In LA, there are no adults in charge.

Occupy L.A. protesters said Los Angeles officials have offered them office space and farmland to end their encampment at City Hall.

The proposals received with a mix of excitement, anger and disbelief among protesters, many of whom did not know that members of the camp were in negotiations with city officials.

“I don’t appreciate people appointing themselves to represent me, to represent us,” one woman called out during the assembly. “Who was in those meetings?”

“It’s divide and conquer,” another protester said.

The details of the proposal were revealed Monday during the demonstration’s nightly general assembly meeting by Jim Lafferty, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who has been advocating on behalf of the protest since it began seven weeks ago.

Lafferty said city officials have offered protesters a $1-a-year lease on a 10,000-square-foot office space near City Hall. He said officials also promised land elsewhere for protesters who wish to farm, as well as additional housing for the contingent of homeless people who joined the camp.

Let’s see these clowns get their hands dirty farming.

Meanwhile, an LA Times columnist thinks Occupy LA may set trends.

With Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park dismantled, and Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland cleared, Occupy L.A. may be the last major U.S. outpost of the 99% movement left standing. Who would have thought it? From the beginning, critics have derided the City Hall protest as the lamest in the worldwide Occupy movement.

The camp had no demands or agenda. Its muddled message wasn’t clear to the public, or even to some of those huddled beneath its grimy tarps.

Aw, say it ain’t so.

But the mockery is misplaced. What may appear ridiculous about Occupy L.A. is what makes it important. Occupy L.A. is not a policy forum or a political party. It’s an experience — and an experiment in shaping a new political culture. And time and again, social experimentation in California has wrought more change than direct political action.

Raise your hand if you know a single word of the Port Huron statement, Tom Hayden’s manifesto for Students for a Democratic Society, the serious radical thinkers of their day. Why was the Weather Underground building bombs in that Greenwich Village town house again?

But everybody knows slow food, yoga and sustainable buildings. They trace their roots to the sometimes wacky communes, collectives and affinity groups of the California-centric counter-culture of the 1960s and ’70s that the serious radical thinkers made fun of.

…The basic occupation of Occupy L.A. is group discussion, hours and hours of it. Committees meet through the day, culminating each evening in the General Assembly, which sets grand policy. Decisions are made by consensus or not at all.

The flaw in this premise is that today’s rabble has no cutting edge ideas, or any ideas at all besides incipient anti-capitalism.

They will set no trends. They are kids enacting scenes they’ve seen on TV, egged on by Boomers who never grew up (or as they’d say, are still “keeping it real.”)

They are as deep as those 20-somethings a couple years back who adopted the style of the Rat Pack and thought themselves cool.

Propagandist Michael Moore has denied being a member of the hated “1%” of richest Americans.

Judge for yourself. As Reason noted:

Moore’s estate can go toe-to-toe in size, nouveau-riche ostentatiousness and pure bad taste with any in the area, which is saying something given that his neighbors include not just fellow Hollywood celebrities such as Bruce Willis, Madonna, and Tim Allen—but also corporate execs such as ex-Chrysler Chairman Bob Eaton and other Big Three execs, Auto mogul Bill Schuiling and boat-magnate John Win, the very people whom the protesters despise.

Michigan View reported:

Moore bought the original 2,500 square foot home, local real estate sources say, then gobbled up two surrounding lots to expand his massive estate. Antrim County public records show the property in the name of Moore and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, and lists its taxable value at nearly $1 million. Local real estate agents estimate the real value of the 7,500-12,000 square foot compound at $2 million (see an overhead view at BigGovernment.com here). A Michigan View survey of the area (see nearby photos) finds an exclusive community of homes and boat slips with housing values ranging from to $500,000 to Moore’s high-end $2 million.

How can he afford it? Celebrity Net Worth says:

Michael Moore is a controversial documentary filmmaker with a net worth of $50 million. Moore’s biggest three movies; Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 911 and Capitalism A Love Story have earned over $300 million at the box office.

Fahrenheit 911 raked in $230 million in theaters and another $3 million in DVD sales. After the theaters take their traditional 50% cut, that leaves roughly $130 million. Take away marketing, production and distribution expenses and Moore is conservatively left with $80 million. Moore was able to secure a deal from Miramax which guaranteed him 27% of his film’s net revenues, or roughly $21.6 million. Michael also was entitled to 50% of the profits of Sicko which are estimated to be $17 million.

