Tag Archives: Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street Romantic?

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“Tim McFallon, stood chatting with a shivering blonde, gallantly offering her his warm pea coat. “Let’s swap,” she purred as she discarded her own coat to reveal a long stretch of taut midriff underneath what could be loosely be described as a sweater.”’

A scene from Days of Our Lives or a Harlequin romance novel?

Neither.

It’s a scene from the Washington Post’s romanticized view of Occupy Wall Street which appeared on Page 1 last month. The Occupy movement is far from fanciful.

The movement has cost hard-pressed cities across the country millions of dollars that could have gone to feeding the hungry, preventing the layoff of teachers and firefighters, caring for the uninsured or repairing dilapidated roads and bridges.

The Washington Examiner reported last year that the DC Occupy movement was costing taxpayers $22,000 a day. That comes to $3.4 million since October. And that’s just DC, where according to the police union, crime has gone up in the city because police are being diverted from neighborhoods to the Occupy tent town. Continue reading →

Vlad Must Go

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from FeeheryTheory.com

The Occupy Wall Street movement has moved to Russia. How is that for some irony?

The protest movement that started in Cairo, swept through almost every Middle East Country, made its way through, Paris, London and New York has finally showed up at the Kremlin.

If I were Vladimir Putin, I would be a bit nervous.

Putin tried to steal the election for the Duma, and the Russian people called foul. Good for them. Bad on Putin.

Putin is a thug. The single worst thing George W. Bush said during his 8 years in office (and he said a lot of stupid things), had to do with seeing something he stared into Putin’s eyes. What W. should have seen was a KGB thug. Who knows what he actually did see? Continue reading →

#OWS

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

City officials from coast-to-coast have finally decided to live up to their responsibilities to enforce the law and have been evicting the Occupy (fill-in-the-blank) squatters from public spaces.

The District of Columbia has decided to allow the squatters to remain in McPherson Square Park because … well, maybe so the city won’t have to mow the grass until next Spring.

I am not totally unsympathetic to the general theory of the demonstrators: The deck is stacked in favor of the people who have the lion’s share of the chips because they already own the casino.

In the end, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement was a pale shadow (how’s that for an oxymoron?) of the Arab Spring demonstrations.

Part of the problem for the OWS crowd was nobody paid much attention to them. I suppose people who actually work on Wall Street paid attention to people who were attempting to occupy it.

But Manhattan is a pretty big island and for most New Yorkers a bunch of rich kids from New Rochelle sleeping in tents and relieving themselves in garbage cans was not much of a reason to miss their morning bagel-and-a-schmear before they got to the office. Continue reading →

Protest Media Bias

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

There is a lot of comparison being drawn between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. There are some similarities, but more differences between them, especially one: the coverage by news media.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters got their faces on ABC, CBS and NBC 33 times in the first eleven days of October. The Tea Party movement got coverage 13 times in all of 2009. The Media Research Center also found that the protesters got on camera delivering their message 87 percent of the time, compared to eight percent for their critics.

That was not the tea party’s experience, if I recall.

PEW research found that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) got more coverage quicker than the tea partiers. It took about three months for the media to pay attention to tea party demonstrations; it took less than a month with OWS, and OWS got its own acronym in no time. Continue reading →

Protests: What’s It All About, Richie?

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

As I have told you before, I watch CNBC in the morning because I know about as much about politics as most of the guests on the morning cable news programs who talk about politics, but I know nearly nothing about finance so I watch the guests on CNBC who talk about finance.

Last Friday I was listening to CNBC on my Sirius radio as I drove to Ohio and heard Jim Cramer talking about the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Even though he made a very large pile of money as a trader and investor, he said that in his youth he was pretty far to the left of his colleagues. When he was asked whether, if he were in his early 20s today, he would be camping out with the demonstrators, he paused and said he probably would. But, that’s not what caught my ear. Continue reading →

Obama Campaign Running Against Obama

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from The Hill

Today, David Axelrod, the chief of the Reelect Obama Campaign, announced that it will formally join the Occupy Wall Street protests and start mobilizing against the policies endorsed by the Obama administration. 

Axelrod brandished a Tim Geithner bobblehead doll, which he stabbed repeatedly with a pen knife while chanting an indecipherable spell, which he later said he hoped would lead to the Treasury secretary’s immediate departure from his office.

Axelrod, in announcing this unusual campaign, said: “We have decided that we aren’t going to defend the indefensible. Yes, we have terrible unemployment. Yes, Wall Street is getting away with murder. Yes, people have lost faith in the future. As much as I have tried, we can’t blame Bush for this anymore. We have to blame the Obama administration.

“I believe in Barack Obama, the campaigner. I have lost faith in Barack Obama, the president. So our campaign will basically run against the president and urge his replacement with the guy on the campaign.” Continue reading →