Occupy Wall Street

 The Occupy protests came to Vancouver. They're camped out by the art gallery, which is where all the protests happen, anyway.

   Just a thought: every time I hear about these protests on the radio or on TV, someone invariably asks: "Do they even know why they're there?" I only hear this on the radio, the TV, or the traditional print media.

   This is because in the dawn of the protests, a lot of Wall Street firms hired communications firms to call the media and salt the ground with harmful rumours. I think a lot of those rumours caught on. I think the main rumour is the protesters' supposed lack of direction.
  There is no lack of direction. Well, there is, but there's a good reason.

   Through the changing of laws, through a bought Congress/Parliament, through executive bonuses, regulations that protect incorporated entities, through a Treasury run by former Goldman-Sachs executives, a tiny sliver of the population ran off with all our money, and when they lost that money, ran off with additional three-quarters of a trillion dollars in bailout money. That money is theirs, not fair and square, but legally. There's a difference between 'legal' and 'fair and square.'

  The OWS protesters, the 99%, have no idea how to get that money back. But they can't just go home: someone took their money, their benefits, their jobs, cut their salary and hours, and they were expected to just continue to buy cheap overseas goods, watch TV, and play video games instead of doing something about it. Instead they woke up, and people of all ages are now taking to the streets.

   So that's why they are there. They're protesting a game in which the rules got changed. They have no idea what should happen, but something needs to happen. They're going to stay there until it does. For all our sakes, I hope they win.