Moore is the author of several best selling books and received a $1 million advance for “Dude Where’s My Country” plus a generous percentage of the book sales.

So the vaunted anti-capitalist is a very successful capitalist.

And hypocrite.

He is indeed among the “1%” and by choice. If he put his money where his mouth is, he’d give enough away to be among the 99%.

Jonah Goldberg

I love this. Jay-Z, an entrepreneur who is famous for something, is coming out with a line of Occupy Wall Street-themed T-shirts. But while the spirit of the T-shirts is universal, the profits are all going into his pocket!

Jay-Z is releasing a new line of T-shirts in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement Friday via his Rocawear clothing label, but he doesn’t plan to share any of the profits with the protesters.

The rapper was recently seen wearing one of the shirts, which tweaks the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” by crossing out the “W” and adding an “S” to make it read “Occupy All Streets.”
The protests, which started Sept. 17 in New York, have since spread to Los Angeles and other cities as demonstrators protest corporate greed and corruption.

Maybe in the Leninist tradition of capitalists selling the ropes they will be hung with, Jay-Z can come out with a line of two-by-fours and other makeshift weapons for the coming capitalism-vs-lifestyle Marxism Ragnarok.

Protesters at an Occupy Oakland meeting Monday voted to deposit a $20,000 donation into a Wells Fargo account. The move comes just days after one of Wells Fargo’s branches was vandalized during a massive downtown demonstration.

An Occupy statement said the money only will be with Wells Fargo temporarily while they work to establish an account with a credit union or community bank. Protesters said it was the easiest way to access the money to bail out people from jail.

Figures.

Glenn Reynolds:

Occupy Wall Street and the movement’s brethren in other cities ranging from Chicago, to Baltimore, to Oakland, to London — has been getting all the press lately.

But it’s the Tea Party movement and its small-government ideology that continues to win elections. Is that a harbinger for 2012? Probably.

There’s no doubt that the Occupy folks have been getting the lion’s share of the ink, and the pixels, over the last month or so. Love them or hate them, their approach is mediagenic, reminding Baby Boomers of protests from their lost (or imagined) youths, and inspiring younger folks who missed the Sixties to take a shot at creating their own protest mythology.

Though they’ve mobilized a fraction of the people who turned out for just one Tea Party rally — the 9/12 rally in Washington, which drew well into the six figures — the Occupy protests have generated far more publicity. And, at least until recently, that publicity has been mostly favorable.

But while lefty share-the-wealth demonstrations have seized the imagination of our nation’s mainstream media, they once again failed to persuade taxpayers to loosen their grips on their pocketbooks.

In Colorado, a tax-increase effort, massively supported (to the tune of about 20 to 1 in terms of spending) by teachers unions, failed miserably. Not only did it lose by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, it failed to carry a majority even in heavily Democratic Denver. (It barely eked out a majority in Colorado’s farthest-left enclave of Boulder County.)

As Colorado talk-radio host Ross Kaminsky blogged, “The wide margin of defeat for Proposition 103 could only happen with a substantial majority — something on the order of two-thirds — of unaffiliated (independent) voters opposing the measure, something which portends well for Republican hopes in 2012 elections.” This despite the fact that Colorado went for Obama in 2008…

Producer Gavin Polone points out that Moore has suckled at the Wall Street teat.

One of the many things that bug me about the industry in which I work is the large population of phonies who claim to be liberal, caring, green and unaffected by their wealth and fame but in reality are just as self-centered and addicted to their huge, over-air-conditioned living spaces and private planes as those at whom they point their fingers. And none is more phony and finger-pointing than Michael Moore.

Moore seems to be everywhere of late, talking about the “occupy” movement and fashioning himself its spokesmodel. I saw him on CNBC blowing hard and receiving kid-gloves treatment from Carl Quintanilla. On Piers Morgan Tonight, Moore said, “How could I be in the 1 percent?” When Morgan made the statement that Moore is “worth millions,” Moore responded with “No, that’s not true.” He went on to justify that comment by saying, “Even though I do well, I don’t associate myself with those who do well.” Although Morgan started off a bit confrontational, he, like most other interviewers, backed down fast. In my opinion, a lot of important issues are being brought up by the “occupiers,” but overall, this protest would be better served if those speaking on its behalf were of cleaner hands and less hypocritical than Moore, who has suckled mightily at the teat of “those who do well.”

