[The Liberty Insight Newswire is an aggregation of what we consider to be important financial and political news and commentary from across the web.]

This week’s newswire examines the Occupy Wall Street movement. What the heck is it? Do they even know? The movement without a goal or even a direction started with one central theme- express displeasure with the current system where the average person gets screwed while the top 1% get bailed out.

The OWS movement is a mixed bag, ranging from socialist progressives to hardcore libertarians. Initially treated as a joke by the mainstream media and portrayed as a bunch of unemployed, uninformed Commie hippies sitting around playing drums and finger painting, the movement has spread to multiple cities and has grown in numbers and diversity (and cameo appearances).

While I don’t agree with all of the protestors occupying Wall Street I can certainly empathize with their plight. After all, the common man has gotten screwed. The bankers screwed up royally, got bailed out by the government with the people’s money, and then paid themselves huge bonuses.

What these people are actually protesting, whether they know it or not, is not Capitalism or even corporations themselves, but “Corporatism” a.k.a. “Crony-Capitalism” a.k.a “Soft-Facism”. They’re protesting a system where big corporations give $millions to politicians in exchange for $billions in bailouts and special favors. A system that protects the big, politically connected corporations from competition, through regulations written by those very corporations. Where the Federal reserve prints new money to finance big banks and government contractors, while the average worker only gets stagnant wages and rising prices.

Unfortunately, so far, most of the anger has been misplaced; mistakenly directed at the “greedy” corporations and especially the big banks. Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for the banks and agree that many of the bankers are a bunch of greedy, deranged money whores. The banks were complicit in the housing bust and the destruction of our economy. But… should we blame the banks for asking for a bailout or the politicians who gave it to them? Of course the corporations are going to take a bailout if they can get it; just as the socialist contingent at OWS would take free education (paid by others) if they could get it. It is the responsibility of the politicians to say “No!”

None of this would be an issue if the government simply followed the Constitution. Hopefully, this is a lesson those at OWS will learn while they’re camped out on Wall Street with Captain Midnight (see video below).

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“Captain Midnight Responds to Glenn Beck” End the Fed/Occupy Wall Street
Youtube

Ok, so it’s not exactly a news article but it is a direct feed from OWS. This guy “gets it” and does an excellent job of summarizing the root of the problems with “Corporatism”. He first gained notoriety with this OWS rant/speech that went viral. “They’re using inflation as a hidden tax to Fuck the people!”

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Occupy Wall Street: What’s Really Going On.
ChrisMartenson.com October 13,2011

Chris Martenson provides a balanced and rational take on OWS in this article and short video. From the article:

The ‘protest’ is as much about participation and discussion as about airing grievances. People are talking. They are debating. They are doing exactly what you learn about in grade school when they teach you about how our political system has worked in the past and is supposed to work today. The difference, of course, is that no real debate, discussion, nor real participation is happening in Congress or the Senate.

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Occupied by Government
Mises.org October 11, 2011

The OWS movement started without a clear goal. One of the more socialist factions of the movement tried to clarify things by creating a list of demands to make things more “fair”. What they amount to is, “the corporations got their government favors so we want our government handout.” In this opinion piece, Rod Rojas explains why these demands are not only impractical (read, batshit stupid), but actually reinforce the root problem of the government handing out goodies to special interests.

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And finally… the mainstream media take on it all. In her defense, this video was from early on in the protest, but the condescending, elitist attitude oozing out of Erin Burnette is enough to make your skin crawl. Apparently, at CNN, this constitutes journalism: Go to a protest, film the craziest people, ambush an uninformed person with a loaded interview, and ask, “Seriously?” Seriously, Erin? I could pay back the bailout money if I was allowed to leverage up with other people’s money, borrow at 0% from the Fed, and loan it back to the government at 3% while the Fed took all of my bad investments off of my books.