In case you haven’t heard, or live in Bumfuck Nowhere, the Toronto chapter of the Occupy movement begins on Saturday October 15, the aptly named Occupy Toronto, ready to set up camp on Bay Street. There will be ordinary citizens both young and old taking a stand against unchecked corporate power, possible G20 flavoured police activity, and a few hipster douchebag drumcirclers doing their thing no matter what the occasion.
But most of all, there will be tools like Kevin O’Leary, distorting and oversimplifying the motives of the movement, displaying either a complete ignorance of facts or full knowledge of facts which are in his interest to suppress. Either way, you’ll hear the same baseless assertions – that it’s just a bunch of lazy mooks blaming the successful class for their woes, or suburban hippies with no coherent agenda, left wing ‘nutbars’ inciting class warfare, etc. Here’s the video, because this is a multimedia blog mofo.
Kevin O’Leary is accustomed to talking down to employees, or intellectuals who prefer the high road, so he resorts to name calling instead of addressing facts.
Fortunately I’m none of the above, and as a standup comic I can match his maturity level and then some.
This walking pile of man-shaped waste named Kevin O’Leary holds a position that is essentially based on supply side economics, often called Trickle Down Theory. The idea is simple – give tax breaks and perks to the most successful, aka the rich and corporations, because these are entrepreneurs and innovators who will use the extra money to reinvest in their businesses to create more jobs, more revenue, more consumption and consequently more money that will flow into the economy and trickle down to everyone. They’re gonna make it rain.
Except that’s not exactly what happened in the real non-theoretical world. Trickle Down economics has been the backbone of economic policy in the US and UK since the conservative revolution of the 80s, and in the past 30 years it created the massive income inequality and corporate abuse that eventually lead to this global recession. The rich have gotten richer, middle class incomes stagnated, and the poor got a whole lot poorer. There’s a reason it’s not called The Giant Wad Of Cash In Everyone’s Pocket Theory. And unlike Fact-Free O’Leary, here’s some data to back up my words bitch.
Baby Boomers like Kevin O’Leary lecture the world about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, because that’s how they made their millions. They forget or don’t even realize that they grew up in a postwar booming economy, when jobs were plentiful, higher education was affordable and Reality TV didn’t exist. They ‘battled’ their way through paradise and emerged with a sense of entitlement that extends their greed into everyone’s lives. They used their financial clout to infect the political system, bend it to their will, and created an economic climate where the barriers to attaining the same riches become increasingly insurmountable. The proof is in your $400 pudding – when the top 1% control the bottom 99%, something isn’t right.
Corporations innovate and do great things, but that doesn’t mean they are above the law. That’s the core demand of this movement, and there’s nothing nutty about it.
Asshole.
Danish Anwar 