In 2005, the Weinstein Co. set up financing of about $500 million to fund production and distribution. The investment vehicle was created and syndicated by a little firm called Goldman Sachs. One of the films that was produced by TWC using funds from that investment was Moore’s documentary Sicko. Given the success of his previous film, Fahrenheit 9/11, which he made with Harvey and Bob Weinstein, Moore was able to command a terrific deal for himself.

While I don’t know for sure what Moore received on his movie, given his previous success, it likely was several million dollars. Sicko, produced by TWC but released in 2007 by Lionsgate, did not perform as well as Fahrenheit, earning $36 million at the box office. But Celebritynetworth.com pegs Moore’s net worth at more than $50 million, and Moore is suing TWC for $2.7 million more in profits from Fahrenheit. (Reports at the time of the lawsuit said Moore already had received $19.8 million from TWC for that film alone.)…

I saw videos of youths burning things in Oakland, but was told that it “was a small minority” and atypical of the protest. Not long ago I saw no clips of anyone spitting at black congresspeople wading into the Tea-Party demonstration, but was told they did and that it was typical of tens of thousands of racialists on the Mall.

That’s from Victor Davis Hanson’s latest column, always so full of pithy observations it is hard to excerpt.

Follow the link to read it all.

…I don’t think the protests are really much over the Goldman Sachs bailout, or jerks like revolving-door Budget Director Peter Orszag starting back up at Citigroup, or Solyndra crony capitalism. Apparently, most middle-class and upper-middle class liberals—many of them (at least from videos) young and white—are angry at the “system.” And so they are occupying (at least until it gets really cold and wet) financial districts, downtowns, and other areas of commerce across the well-reported urban landscape. As yet there is no definable grievance other than anger that others are doing too well, and the protestors themselves are not doing at all well, and the one has something to do with the other. I am not suggesting union members and the unemployed poor are not present, only that the tip of the spear seems to be furious young middle class kids of college age and bearing, who mope around stunned, as in “what went wrong?”

Then there is a wider, global phenomenon of the angry college student. In the Middle East, much of the unrest, whether Islamist, liberal, or hard-core leftist, is fueled by young unemployed college graduates. Ditto Europe in general, and Greece in particular: The state subsidizes college loans and the popular culture accepts an even longer period between adolescence and adulthood, say between 18 and 30 something. Students emerge “aware,” but poorly educated, highly politicized, and with unreal expectations about their market worth in an ossifying society, often highly regulated and statist.

The decision has been made long ago not to marry at 23, have two or three kids by 27, and go to work in the private sector in hopes of moving up the ladder by 30. Perhaps at 35, a European expects that a job opens up in the Ministry of Culture or the elderly occupant of a coveted rent-controlled flat dies.

Students rarely graduate in four years, but scrape together parental support and, in the bargain, often bed, laundry, and breakfast, federal and state loans and grants, and part-time minimum wage jobs to “go to college.” By traditional rubrics—living at home, having the car insurance paid by dad and mom, meals cooked by someone else—many are still youths. But by our new standards—sexually active, familiar with drugs or alcohol, widely traveled and experienced—many are said to be adults.

Debt mounts. Jobs are few. For the vast majority who are not business majors, engineers, or vocational technicians, there are few jobs or opportunities other than more debt in grad or law school. In the old days, an English or history degree was a certificate of inductive thinking, broad knowledge, writing skills, and a good background for business, teaching, or professionalism. Not now. The watered down curriculum and politically-correct instruction ensure a certain glibness without real skills, thought, or judgment. Most employers are no longer impressed.

Students with such high opinions of themselves are angry that others less aware—young bond traders, computer geeks, even skilled truck drivers—make far more money. Does a music degree from Brown, a sociology BA in progress from San Francisco State, two years of anthropology at UC Riverside count for anything? They are angry at themselves and furious at their own like class that they think betrayed them. After all, if a man knows about the construction of gender or a young woman has read Rigoberta Menchu, or both have formed opinions about Hiroshima, the so-called Native American genocide, and gay history, why is that not rewarded in a way that derivatives or root canal work surely are?

