We have entered a new phase of the endless Occupy Wall Street sleepover. Not working is hard work. After a month of tying up the police, generating mounds of trash, railing against Jews while holding up “Nazi Bankers” signs, grappling with pervs, rapists and thieves in their ranks, communing with avowed communists, and hobnobbing with 1 percenter celebrities donning 99 percenter costumes (phew!), the Occupiers are rallying around a new mascot:
Robin Hood.
The crime-plagued Carnival of 1,001 Demands is now focused on one unified agenda item: a soak-the-rich tax on financial transactions worldwide. The corporate-bashing Canadian magazine “Adbusters” (funded by left-wing Wall Street trader Robert Halper) initiated the Occupy Wall Street siege last summer and published a new online manifesto this week explaining the call for an October 29 “Robin Hood march”:
“Across the globe the 99 percent are marching! … It’s now time to amp up the edgy theatrics … deviant pranks, subversive performances and playful detournements of all kinds.” There’s been no shortage of deviance, unfortunately, what with protesters defecating on police cars, urinating on each other’s tents, stealing food and phones, and exposing themselves to children. But I digress. As the movement “matures,” the leaders overseeing an unruly mob in Guido Fawkes masks exhorted the masses to “occupy the core of our global system.”
October 29 is the eve of the G20 Leaders Summit in France, you see, and that’s the date on which Adbusters wants its followers to “rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediately impose a 1 percent ROBIN HOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.” The money, say longtime champions of the tax, would go to “fund crucial action against climate change.” The Occupiers’ message? “We want you to slow down some of that $1.3 trillion easy money that’s sloshing around the global casino each day — enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world.”
Say what? Panicked governments forked over trillions to rescue politically connected, basket-case banks, and the solution is … punishing individual investors, creating less efficient capital markets, and spreading the wealth around to global-warming zealots and welfare-state overlords?
Rest assured, the text of the Robin Hood tax manifesto will be chanted in ignorant zombie unison — using the “human microphone” method of call and drone — in dingy occupier camps from NYC to San Francisco and every blue dot in between.
Showcasing their economic illiteracy, the Occupiers remain clueless about the real-world consequences of their redistributionist claptrap. And they’re ridiculously oblivious to the irony of adopting anti-tax crusader “Robin Hood” as their hero.
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