Occupy This October 13, 2011

I’ve been following the Occupy Wall Street movement and some of it’s cross country clones with interest these last few weeks. I love that these guys are out there sleeping in the rain, being degraded, and getting assaulted for their beliefs.  I applaud the determination. I do also have to say that while they make a few valid points, those points are generally occluded by their problem solving skills.

I do think the government and the business circles need to uncopulate, and stay away from each other.  The large corporations being paid billions of our tax dollars which they then pay to the politicians (I think it’s referred to as “money laundering” in many circles) needs to end.  Governments giving tax breaks to large corporations to get them to locate someplace needs to end.  Governments forcing small businesses to pay taxes while the box stores driving them under do not have to pay, needs to end.  There is something shifty about the Federal Reserve.  I will wholeheartedly agree with these statements.

However….

The rest of it guys?  Come on.

You can’t pay for your student loans?  Well you shouldn’t have taken out the loan.  Can’t pay your mortgage?  Shouldn’t have taken out the loan, or you should have unloaded before you got to this point.  You are acting just like the government you claim to despise.  You are spending money you do not have, and have no hope of making; and now you want someone else to pay for it. You’re making Karl Marx blush.

You cannot get government out of business by sticking the government further into business.  Think about it.

Suck it up or find a real solution.  You have the power to make lasting change, you just don’t seem to want to make  logical change.  (Of course, since logic rarely makes a good slogan to yell while marching down the street, I doubt you will.)  If you don’t want to pay insane interest rates on credit cards, don’t get credit cards, then you don’t have to pay them. If you don’t want to pay BoA’s bank fees, boycott BoA, then you don’t have to pay them.

Take some tips from the commonsense brigade.  If you don’t want to deal with drunk people, don’t go to bars.  Don’t like porn, don’t watch it.  If you don’t want to support sweatshops, don’t buy the clothes and you won’t.  If you want to eat organically grown food, buy it and don’t buy the food grown with pesticides.  It’s called responsibility people, get some.

Unfortunately too many of you want the convenience of a billion BoA branches, so you would rather have the government stop them from charging high rates for their services, so you can still bank there.  Do you have no self control?  Too many of you want to go to college and not pay for it, so you would rather have the government stop banks from collecting the money they lent you.    Too many of you have a sense that you are some how special, that you deserve to have someone else work their ass off so you can draw stick figures on the sidewalk.  Do you have no self-respect?

Come on people, as long as you’re cluttering up parks across the country, at least you could make it count for something.