To hardliner like domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the OWS stuff must stir his heart — at last the revolution is upon us! Nah.

Kyle Olson

As radical progressives continue to strengthen their grip on the #OccupyWallStreet mob, they’ve looked to activists of yesteryear to glean some advice and guidance. The #OccupyChicago crowd has unsurprisingly turned to domestic terrorist-turned-university professor Bill Ayers.

Ayers appeared at a recent “teach in” at #OccupyChicago and regaled his audience with stories of meeting with the Vietnamese to tut-tut about his “American revolution.”

He theorized whether or not the police – you know, the pigs that protesters are attacking from coast-to-coast – are indeed a part of the 99%. They’re not if they attack us, he mused.

But then, in typical leftist fashion, he wondered why we have jails at all. “Let’s abolish the prisons. That freaks people out,” he told his audience.

“But then somebody immediately says, ‘What about John Wayne Gacy…?’ Okay, one cell. Who else…who else. Alright, I’ll give you George Bush,” he said to his giggling admirers.

The more the #Occupy crowd embraces radicals and retired terrorists, the less chance they have of being respected for anything they say. But I honestly don’t think they’re seeking validity in the sense of a political debate.

Sound and fury signifying nothing, as they strut upon the stage.

Salon’s staff collaborated on a “New Declaration of Independence,” creating a document that’s as embarrassing as it is foolish.

One passage:

It is our belief that many of the problems facing Americans today can be directly connected to the unchecked power and complete unaccountability of the 1 Percent, a group that benefits from every unequal boom of the modern era and escapes each disastrous bust unscathed. The 1 Percent is insulated from the negative effects of its disastrous policies by its paid representatives in government.

I suppose Bank of America would qualify as part of the 1%.

Guess what happened to BofA when it tried to impose a $5/month fee for debit cards?

The market rose up and spanked them. Credit unions saw their memberships grow as unhappy customers (99% people) voted with their wallets.

Now Bank of America has backed down.

So…

• unchecked power? Nope.
• complete unaccountability? Nope.
• insulated from its disastrous policies? Nope.

Short memories make for incompetent analysis:

…the 1 Percent, a group that benefits from every unequal boom of the modern era and escapes each disastrous bust unscathed.

Let’s take the Internet boom of the 1990s.

Kids still in dorm rooms launched businesses funded with millions in venture capital and stock offerings (Wall Street!).

Many of those kids became millionaires and billionaires, leaping into the top 1% overnight, like Google’s founders. Google didn’t just “benefit” from the unequal boom, it helped create it.

Others sucked good money into marginal ventures and lost plenty of other people’s money (provided by Wall Street!). Remember the tech bubble bursting in 2000?

Thousands of ventures have come and gone. The 99%, far from being powerless, determine what lives and dies in business.

Remember when Motorola was the top brand in cell phones? When Sears was the world’s largest retailer? When it cost serious money to make a long-distance call?

Matt Welch has much more at Reason.

Many “Occupy Wall Street” protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

For each of the 984 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in New York City between September 18 and October 15, police collected and filed an information sheet recording the arrestee’s name, age, sex, criminal charge, home address and — in most cases — race. The Daily Caller has obtained all of this information from a source in the New York City government.

Among addresses for which information is available, single-family homes listed on those police intake forms have a median value of $305,000 — a far higher number than the $185,400 median value of owner-occupied housing units in the United States…

But they think they’re poor.

We were returning from Central California yesterday and stopped at a light in Santa Maria, an agricultural town about an hour north of Santa Barbara.

There stood an OWS geezer, straight out of central casting: fuzzy white beard, long white ponytail and sandals. He hoisted a sign similar to this, but home made.

About 15 more OWS people were in a park across the street.

The apathy slogan dates to the 1960s. It struck me for the first time how presumptuous it is, assuming that only disinterest separates them from the rest of us, that we’re all in our hearts, anti-capitalist fools.

Not a chance.

I commented to my wife that the loony left never leaves the body politic, but lingers like a virus waiting for its moment.

“Like herpes,” she said.

