Those who think the Occupy Wall Street protesters are harmless should watch a chilling interview Michael Moore gave on CNN.
As protesters surrounding him nodded their heads and raised their fists, Moore told Anderson Cooper that the goal of the protests is not to change the American capitalist system through elections.
“This movement is so beyond just, hey, let’s get behind this candidate, get them elected to office,” Moore said.
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| Michael Moore gestures at an Occupy Wall Street protest (AP photo) |
“Those days are over. You know, we’ve all worked for candidates. We’ve all voted. We’ve all participated. And what have we gotten out of it?
"Where are we? We're in the worst shape we have been in this country that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and so, this movement is not right now concerned with candidates or specific bills in Congress,” the filmmaker added.
Instead, Moore said, the goal is to eradicate capitalism and replace it with a new, albeit unspecified system.
“The reason we’re not occupying Washington . . . right now is the congressmen or senators are the employees of Wall Street,” Moore said. “We’re kind of tired of dealing with the middleman or the servant.”
The problem, he said, is “with capitalism and with corporate America . . . 2011 capitalism is an evil system, set up to benefit the few at the expense of the many.”
So what system do you want? Anderson asked.
“No system right now that exists,” Moore said. “We’re going to create that system. This movement . . . is going to create a democratic economic system . . . Whatever we come up with, the American people are going to control this economy.”
The tea party movement wants to achieve change through the political system. But Moore said Occupy Wall Street has different goals.
“We’re no longer settling for we live in a democracy because we voted for a politician,” he said.
The fact that police have now arrested close to 1,000 protesters underscores that they are willing to use violence and civil disobedience to achieve their ends. Ironically, they vilify millionaires and billionaires, yet their target includes left-wing heroes like President Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, George Soros, and Moore himself.
Nor do the protesters have much grasp of the world. One woman told a Fox News reporter that socialism in North Korea — where hundreds of thousands have died of starvation — is far preferable to capitalism in South Korea.
The fact that Obama and key Democrats have endorsed the protesters and have identified with them will help sink them in the next election.
“Obama, the Occupy Wall Streeters, and their other Democratic Party supporters don’t seem to value democracy,” Phil Kerpen, whose eye-opening book “Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America — and How to Stop Him” just came out. “They don’t care that the American people clearly rejected their agenda one year ago in the 2010 elections.”
The protesters’ “principal focus is to institutionalize envy under the guise of social justice,” Kerpen says. “This is a losing agenda with the American people, who are angry that their 2010 message is being ignored. They can be counted on to say it again even more loudly come 2012.”
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. He is a New York Times best-selling author of books on the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA. His latest, "The Secrets of the FBI," has just been published. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via email. Go Here Now.