I’ve been reading on blogs and hearing on talk shows about some Wall Street protesters comparing themselves to the Egyptian and other Middle Eastern protesters and “Color” Revolutionaries. And some bloggers have been noting how these OWS protesters don’t really know what everyday life is like in Egypt and other areas there, because, if they did, then they would probably feel like a bunch of fools.
I’m not going to comment on the current OWS protesters, but I did write the following in a post earlier this past February, regarding the Wisconsin unions, teachers, police, etc., protesting Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans making or attempting to make huge budget cuts and cutting pensions and, I think the main issue was collective bargaining.
The Egyptian protests were happening at the same time as the Wisconsin protests. I wrote this on February 18th:
Several times now, I have heard references on the radio talk shows to this struggle between government employees and taxpayers as “class warfare,” a war between the private sector and the public or government sector. Someone on the radio referred to the old phrase, the “haves vs. the have-nots,” but now the “haves” are the government class, except they have acquired what they have through dishonest means: through the coercive, confiscatory power of the State.
And now we have all the unions and teachers and police in Wisconsin protesting state government cuts, while the Democrats in the state legislature are running and hiding like little cowards.
Jason Lewis on the radio suggested that the Wisconsin attorney general should demand a special election to replace the Democrat state legislators who are derelicts of their sworn oaths of office. Will all this turn violent? …
Some people have been ignorantly comparing these public employee protests in Wisconsin with the protests in Egypt, referring to the “workers” in Wisconsin as the “common people,” protesting the state or local government who wants to cut their benefits and pensions, when in reality the government and these public “workers” and their unions are on the same page. The real class warfare, the real fight is between the government’s employees and the taxpayers or private sector. It is the actual productivity from the private sector whose earnings, profits and funds are confiscated by the government through its coercive police power, that is used to fund these public employees’ high salaries, benefits and pensions. It is the taxpayers and the Tea Party people who elected the new governor and Republican legislators because they were getting sick of being taken for a ride, sick of their freedom and their right to their own earnings being egregiously whacked.
In total contrast to these Wisconsin protests, the protests in Egypt are for their freedom — freedom from State and police aggression, freedom of speech and religion and dissent, and that’s it (regardless of what the paranoid nutsos on the right want people to believe). The paranoid conservatives view what is going on in Egypt as some kind of insurrection of Muslim extremists. With the conservatives, constant Tea Party “freedom from government intrusions” rhetoric covers what really is their true authoritarian love of and obedience to the State and the State’s authority and power.
So the Wisconsin protests are not like those in Egypt. In Egypt the protests are of the everyday workers (and the students and youths), who don’t like the State and its agents living off the workers’ productivity. The State is a parasite and their leader of 30 years Mubarak has accumulated billions off his own people. But now they have successfully peeled off that leech.
But in Wisconsin, the leeches are the agents of the State who are protesting because they want even more from the actual producers, the productive middle class. And let’s be honest about this now, it isn’t a “living wage” these government employees want or want extended, it’s the extravagant pay, benefits and pensions far above what the market would provide in a free and open exchange, without coercion or threats. It is the extravagant benefit packages that workers in the dreaded private sector could never get. And pensions after the age of 50 or 60 that private sector workers rarely get. None of this has to do with a “living wage,” but in actuality is nothing more than welfare hand-outs.
However, don’t think that I’m just picking on government employees — It’s the same deal with the Wall Street parasites: Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke going into Congress and fraudulently threatening them with “civil unrest” and Martial Law if they didn’t fork over the tax-funded loot, nothing more than extortion. That is what our entire society has become, thanks to FDR, Johnson and Nixon, the Bushes and the Clintons — the Government-Industrial-Parasite-Complex.
And it’s the same damn thing with the military industrial complex, with their false flags, their provocation of terrorism in order to fight it. This literally has become a Sodom and Gomorrah public trough criminal society.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling all teachers and all police “criminals” because of their voracious appetite for extravagant pay packages, overtime and huge pensions and tenure all at the expense of the productive middle class — just most of them — at least in Wisconsin as we can plainly see. No, I’m just kidding. But I agree with Karl Denninger at Market Ticker, who suggests that those teachers who called in sick in order to go to the state capitol should all be fired. And he suggests that there are plenty of people out of work in Wisconsin who are probably intelligent and qualified enough to replace the lying, dishonest teachers.
Now, don’t get me started on teachers’ unions and this thing called “tenure,” now. Give. Me. A. Break. There are too many teachers who suck now, because they are utterly incompetent and just plain dumb, and they have no right to be teaching children. We can’t have dumb people teaching the next generation, but that is what we have had too much of now.
And the police. Now, what is this with police officers deliberately doing overtime in their last year before retirement in order to jack up their pensions? These are law enforcement officers, whose job it is to “enforce the law”! I don’t think that deliberately screwing your fellow neighbors and local taxpayers is a particularly honest way to “enforce the law.”
That is the problem now with the State. Because of its various monopolies, such as in education and policing and territorial protection — and yes, there are private schools, but the State has a monopolistic control over the education industry — there is no competitive incentive for these government monopoly workers to be productive, and to serve the interests of their fellow citizens (and taxpayers), and the poorer quality workers with lower quality output or lower quality work do not suffer any consequences for their poor work, or their lack of productivity, whereas in the dreaded private sector, the bad ones get fired (usually), or their employers go out of business. In the private sector, employers have an incentive to keep better quality workers on the payroll, but in the public, government, monopoly sector, the employers do not have that pressure.
But most of all, freedom is what creates prosperity for the most people in any society. When the State uses its armed power to restrict the people, their rights of association and contract, their right to make use of their property and skills however they want, in order for the State to protect certain professions from competition, that is when more people become less prosperous, and there is less opportunity and productivity in society, and more “strife,” and the more restrictions imposed by the State on society, the more poverty there is.
The Wall Street protesters need to understand that many Wall Street fatcats for decades have been becoming fatcats by means of State-corporate welfare handouts and, most of all through acts of legislation and regulation and through the State-controlled apparatus of central banking. They need to be protesting in Washington not to get a “jobs bill” passed (that would further sink America) but to get rid of the Federal Reserve, and end the regulatory fascism-welfare State apparatus that have been the primary enablers of Wall Street’s pilfering and embezzling of the 99%’s wealth.
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