Exactly. As I looked back at Apathy Man, I thought, “March on, you homely, foolish cold sore.”

Jim Newton in the LA Times.

What’s a rebel to do? In New York, demonstrators have tussled with police, and in Rome, authorities used tear gas on them. Meanwhile, members of Occupy L.A. pitched their tents, erected their signs and girded for battle with the establishment, only to discover that City Hall has no interest in fighting back.

On what were once the lawns of City Hall sits a squatters community. There are the requisite signs and banners celebrating Che Guevara; condemning police abuse, banks and the corporate media; and demanding that the rich be taxed, the poor educated and the environment protected. Most of the protesters seem to be having a good time, and the encampment is thick with earnestness, though a few of the residents wear bandannas over their faces to show how dangerous they are.

That’s because LA pols are as whacked as the clowns on the lawn.

…then there was Councilman Ed Reyes. More than a year ago, he wrote a resolution calling for an economic boycott of Arizona, which members approved to express their disapproval of that state’s mean-spirited and ill-considered attempt to create its own immigration policy. Last week, Reyes asked the council to exempt itself from it. Why? He and other members wanted to attend a convention of the National League of Cities in Phoenix, and Reyes argued that an exception should be made to the boycott because Phoenix officials opposed the immigration bill. Phoenix, for the record, is in Arizona.

How to help the Phoenix economy without helping Arizona’s was apparently beyond the scope of Reyes’ reasoning. No matter. After first proposing that the council waive its boycott and go to Phoenix, he then withdrew the idea, to the relief of his colleagues. Some might be confused, he conceded. Why would anyone be confused by a councilman advocating a boycott and then moving to violate it? There, Reyes found solidarity with his friends camped outside. He blamed the media.

Andy Kessler ventured out to the OccupySF gathering and reported this nugget:

I spoke to a young woman who had clearly bathed more recently than most. I asked her why she was at OccupySF. She told me she’d done all the right things. Studied hard. Graduated college. (She was an art major.) And now she can’t get a job. It didn’t matter. It’s all messed up. She was lied to.

Of course she was. She’s a member of the Trophy Generation. Win or lose, you get a trophy. We embraced mediocrity to an entire generation of kids during good times who are now finding themselves mediocre in bad times. There still is that American dream: Go to college, get a job, buy a Prius. But like it or not, studying art or humanities or gender studies won’t get you there. Marissa Mayer at Google complains she can’t find enough computer-science majors. Civil engineers are getting hired sight unseen.

The self esteem movement that began in California muddled plenty of middling minds, especially among educrats.

I gritted my teeth through three middle school graduation ceremonies — they were actually called that — as my children advanced.

Apparently, the educrats forgot that having “an eighth grade education” used to mean you were uneducated.

This recalls a conversation from The Incredibles:

Helen: I can’t believe you don’t want to go to your own son’s graduation.

Bob: It’s not a graduation. He is moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade.

Helen: It’s a ceremony!

Bob: It’s psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional…

Indeed, if someone is truly exceptional and becomes wildly successful, employs thousands of people, generates wealth for many and more for himself, he’s not to be celebrated by scorned for his corporate greed.

Anarchy breaks out amongst the anarchists, and a new power structure emerges. Hilarious.

New York Magazine

All occupiers are equal — but some occupiers are more equal than others. In wind-whipped Zuccotti Park, new divisions and hierarchies are threatening to upend Occupy Wall Street and its leaderless collective.

As the protest has grown, some of the occupiers have spontaneously taken charge on projects large and small. But many of the people in Zuccotti Park aren’t taking direction well, leading to a tense Thursday of political disagreements, the occasional shouting match, and at least one fistfight.

It began, as it so often does, with a drum circle. The ten-hour groove marathons weren’t sitting well with the neighborhood’s community board, the ironically situated High School of Economics and Finance that sits on the corner of Zuccotti Park, or many of the sleep-deprived protesters.

“[The high school] couldn’t teach,” explained Josh Nelson, a 27-year-old occupier from Nebraska. “And we’ve had issues with the drummers too. They drum incessantly all day, and really loud.” Facilitators spearheaded a General Assembly proposal to limit the drumming to two hours a day. “The drumming is a major issue which has the potential to get us kicked out,” said Lauren Digion, a leader on the sanitation working group.

