Vancouver activists corrupt Occupy movement
By Harvey Oberfeld
This blog comes to you from the United States …where the Occupy movement is real and still relevant.
Make no mistake about it there is a BIG difference between the majority of those keeping the Occupy movement alive down south and those Occupy pretenders in Vancouver/Victoria who have co-opted and stolen the original cause.
In the US, the Occupy masses are the real thing: thousands of individuals, single parents and families who, for years and years, were hard-working people, but who have fallen on hard times and unemployment due to the sagging economy; home-owners who were foreclosed upon because of the criminal …yet never charged … ponzi-scheme actions of deregulated US banks and mortgage lenders; and working people fed up with the growing gap between the rich and the poor in a republic, where the government is all but paralysed by a political process run amok.
The Occupy movement may have started out with those ideas in Vancouver and Victoria too … but has largely deteriorated into just the “usual” unemployables and homeless raising hell for a whole different set of reasons; trying to get more free housing (without work, of course); and, a large group of activists and anarchists with few aims beyond having a party and sticking it to “the man” any way they can.
And what has made it all much worse in Vancouver is that the lefty Vision mayor and council can’t tell the difference.
So rather than enforce city bylaws forbidding anyone without permits to erect structures on city property (not even a tiny Falun Gong one-person hut, not bothering ANYONE except the Communists in the Chinese consulate), the Vancouver politburo has decided to abandon its own laws and try to mollify the anarchists and homeless unemployables, while the taxpayers pay and pay and pay.
But the truth is the Vancouver Occupiers, in their present format, will accomplish nothing for the real working people or unemployed. Just make revolving parts of the city look like hell.
I support the US Occupy movement and deemands fror a better, fairer and more equal society. And readers of my blog know I have ranted before it became fashionable, about the unfair growing gap between the poor, the working class and the very wealthy. And when I was working, I particularly enjoyed doing stories on the topic, so the rich would know their greed and selfishness was being noticed and reported. Even if not acted upon by their friends in government.
So I’m no right wing enemy of the workers.
But the truth is the situtation, economically, job-wise,mortgage-related and and just financially in Canada is NOTHING CLOSE to the disaster befalling the US.
Nevertheless, just because of the widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of us up north, I regarded the Occupy movement in Vancouver and Victoria and Toronto as being quite laudible and legitimate. And the REAL protest to narrow the gap, increase workers’ pay, shift the tax burden from the middle class to the wealthy again, should continue.
But the roving Occupy homeless, unemployable face-tattooed, spiked nose, ear, tongue and lip crowd and their mentally-troubled coterie and anarchist organizers (who have insulted passersby, forced WORKING food cart operators to move away, and disrupted and insulted media just trying to cover their “protest”) have ruined the Occupy brand.
Time for them to pack up their tents …until the next excuse they can find.
And time for the real Occupy people to find some other way of continuing their struggle.
Harv Oberfeld is a blogger and retired journalist. This column originally appeared in his blog, Keeping It Real.
