Some Words Of Wisdom From Big Bird

The oligarchs declared victory against Occupy Wall Street this week.

With OWS raided out of their home at Zuccotti Park and with the corporate news media having turned Thursday's "Day of Action" into a "OWS Attacks the 99% and Keeps Them From Getting To Work", they think they've got this protest thing wrapped up solid.

The key is always to get the 99% back to fighting each rather than fighting the oligarchs.

And they're very busy doing that right now.

In some cases, they've been quite successful.

At least if you read the tabloids and watch the corporate news media.

But Juan Gonzalez has some words of wisdom on the movement:

They aren’t going anywhere.

During a long and turbulent day of street protests, the ragtag rebels of Occupy Wall Street served notice that their two-month-old movement against the nation’s big banks and corporations is now stronger than ever.

Sure, Mayor Bloomberg and the police arrested hundreds of them this week and evicted their tents and sleeping bags, their computers and their books, from Zuccotti Park.

But no one can stifle the burning belief among so many of these young people that America has lost its way — or that it is up to them to change things.

Critics who label them slovenly misfits, troublemakers and drug addicts, have not bothered to take the time to engage them.

Nor do those critics understand that social movements are never neat and tidy or easy to decipher — not at the beginning.

Even in the midst of an unprecedented police presence in lower Manhattan, with dozens of checkpoints set up and cops demanding IDs for anyone getting near the Financial District, new supporters of the protest kept finding their way to Zuccotti.

With more austerity measures to come, with the sovereign debt/banking crisis continuing to sweep through Europe and threatening to bring about real collapse of the financial system just four years after the last near collapse, with more layoffs looming and Social Security and Medicare cuts counted on as the solution to the country's economic problems, you can bet more people will find their way down to Zuccotti.

The NY Times reports today that one out of every three people are living below the poverty line or just barely above it.

That's 100 million people.

After a lost decade of flat wages and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the findings can be thought of as putting numbers to the bleak national mood — quantifying the expressions of unease erupting in protests and political swings. They convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure.

The Census Bureau, which published the poverty data two weeks ago, produced the analysis of those with somewhat higher income at the request of The New York Times. The size of the near-poor population took even the bureau’s number crunchers by surprise.

“These numbers are higher than we anticipated,” said Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.”

Bloomberg and Murdoch and Zuckerman and and the rest of the oligarchs want you to go back to meekly obeying your corporate masters, running the machines and the offices more productively for less pay, taking on debts you'll never pay off to educate yourself, and buying, buying, buying the newest latest must have gadget and consumer trend with money you don't have so you can distract yourself from just how badly you're getting fucked by a system that threw you overboard thirty fucking years ago.

They think they can put the lid back on the unrest with force and lies and deception and distraction.

But these numbers don't lie and the despair in the country is real and that cannot be erased with lies and deception and distraction.

Even Big Bird knows where the problem lies.