But the drums were fun. They brought in publicity and money. Many non-facilitators were infuriated by the decision and claimed that it had been forced through the General Assembly.

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” said Seth Harper, an (more…)

If Corporations Aren’t People, How Can They Be Greedy?

A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney observed that corporations are people. This prompted hysteria on the left, including a video produced by the Democratic Party. But of course Romney was right. A corporation consists of its owners, i.e. shareholders, and its employees–people. It is an elementary principle of law that a corporation can act only through its employees and agents–people. The Democrats’ apparent belief that you can hurt companies without hurting people is absurd. The corporation is merely a legal form in which people do business, now several hundred years old. It is absolutely necessary for any major commercial enterprise because its existence can continue without disruption beyond any one individual’s lifespan. So being “anti-corporation” is equivalent to being pro-medieval.

Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%).

An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008. Now 51% disapprove of the president while 44% approve, and only 48% say they will vote to re-elect him in 2012, while at least a quarter won’t vote.

LA Protestors Both Kill ans Smoke Grass

The cost of repairing the increasing damage to the City Hall lawn where hundreds of Occupy L.A. protesters are camped out is becoming an issue for Los Angeles officials even as the protesters make plans to expand their demonstration to other downtown city property.

The city has already incurred $45,000 in costs related to the demonstration, officials said, including thousands of dollars in overtime pay for General Services police. Eight Los Angeles Police Department officers have also been deployed full-time to monitor the protest.

The tent city circling City Hall is getting crowded — organizers say about 700 people stay there each night — and there isn’t room for many more. Organizer Mario Brito said it may be necessary to expand.

Fewer than one in three (32%) call themselves Democrats, while roughly the same proportion (33%) say they aren’t represented by any political party.

Narcissism on steroids as the pampered, spoiled spawn of the American entitlement state compare themselves to the murdered victims of real tyrants. Shameless.

Then there’s this:

Day by Day

If you think she’s an anomaly, have a look here.

What was her major, women’s studies?

Barton Hinkle

“We meet every day to decide what our demands are.”

— Hero Vincent, a Wall Street Occupier, quoted in The New York Times.

We are the union members, students, teachers, veterans and activists who make up the 99 percent of America, if you don’t count everybody who is at work right now. We are the unemployed and the art majors and the interns for Rainforest Action Now!

Also we are the firefighters and the police officers and the paramedics, except none of them could be here on account of their fascist shift supervisors, but we know they are with us in spirit. (First responders, you guys rock!) We are the lost, the slightly disoriented, and the people who are pretty sure they know where they are if you’d just be quiet for one second and let us think, okay? Jeez.

Where were we? Oh yeah. We are the makers of homeopathic medicines. We are also the Druids. There’s a couple of Zoroastrians around here somewhere, too (or at least that is what some of us think the tattoo on the one dude’s neck means).

Also, we are that long-haired welder guy who makes bird sculptures out of rebar and old gardening equipment. We are Slightly Creepy Hippie Lady in a Van Who Sells Healing Crystals. We are the young woman with the piercings and the pink hair who just came from the D.C. Slutwalk. We are the guys in goatees and motorcycle boots who can’t ride a motorcycle, who are hoping to score with Pink-Hair Girl.

We are the 99 percent. And we are Here to Stay.

The Corporate-Owned Media has been misleading people by telling everyone our objectives are unclear. That is a lie. We have been very clear. Superduper clear, in fact. Can’t you, like, read our signs? Some of them are really witty, too; you should check them out.

Anyhow. Just to make sure there is NO MORE misunderstanding, here are our demands as of about 9 A. to the M. today.

(1) End corporate greed. Corporate greed is responsible for most of the poverty and suffering on this planet. (The bubonic plague and the Cambodian killing fields? Don’t use your patriarchal “logic” on us, fascist.)

(2) No one is allowed to make more than the median income.

(No joke, in the early ’90s, a SF politician was demanding to know why half of the kids in the public schools were scoring less than the average.)

(3) Free health care for everybody. Starting . . . riiiiiight . . . NOW! (more…)

From the Occupy Wall Street website, a sample of the personal stories, all with the tagline “We are the 99%”

Anorexia is a serious mental condition, but her gripe seems petty compared with deprivation people around the world endure.

