OWS Manifesto: Massive Theft

An early OWS manifesto has come to light thanks to the Breitbart email dump of the movement’s communications. One email chain shows that MSM figures like MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan and Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi simultaneously covering and advising the .083 percenters on their message and demands.

The manifesto puts together a list of demands which, among other things, violate private property rights and amount to a huge act of theft.

A MESSAGE TO AMERICA FROM THE PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY IN ZUCOTTI PARK

Dear fellow Americans,

We are assembled in Zucotti Park — which we’ve renamed Liberty Plaza — in the financial district of New York, because we believe that the American economy is heading in the wrong direction and we have a few ideas for what to do about it.

There is a feeling shared by a growing number of people on the streets of the world that the global economy has become a kind of Ponzi scheme, a global casino, run by and for the benefit of the 1 percent.

We believe that it is possible to inject justice into the global economy. We have come up with the following list of things that can be done right now to rejuvenate democracy and economic justice in our country:

•        Halt foreclosures for the unemployed, sick and elderly

•        Increase funding to public services by taxing the richest 1 percent

•        Forgive all student loan debt

•        Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act in order to control speculation

•        Work with the other G20 nations to implement a 1% “Robin Hood” tax on all financial transactions and currency trades

•        Ban high-frequency ‘flash’ trading and bring sanity to the markets

•        Break up the “too big to fail” banks that threaten our future

•        Arrest the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 meltdown and bring them to justice

•        Ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence corporate money has on our elected representatives in Washington

If you agree with any of these demands, then join us!  We will stay here in our encampment in Liberty Plaza until President Obama responds to each of these demands.  This is just the beginning, there is more to come as we work together to reshape America.

 — The People’s Assembly of New York City

These campers don’t even have the legal right to camp in Zucotti Park, which is privately owned, let alone rename it. That third point has consistently shown up in the “We Are the 99 Percent.” Students got themselves into massive debt of their own free will, and thanks to some combination of factors including largely useless degrees and a horrible economy, can’t get the jobs they need to pay off their debt. The government — Obama’s government — is culpable at both ends of this, now, since on the one hand it took over the student loan industry, and on the other hand Democrats wrecked the housing and have blown the past three years as stewards of the economy. They made it worse, making it harder for these students to get jobs.

But instead of connecting those dots, the People’s Assembly goes for freebies. Just give us your money or we’ll keep on attacking the police and threatening to shut down Wall Street.

It’s blackmail, basically, perpetrated by childish and gullible people who got themselves into trouble and now want a mulligan.

Funnily enough, the occupiers never adopted this manifesto out of fear that their homeless cadres would see the demand for student loan forgiveness as elitist pap. Imagine that.