, empty on the inside.

Occupy Wall Street in Chicago: Applause For "The Next Big Step in the Democratic Revolution"

Video here.

Sorry Occupy Wall Street, Democracy Looks Like This, Not Like You

Arrests Spread as Occupy Wall Street Spreads

Like a disease.

Last time I checked, ZERO Tea Partiers have been arrested for anything since 2009, but just over the weekend unruly Occupy Wall Streeters in scores have been arrested:

175 arrests in Chicago;

another two dozen in New York City (where police were injured);

an unknown number of arrests in Tucson;

maybe 40 in Phoenix;

and at least two dozen in Colorado.

See the AP story here.

Tea Partiers protested bailouts in the name of free market capitalism's cure for failure: bankruptcy. They showed up at the ballot box in November 2010 and put a stop to Barack Obama's Democrat Party. Now they wait for November 2012.

Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Streeters suddenly decide to protest bailouts in the name of bailouts for their student loans, a living wage, and sundry other entitlements which don't yet exist but they hope to extract by mob action and intimidation, the modus operandi of the unions.

A cold snap can't come soon enough, or a flu epidemic.

A Movement to Occupy My Underwear

Oops!

Occupy Wall Street Demands Student Debt Bailouts

So says Scott Cohn for CNBC.com here:

One proposed list of demands for the Occupy Wall Street movement includes "free college tuition" and "immediate across the board forgiveness" of student debt. While neither demand may be very realistic, the student debt problem is very real.

According to FinAid.org, which carries a "student debt clock" on its website, outstanding student debt is on pace to top $1 trillion in a matter of months. Student debt surpassed credit card debt in 2010, and has not looked back. The average 2011 college graduate had $27,204 in student debt, according to the organization.

The price of worship at the altar of the god, Education. Its high priests rob the easy.

Anti-American Occupy LA Speaker Calls For Violent Socialist Revolution

Video here:

Why Don't You Occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Herman finds his voice (or we found his):


"Wall Street didn’t write these failed economic policies -- the White House did."

“Why don’t you move the demonstrations to the White House?”

“Wall Street didn’t write those failed policies, Wall Street didn’t spend a trillion dollars."

“Wall Street isn’t asking to spend another $450 billion.  It didn’t work with a trillion. It’s not gonna’ work with $450 billion. You can demonstrate all you want on Wall Street. The problem is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!”

Herman! Herman! He's our man! If he can't tell 'em, nobody can!

More here.

For Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Occupy Wall Street Anger Counts, ObamaCare Anger? Not So Much.

As quoted in the LA Times here:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco on ABC’s “This Week,” essentially called [Rep.] Cantor a hypocrite for criticizing the Wall Street protesters while embracing the “tea party” movement.

“I didn’t hear him say anything when the tea party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol, and he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them,’ Pelosi said.

Pelosi said she supported the movement’s “message.”

“I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street or the political establishment and the rest, that change has to happen,” she said “We cannot continue in a way that does not — that is not relevant to their lives. People are angry.”

Sarah Palin Quit a Governorship, and Bails Out of a Race for President

Americans don't like quitters. Just like they don't like bailouts, unless they get one. All the Wall Street occupiers would go home tomorrow if you just gave them what they want: cancellation of their student loans. Political protest? I call it extortion.

I'm guessing the polling in the aftermath of Palin's Sept. 3 "crony capitalism" speech didn't look very good, either, otherwise Sarah would be getting ready to run right now, not announcing that she's quitting before she's begun.

I don't think anyone really believed her on Sept. 3, seeing how she defended the bailouts after McCain's defeat. She got the religion against bailouts long after the fact, then didn't press it home consistently as the number one issue and got sidetracked by all kinds of other stuff, only to find at this late juncture that the issue has, unhappily, lost its intelligibility among the electorate.

Government intervention in the financial sector has been too bewilderingly thorough-going and complex even for the experts to explain, even when they've been against it. Which is why people end up accepting facile explanations, which boobs like Rush Limbaugh excel at explaining and which elites are happy for people to believe as the surest way forward to business as usual.

One day after declining to run, here, Rush Limbaugh is telling his listeners that the bank bailouts were a big success, that TARP has been repaid, and that the banks are on the side of free-market capitalism, so don't be deceived and fall for occupywallst.org.

Too bad we haven't really had any free market capitalism since FDR, just big shots who stand to gain the most because they are the first in line for the money, which other big shots need at preferred rates to do business.

Try to remember that every time Rush takes an obscene profit center time out.

The rest is just entertainment.

Because Occupy Wall Street Refuses to Cooperate, Zuccotti Park Has Not Been Cleaned Since 9/16

Not a single headline like that could be written about The Tea Party.

Story here:

But Brookfield Office Properties, which owns Zuccotti Park, seems to be slowly building a case against protesters, saying Thursday that the protestors are interfering with the use of the park by others and are creating sanitary problems.

“Sanitation is a growing concern,” Brookfield said in a statement. “Normally the park is cleaned and inspected every weeknight. . . because the protestors refuse to cooperate. . .the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16th and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels.”

They don't call 'em dirty commies for nothing.

'The Capitolist Pigs and There Damn Banks'

Seen at occupywallst.org here in reply to communist Lloyd J. Hart's posting of Marxist demands:

"I hope these demands get met. I would love to get a check mailed to me every month or week or whatever and not have to work like a slave for it! That would be [       ] sweet as hell. [    ] the capitolist pigs and there DAMN banks. I propose $2000 a month for ALL people in this country including the UNDOCUMENTED CITIZENS. We will take the money from teh DIRTY BANKS and give it to those of us that are DESERVING!" (italics added)

Corect spelin is so bourgeois to teh internet left.

Why the organizers leave that stuff up there even one day after the right has savaged it, I'll never know:

Wait, I do know. They sympathize with it.