As we posted the other day, if the so-called 99% have a claim on rich Americans’ money, why shouldn’t people in the Third World have a claim on the wealth of America’s “99%” because that group is extremely well off by global standards.

This is a random photo from Mexico. Do you think these folks might envy the wealth of the OWS crowd?

Would the OWS folks agree to sell off some of their worldly goods and donate them to families such as these?

Do any of the OWS protestors understand that without corporations, rule of law and a robust financial system, the United States could be just as poor as Mexico or Pakistan?

Karl Rove writes about Democrats flirting with the Occupiers.

…Democrats hope Occupy Wall Street will boost their party’s chances in next year’s election as the tea party did for the GOP in 2010. But Democratic leaders are wrong in believing that Occupy Wall Street is the liberal alternative to the tea party.

The tea party is a middle-class movement of people who want limited government, less spending, less debt, low taxes, and the repeal of ObamaCare. Occupy Wall Street isn’t a movement. It’s a series of events populated by a weird cast of disaffected characters, ranging from anarchists and anti-Semites to socialists and LaRouchies. What they have in common is an amorphous anger aimed at banks, investors, rich people and bourgeois values.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York appear unfocused and disorganized. WSJ’s Hilke Schellmann takes a peek into the inner workings of the organization and how it is trying to manage communal living in a public space.

The tea party reveres the Constitution and wants to change laws to restore the country to prosperity. Occupy Wall Street started by occupying a New York City park and then blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, sparking the arrest of hundreds.

The tea party files for permits for its rallies and picks up its trash afterwards. Occupy Wall Street tolerates protesters who defecate on police cars, allows the open sale of drugs at protests, and features women walking around rallies topless.

The tea party has settled down to democracy’s patient, responsible work, either by exerting influence on the Republican Party nomination process or educating Americans on the issues in order to hold politicians in both parties to account.

By comparison, Occupy Wall Street seems alienated by the American political system. It has no concrete agenda and no plan to become a political institution. Yet it needs both things to have an impact on politics or policy. Without them, Americans will be interested in Occupy Wall Street’s weird and off-putting side show for only so long.

The fact that it lacks a clear program means that Occupy Wall Street is susceptible to being captured by even more extreme elements. It’s no accident its rallies and marches around the country include signs extolling wacky causes and marginal, but highly organized, left-wing groups. Nothing draws ideologues who know what they want as fast as a malleable crowd that doesn’t.

What Democrats eager to latch on to the Occupy Wall Street protests don’t seem to fully grasp is that these events are in part an expression of deep dissatisfaction with Mr. Obama and other D.C. Democrats. Some young Occupy Wall Street participants are angry because their economic future seems so bleak. They want someone to hold responsible for the absence of jobs. Others see Mr. Obama as insufficiently liberal. And some are simply nutty: A third of the protesters polled by New York magazine say the United States is as bad as al Qaeda…

LAT columnist Steve Lopez gets down with the Occupation.

That’s why I decided to spend a night with Occupy Los Angeles on the grass skirt outside L.A. City Hall. And after an evening of observation and conversation, I can tell you this:

Occupy L.A. is a festival, a rebellion, an awakening, complete with a mess tent, economics classes, a silk screen printing shop, live music, a pumpkin patch and passionate conversation.

OK, it’s also a place to party on city property while the police, at least so far, look on benignly, and contact highs are easy to come by. My favorite sign:

“God Forbid We Have Sex ‘N Smoke Pot. They Want Us to Grab Guns ‘N Go to War!”

Gee, this sounds like a run-of-the-mill anti-globalization/anti-war/anti-etc. protest that we’ve seen hundreds of times. Dog bites man.

What made the Tea Party newsworthy was that people who naturally don’t take to the streets were on the streets.  (Which they left cleaner than they found them.)

Will it grow into a cohesive movement? Who knows.

What I found was a collection of disaffected souls that included socialists and capitalists, atheists and religious zealots, youngsters and codgers. They have a lot of different targets, but most seem to be antiwar (“Drop Tuition, Not Bombs”), and they believe the middle-class and the poor are being crushed by scheming profiteers on Wall Street and in Washington.

