With each passing day, the Occupy Wall Street movement is picking up steam. The growing roster of A-list supporters at home and from around the globe is impressive, if that’s the right word.
Iran’s chief mad mullah, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, loves the protests, the government of China applauds them, and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is positively gung-ho.
Naturally, the American Nazi Party favors the lusty attacks on the “Judeo-capitalist banksters” while the Socialist Party USA and the Communist Party USA are happy passengers on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon.
Oh, and Barack Obama hearts the movement, too.
Because you should judge a man by his allies, our president might want to reconsider the villainous company he is keeping. Despite his claim that protesters reflect a “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” the people sleeping in Zuccotti Park are not there to help him create middle-class jobs or save the ones that exist.
If they were, America’s crackpot foreign and domestic adversaries wouldn’t be cheering. Their support reveals what the movement is really about.
Plain and simple, the movement is about destroying capitalism, which most protesters see as the enemy. They don’t want to fix the financial system. They want to bring it down.
Movement leaders don’t want the economy to grow, which would mean the Big Bad Banks would be healthy enough to lend and Evil Corporations would be healthy enough to borrow. They want to redistribute wealth, not create it.
They hope banks and corporations go belly-up, except, of course, for those that produce cool stuff they like. The cool stuff, actually, all stuff, should be free because profits are filthy.
For the Wall Street campers, housing grows on trees and storks deliver small businesses. They oppose banks making money on home mortgages and loans to entrepreneurs. Pollster Doug Schoen finds a third are willing to use violence to get their way.
It is bad enough that Obama is trying to recruit this destructive cult for partisan purposes. It is even worse that he is not alone.
Mitt Romney, the probable GOP presidential nominee, foolishly gave credence to the protesters’ distorted vision that American society consists of a few haves oppressing a multitude of have-nots, with nothing in the middle.
“I don’t worry about the top 1 percent,” Romney told a New Hampshire audience. “They’re doing just fine by themselves. I worry about the 99 percent in America. And so I look at what’s happening on Wall Street, and my own view is, boy I understand how those people feel … The people in this country are upset.”
Yes, yes, about 75 percent of Americans are upset about the economy and the lack of jobs. But it verges on insanity to say that the protesters in lower Manhattan are typical examples of that angst, and thus deserving of mainstream support.
To endorse the radical movement’s sentiments is to deny reality and make the jobs crisis worse. More taxes, debt and regulation would kill the future. If new entitlements are created, it’s game over.
Obama already has made the financial system a pinata. Now that it’s spilled its candy — Goldman Sachs is losing money, hooray! — he wants to beat it to death to get four more years. He certainly doesn’t need Romney’s help.
As I noted Sunday, New York City has about 3.7 million jobs, yet fewer than 500 committed leftists are holding the city hostage with their Woodstock tent city. Everybody knows they are torturing the First Amendment, but nobody has the guts to say “Enough!”
Mayor Bloomberg has come up especially small in this emergency. He laments the protesters selfishness in harming local businesses and residents, yet is too timid to forge a solution.
So he dispatches a garrison of New York’s Finest to baby-sit a group of hooligans who occasionally attack them, spew anti-Semitic rants and turn the streets into toilets. And working New Yorkers pick up the exorbitant tab for the stand-off.
Someday, there might be a comic angle to this drama, but not yet. For now, Occupy Wall Street is shaping up as a tragedy that will doom the hopes of millions of Americans who simply want an honest government and a decent job.
Israel’s ‘killer’ gamble
Even as they often ignore Palestinian attacks, American leaders have a knee-jerk habit of demanding that Israel take “risks for peace.” Perhaps they will admit the prisoner swap with Hamas qualifies as the mother of all risks.
Israel’s compact with its citizen-soldiers led it to turn over 1,027 Palestinians arrested on serious charges, some for multiple murders. In exchange, Israel got back one lone soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was 19 when he was kidnapped in 2006.
With the recidivism rate among jihadists released from America’s prison at Guantanamo Bay 25 percent, it is almost certain that some of the terrorists released will return to their murderous ways.
Consider that more than 280 were serving life sentences. One man masterminded a hotel attack during Passover that killed 30 people, one seized a bus and drove it off a cliff, killing 16, and another participated in a coffee-house massacre that killed seven. A woman set free helped a suicide bomber attack a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem that killed 15 people.
In his address to the nation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reported that he delivered Shalit to his parents and said, “I have brought your son back home.”
But he called the release of so many killers “a hard day” for the victims’ families and added: “Any released terrorist who returns to terrorism — his blood is upon his head. The State of Israel is different from its enemies: Here, we do not celebrate the release of murderers. Here, we do not applaud those who took life.”
For all its difficulty, the swap offers proof of Israel’s distinction. It is long past the time for all America’s leaders to recognize the values that make her our one true ally in the Mideast.
Putting $$ where your Web is
A reminder for the Warren Buffetts out there who want to pay more taxes: The Department of the Treasury accepts voluntary payments to lower the national debt.
Just go to the Web site http://www.pay.gov and follow the links to Treasury.
Happy giving, and thanks.
Sagging intellect
So Susan Sarandon called Pope Benedict “a Nazi.” It just proves some people will say anything when the career and the jowls are sagging.
‘Speechless’ O
Top headline of the day: “Obama’s Teleprompter Stolen.”
After that softball set-up, the story writes itself.
Love to work at nothing
Reader Don Gill spiesamissing link in the Wall Street protesters. “Just awild guess but if yougrab a few and did some background checks into their upbringing, I’ll bet you find their parents did a lousy job of passing on the work ethic,” hewrites. To judge fromthe mailbag, he is not alone in that view.