Brian Phillips is the head of communications for the NYC General Assembly, the group primarily responsible for occupying Wall Street. I learned about him while listening to National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. According to NPR, Phillips is “an ex-Marine with a bachelor’s in computer science. Today he is wearing a sock on his head.”
“My political goal,” Phillips says, “is to overthrow the government.”
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Note: That’s not some random nut job pulled from his Lyndon LaRouche desk or tricked-out refrigerator box/time machine. That’s the communications director for the whole shebang, and his goal is to overthrow the government.
Now, he’s not advocating violence or dictatorship. No, he just wants the government to work on the same non-hierarchical, consensus-based, extremely deliberative form of direct democracy that they’re using down in Liberty Plaza. How that would work for some 300 million Americans remains a bit of a mystery.
An even bigger mystery is what these people want. There are many demands floating around, but the only official list isn’t of demands at all but of wide-ranging grievances. Grievances about the “system,” if not about carbon-based life itself, are the one unifying sentiment to this movement.
Some of those grievances are entirely valid, even bipartisan. Conservatives have been complaining about bailouts for “too big to fail” institutions for several years now. It’s how to remedy those grievances where the debate lies.
For instance, among the more popular demands is debt forgiveness — for everything from student loans to, well, everything.
A widely circulated “proposed list of demands” calls for “immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the ‘Books.’”
Even if you break the crazy pill in half and simply talk about forgiving all mortgages and consumer credit, we’re still probably talking about the utter destruction of the global financial system. U.S. mortgage debt alone is roughly equal to our entire GDP.
The reason I bring this up is that I think this is extreme.
“Extreme” is a funny word these days. It’s often used by mainstream news outlets to describe the tea parties and the tea-party-friendly caucus in the GOP.
For instance, when those hotheads in tricorn hats were trying to get the government to borrow slightly less than 40 cents for every dollar Washington spends, the conventional wisdom among enlightened liberals, the Obama administration, and the other usual suspects was that they were “extremists.”
Senate majority leader Harry Reid blasted said extremists as “heartless” for daring to suggest that the exploding federal debt might require cutting subsidies for “cowboy poets.”
Meanwhile, the sock-headed spokesman for the protesters wants to “overthrow the government.”
And yet, if you peruse LexisNexis, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone calling him or his more radical confreres “extremists.”
You also won’t hear them being called racists, even though the Occupy Wall Street movement is mostly white. Personally, I don’t think the racial composition of the “99 percenters” is relevant, but the fact that the tea partiers are mostly white has been cited time and again as evidence of nascent racism. After all, what other explanation could there be for a mass movement opposed to the first black president’s policies? (Never mind that the most popular tea-party politician these days is Herman Cain, who, in case you hadn’t noticed, is black.)
If the insanity of the Occupy Wall Street protests don't make your head spin, then the hypocrisy will. And that any Democratic politician would claim these dirty, screaming malcontents who look like they're on their way to an early Halloween party represent the hopes and desires of mainstream Americans - as President Obama did yesterday - is something I can't get my head around.
Democratic support for this taxpayer-funded chaos could be the result of grateful politicians who feel compelled to get in line behind unions and other Democratic-friendly organizations that are joining in the protest. Or perhaps when Democrats look at these self-centered misfits demanding a free ride they see their hope for America's future - millions of mainstream Americans dependent on a vast and powerful government.
It is a conundrum. I can put socks on my feet, socks on my hands, make a sock puppet or stuff a sock in it, but can't seem to get my head into a sock. I'm piqued. Best get a good strong cuppa.
These evil (yes, I truly believe that many of them are evil with the rest just being stupid lemmings), unwashed, spoiled rich kids calling themselves "Occupy Wall Street" or "the 99%ers" or whatever they will think of next (Liberal begat Progressive, Global Warming begat Climate Change, etc.) will prove to be more reason to hold your nose and pull the lever for whomever the Republicans put up. As long as the Republicans have the stones to actually use the ammunition they are being handed.
My message to OWS is this: Get a bath, get a real job (your rich daddy can see to that if you'd only ask) and stop trying to kill the middle class with your policies and your stink.
The crux of the issue lies (as it so often does)in a simple error at the print shop. When making up the initial batch of 99%er signs, the printer inadvertently failed to include the critical first decimal point.
I would love to have it verified that Brian Phillips is indeed a former Marine. That's hard to fathom, given his wearing a sock on his head and stated hope of overthrowing the government.
The tragic lesson of Fort Hood is that today's PC military is not the same military in which our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers served. Today's military embraces diversity for the benefit of the individual rather than unity for the benefit of the whole. Thus, it's likely there are more people in the military than we realize who wear socks on their heads and advocate the overthrow of the government. As liberalism erodes self-discipline and honor in civilian society, so it erodes self-discipline and honor in our military.
Profound. The well-meaning, but nonetheless, poisonous ideology, liberalism, may ultimately destroy the military the way it has destroyed other institutions.
The current love affair with neo-COIN as a one size fits all tonic may be a symptom of that decadence.
Nonsense. The military of our fathers and grandfathers was a draft army which had to accommodate people who didn't even want to be there. The military today is MORE likely to be inclined toward self-discipline, not less. Above all, it's still an organization based around discipline and conformity (not bad things, as one needs these qualities in an effective fighting force), and thus hardly a bastion of the PC. The idea that there are any sizable proportion of anti-Americans in the armed forces is not only wrong, it's offensive, and irritatingly hypocritical given all the heated rhetoric surrounding the Iraq invasion. American politics is full of such opportunistic contortions, non the left as well as the right, but given the sacrifice and dedication involved in this matter, it's probably the most irritating example.
It's really irritating how abruptly, with Obama's inauguration, many conservatives grew lukewarm about the military and the mission in Afghanistan. That said, there were already signs of this direction in 2008, particularly when McCain's "for patriotism, not for profit" at a debate got criticized and worst of all when his poignant and stirring convention speech met with tepid applause vs. Palin's shallow screed getting enthusiasticly embraced, as if being a POW was passe and driving an SUV was where it's really at. Pathetic.
The NRO poll today is asking if the Occupy Wall Street extremists should be taken seriously.
They should be taken seriously but not for the scatterbrain reasons they are gathered together under one banner. Rather this is serious because of their potential to gather other wildly diverse extremists together in cities across the nation.
There is no telling what they are willing to do. A mob mentality is exhilarating and will escalate.
These aren't your Sixties flower power protesters. "For what it's worth: There's something happening here." We should be taking this development seriously.
Jonah, this is a waste of time and good bits. The media view of any group or event is going to be skewed and it is just not worth commenting on.
I'd rather use these protests to engage in a discussion of what it means to transfer $1 from the earner of the $1 to a non-earner. What are the effects of this transfer.
This is where the foregiveness of student loans comes in. What happens when these loans are foregiven?
Interesting comment. What happens is that he has his degree in feminist studies, owes no money, and STILL has no job or job prospects.
Meanwhile the banks will stop making student loans, meaning only the well-to-do will be able to send their kids to college. However, well-to-do people, who are spending a substantial amount of money will most likely require some return on that money, and require their kids to get degrees in something practical.
The result of this would seem to be an increase in productive citizens. This may not be as bad as I was first viewing it. Think of it as weeding the garden.
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