After that, it gets a bit mushy; this isn’t yet anywhere near as focused as the civil rights movement or as fiery as the antiwar protests of the ’60s, and it may never come close.

After that it gets mushy? How clear is the contention that scheming profiteers in Washington and Wall Street are crushing them? How? With student loans?

“Corporate profits are at record highs. Mortgage foreclosures are at record highs,” one young man was saying to another, summarizing what for him is a snapshot of the 99% getting shafted by the 1%, in a country where commercial banks have already spent nearly $33 million this year on lobbying.

That’s a snapshot of simple mindedness. Try this for an explanation of how we got where we are:

• The federal government encouraged/coerced banks into making risky mortgages in a failed attempt at social engineering.
• Millions of people borrowed money they could not and did not repay. They reneged on their obligation. In the process, they bid up the price of real estate and created a bubble.
• Wall Street figured out how to bundle these craps loans into crap securities and made big money until the music stopped.
• With major banks on the verge of collapse, Bush pushed through TARP with almost no GOP support. The banks repaid the TARP funds with interest and the government might have actually turned a small profit.

So where is the anger at the government policies that started the crisis?

Why not demand the head of Barney Frank, who defended Freddie and Fannie when it was obviously in trouble?

Why not demand the head of Franklin Delano Raines?

Michelle Malkin has a funny photo essay of various Occupy Wall Street protestors holding up signs with their personal histories and demands.

See it here.

Mark Steyn

Who was Steve Jobs? Well, he was a guy who founded a corporation and spent his life as a corporate executive manufacturing corporate products. So he wouldn’t have endeared himself to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, even though, underneath the patchouli and lentils, most of them are abundantly accessorized with iPhones and iPads and iPods loaded with iTunes, if only for when the drum circle goes for a bathroom break.

The above is a somewhat obvious point, although the fact that it’s not obvious even to protesters with an industrial-strength lack of self-awareness is a big part of the problem. But it goes beyond that: If you don’t like to think of Jobs as a corporate exec (and a famously demanding one at that), think of him as a guy who went to work, and worked hard. There’s no appetite for that among those “occupying” Zuccotti Park. In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due.

So they are in favor of open borders, presumably so that exotic Third World peasants can perform the labor to which they are noticeably averse. Of the 13 items on that “proposed list of demands,” Demand Four calls for “free college education,” and Demand Eleven returns to the theme, demanding debt forgiveness for all existing student loans. I yield to no one in my general antipathy to the racket that is American college education, but it’s difficult to see why this is the fault of the mustache-twirling robber barons who head up Global MegaCorp. Inc. One sympathizes, of course. It can’t be easy finding yourself saddled with a six-figure debt and nothing to show for it but some watery bromides from the “Transgender and Colonialism” class. Americans collectively have north of a trillion dollars in personal college debt. Say what you like about Enron and, er, Solyndra and all those other evil corporations, but they didn’t relieve you of a quarter-mil in exchange for a Master’s in Maya Angelou. So why not try occupying the Dean’s office at Shakedown U?

Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. At Liberty Square, one of the signs reads: “F**k your unpaid internship!” Fair enough. But, to a casual observer of the massed ranks of Big Sloth, it’s not entirely clear what precisely anyone would ever pay them to do.

Do you remember Van Jones? He was Obama’s “green jobs” czar back before “green jobs” had been exposed as a gazillion-dollar sinkhole for sluicing taxpayer monies to the president’s corporate cronies. Oh, don’t worry. These cronies aren’t “corporate” in the sense of Steve Jobs. The corporations they run put “people before profits”: That’s to say, they’ve figured out it’s easier to take government money from you people than create a business that makes a profit. In an amusing inversion of the Russian model, Van Jones became a czar after he’d been a Communist. He became a Commie in the mid-Nineties – i.e., after even the Soviet Union had given up on it. Needless to say, a man who never saw a cobwebbed collectivist nostrum he didn’t like no matter how long past its sell-by date is hot for “Occupy Wall Street.” Indeed, Van Jones thinks that the protests are the start of an “American Autumn.”

Read it all.

A scene from the Occupy Atlanta gathering, where John Lewis, a leading figure from the civil rights movement, was refused a hearing. Or was it kindergarten?