Occupy, Don't Ossify!

I made a point of wandering by the Seattle Central Community College campus the other day, having heard that the Occupy Seattle troops had encamped there, their overnight presence at Westlake Mall an ongoing challenge to keeping something like working relationships with the PTB.  And quite an encampment it is, replete with scores of small tents and mega-buzz.  It was good to hear that the SCCC potentate had backed off of his small-minded grumbly threatening tone about folks camping on their property.  I hear there are SCCC faculty offering instructional sessions to the Occupiers.  I don't doubt that there were CC students commendably in the first ranks of the Occupiers at Westlake.

It is thrilling to me to see this activism.  I am truly agog over this international Occupation.

I was stunned a while back when my generally-very-liberal hair-cutter remarked that the demonstrators just needed to "get a job."  If only.  Well yes, a job might be a great thing for the gazillions of Americans out of work and/or working for what amount to slave wages, barely covering child-care costs and often with abysmal or no health care benefits, while the fat-cats get their billion-dollar bonuses year in and out.  That is not the point.  We have arrived at a system that enriches the richest at the expense of all the rest of us thanks to casino politics where the vast majority of politicians are effectively owned by the corporate interests who pay for their whopping campaign bills and also control the "mainstream media" so the (dare I say) silent majority who settle for passively letting the tube infuse them or don't even bother with "news" don't have to be troubled with facing the absolute corruption that is our politics today.  And the whining and sniveling from the uber-rich is astounding and needs more attention from those organizations supposedly in the business of edifying anyone still resigned to getting their "news" through classical media.  This embodies such a blatant assumption of entitlement and victimhood at the same time that it is clear where the tea-dregs learned it.  Oh you pitiful things.

It's a wonderful thing that the Occupy folks designated Wall Street as their target.  Many of the primary WS players have featured huge CEO bonuses after accepting taxpayer bailouts to save them from their outrageous flim-flam packaging of certain-to-fail mortgages that they had collaborated in and in many cases fraudulently approved and then I gather sold-short against, further profiting while providing no value to anyone but themselves.  These are definitely not creators of jobs.  The corruption stinks to high heaven.  The payoffs they have made to our congress-swine to eviscerate the regulations make a pig-pile seem sweet.

I was also delighted that Elizabeth Warren, the consumer-rights advocate running for Ted K's Massachusetts Senate seat, has received some serious props as a major inspiration for the Occupy movement.