Week of 10/10/2011

The Willfully Ignorant Are Willing Idiots
– by David Matthews 2

“You’re saying words but all I hear is crazy!”

No truer statement can be said about the recent social schizophrenia than can be expressed by a couple of reviewers from That-Guy-With-the-Glasses-dot-com.

You have a group of people out there protesting the status quo. They’re carrying signs, some of them are wearing costumes, and they complain about the political system and the fact that they’re not being represented by the two dominant political parties. They’re furious about the bank bailouts and how they feel they’re getting disenfranchised by the system and how the “mainstream media” is saying nothing about them. They’re not all there for the same reason, but they all have one thing in common: they don’t like what’s going on.

Now if you’re thinking that I’m talking about the current “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, well you would be wrong. I’m actually referring to a different group of people that were doing protests all their own two years ago. You may have heard of them. They called themselves the “Tea Party Movement”.

Of course it didn’t take long for that group to get co-opted by political action committees and a certain cable news network and get seduced by politicians from one certain political party. But, for a brief and shining time, they really were what they claimed to be. They really were the voice of the politically discontent.

So now we have a new bunch of protesters that are doing the same thing. Again, people carrying signs, wearing costumes, complaining about the political system and of being disenfranchised. Again, they’re not all there for the same reason but they all are there to say that they don’t like what’s going on.

Now you would think that the people of the first protest group would at least sympathize with the people of the second. You’d think that they would recognize that they have plenty of things in common. Bailouts were bad, people are getting screwed over, and that most people are being disenfranchised by the political system.

Instead, what are the OWS people hearing?

“They’re not organized. They don’t have a message. They don’t know what they want. They just represent a small extreme fraction of the American people. They’re just long-haired hippies that haven’t taken showers. They hate freedom. They hate capitalism. They hate money. They should just get a job. Stop complaining. Stop whining.”

You ignorant sluts.

I’m sorry… that’s actually an insult to real ignorant sluts. At least real ignorant sluts are willing to try new things so they won’t be so ignorant.

I’m not surprised that it took three weeks for the media to finally recognize that the Wall Street protesters are around, especially when the movement started to spread to other cities. Nor should I be surprised to see that the air-fluffed ego-driven media are eager to recite the “They don’t know what they want” propaganda speech. Take a look at who pays for their news programs and you’ll see the very financial institutions that are being protested.

It is no big secret that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owns not only FoxNews but also the Wall Street Journal. But do you know what else they own that comes with the Wall Street Journal? The Dow Jones. Yes, they are very much a part of the very institution being protested; the very institution that got huge stinking bailouts; and the very institution that the political system has been bending over backwards to appease and have been convinced were far more important than the American people themselves.

Suddenly the vitriol against the OWS protesters by the Ministry of Truth has a purpose. When blowhards like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly mock and attack the protesters, they’re protecting their own bosses. They have a vested interest in making sure that the financial institutions are left alone to continue to do the very things that pays their salaries.

The same goes for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who whines like a spoiled bitch about fictional “struggling” Wall Street workers. He has a whole cable business channel under his own name to protect; since anything that effects Wall Street also effects his own bottom line. Seriously, Mister Mayor? Forty-thousand-dollar Wall Street executives? Maybe in the 1970’s.

But what truly surprises and disgusts this commentator is not the hatchet job being run by the media, but rather the willful ignorance being spewed by the great unwashed on this subject. The people that are echoing the propaganda coming from the media and the Ministry of Truth and are dismissing the real pain being felt by millions of their own neighbors. The same people that claimed that the “Tea Party Movement” represents “the silent majority” are now hypocritically bashing the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters for using the very same reasons that brought them out in protest two years ago.

From the comments they post in Facebook and the letters they send to newspapers, it’s clear that these people aren’t just ignorant… but willfully so. They intentionally keep themselves in the dark about what the OWS protesters are about and instead are reciting the crafted talking points handed to them by the biased corporate-owned media.

Let’s get brutally honest here… it’s not that the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t have a message. It is that you do not W-A-N-T to know their message!

I am not a member of the Occupy Wall Street group. I have nothing to do with them, but even from my perspective, looking through the biased mirror of the media, I can see what they want as plain as day. I can see what they are protesting. I can see what they are complaining about.

They are complaining about the very predatory environment that “Too Big To Fail” and Big Business have been using to systematically pilfer and destroy America. They are complaining about the banks that get bailed out through our tax dollars and then turn our neighborhoods into ghost towns. The same banks that are now imposing fees on top of fees on the very customers that will be paying for their bailouts for the next few generations. The same banks that are in negotiations with our government to receive “Get Out Of Jail Forever” cards for their criminally abusive handling of foreclosures.

Go ahead and change banks… if you can find one that hasn’t been taken over by “Too Big To Fail” just yet, either through merger or through the FDIC. But you have no control over the notice that you get about your mortgage being picked up by “Too Big To Fail”. You either have to pay it off on the spot or else suck it up. That in and of itself is a good reason to protest.

Corporate America sits on two trillion dollars of money from the Federal Reserve. That is money that is supposed to create jobs. Instead it’s collecting interest and feeding profit margins. They use their friends in the GOP to insist that sustaining Bush-Era tax breaks would be used to create jobs, only to then say that the economy is just “too risky” to live up to those promises. (This, by the way, also comes from people that boast that they are “risk-takers”.)

Check your health insurance premiums of late? They’ve gone up, haven’t they? Corporate America wants you to blame so-called “Obamacare”, but in truth this fiscal shakedown is pure corporate greed. The same corporate greed that allowed them to manipulate the reform legislation to their fiscal advantage, and to force Americans to sign up with their services, whether they can afford to or not. “Socialism”, you say? No, that’s actually fascism. Thank you for showing just how badly you failed at high school civics.

The price of basic essentials like energy and food go up and down based not on physical supply-and-demand, as was originally the case, but rather on the irrational futures speculation of those in Wall Street. The price of gasoline goes up and down based on whether or not a Saudi sheik stubs his toe, or if something bad is said about the State of Texas, or if an ill wind blows towards the Gulf of Mexico. And how did it get this way? Because Wall Street went to K-Street and told Washington to give them this power, supposedly to “limit” the marketplace abuses.

This is what the Occupy Wall Street people are protesting about, and where else are they supposed to turn to? Turn to their representatives in Congress? Those two-faced Januses listen to K-Street, not Main Street. And besides, weren’t the so-called “Tea Party Movement” people complaining about that as well? Oh, that’s right, that was before it became a special interest group all its own, with its own GOP caucus and their favorite channel that just happens to be owned by the same company that owns a huge part of Wall Street.

The people that I hear that support the Occupy Wall Street group each have various different reasons to protest. Some are protesting greed. Some are protesting animal testing. Some are protesting the outsourcing of jobs overseas. Yeah, some are even protesting the corporate system itself. It’s a little hard to get a consolidated message from all of those groups, and that is no different than what the original “Tea Party Movement” was like in their beginning. That protest group had anti-tax supporters, libertarians, conservatives, neo-conservatives, theo-conservatives, all complaining about the status quo in Washington. They too couldn’t get a consolidated message out at first, other than to say that they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore.

By the way, some of America’s founding fathers weren’t happy with Big Money muscling their way in America either. Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to John Taylor in May of 1816 that he considered “that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale”.

It’s one thing to not know the message. It’s another thing entirely to not want to know the message and then assert that there is no message, especially when it is right in front of people all this time. That’s not just “crazy”; that’s idiotic. Then you can’t just claim to be an “innocent bystander”… then you actually become part of the problem.