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Alright, everyone calm down before we have to call in the National Guard

Can you see them over there? I know it’s a bad picture, but there are four protestors “occupying” Trenton across from the statehouse. Four.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

That’s it. That is it. Four protestors.

If there was ever an example of how completely blown out of proportion the mainstream media has made a story, it has to be these various “occupations” around the nation. Sure, there seems to be a solid 6,000 or so that are hunkered down in New York City by Wall Street itself and yeah, it does seem like there is something going on in Oakland. But outside of those two locations, there is absolutely no sustained “occupation” going on anywhere.

And that’s why I think this story has pretty much died down over the last few weeks. Thankfully, someone in the media took a step back from this fabricated frenzy and realized that on any given day there are more people protesting to end abortion than there are people “occupying” various places around the nation.

Four protestors in Trenton. FOUR! There have been protests in Trenton during the last year where tens of thousands of people clogged up every road in and out of the city and they only received a passing glance by the media. Yet, there are four protestors who think that they are “occupying” Trenton and this is written up as part of the mainstream media’s stories?

Give me a break.

The protestors are out there, but nothing is going to change. Photo from Tom Clark's Beyond the Pale.

I’ve got news for those folks – the people protesting on Wall Street, united or not, will always be defeated. Why? Simple. If your rank and file members are anti-Semitic or anti-any group of people, you will never win over the masses. Oh, sure – you might draw in a few thousand people in New York City and maybe even a million or so from coast-to-coast. But even if you drew in 1 million people to support your cause, you’d be a minor fraction of a percent of the American public. Here’s the simple math: 1,000,000 people who are protesting (and, apparently, don’t mind the anti-Semites in their ranks) divided by 320,000,000 Americans = 0.003125 percent of the American public.

That’s not even enough support to warrant one millisecond of any Wall Street banker’s day.

But that’s not my message – that’s just some discussion on what I saw in that hateful, disgusting video. Here’s my message to the OWS protestors:

You are mainly the cause of your own pain.

I’m in the rare position to be able to feel the pain that these protestors are complaining about. These are the kids who went to college, majored in the humanities, and now can’t find a job with their art, English, sociology, political science, gender studies, etc. degree. I feel their pain because I graduated from my college with a bachelors degree in English. The difference between where the protestors are in life and where I am in life is that I didn’t view that humanities degree as a means to an end. In other words, I never thought that getting that degree 1) guaranteed me a job after graduating, 2) guaranteed me any respect after graduating, and/or 3) meant anything other than that I read a lot of literature and cranked out a bunch of academic-style research papers.

The larger difference between the protestors and a guy like me, though, is that I don’t believe my own bullshit. Here’s a brief explanation of what I’m talking about… Thanks to my work with volunteering to my local fraternity, I’ve watched a generation of young kids grow into an unrealistic adulthood. Their adulthood is unrealistic because they actually believe the bullshit that they spew. For example, it’s not uncommon for me to encounter an undergraduate who tells me that his Father/uncle/cousin/Grandfather is a major executive at XYZ Corporation and that once he graduates he’s going to get a good job there (or some variant of that story). And, almost invariably, when it comes time for that undergraduate to move on from college they either don’t graduate at all or wind up working at a completely different company than the one that their familial relationship was supposed to just hand them. Regardless of that reality playing out time and time again, I see more and more young people coming into the academic environment with that entitled mindset. As one of my old professors tells me whenever we have lunch together, there are kids entering college today with the attitude of, “I have arrived!”

And no one gives a shit that they’ve arrived.

So if you are one of the many, many protestors on Wall Street who are complaining that you can’t find a job because of the evil corporations, what you should really be complaining about is a university atmosphere that served you a tall glass of bullshit-flavored Kool-Aid. That’s right – the very same ivory tower where you fell in love with Chaucer, literary reviews of British literature during the Industrial Revolution, or the gender equality struggle in the Middle East (which is something that I’m passionate about, too), is the same ivory tower that duped you into believing that your passion for these causes and issues would be enough to support your life post-graduation.

They lied to you. The professor that you fell in love with because you really believed and felt that they had a passion for their work – they are part of a much larger, much greedier institution than Wall Street. They push an ideal that has proven throughout the ages to never be sustainable – namely, that you can be a 100% humanistic, artistic society and thrive. It’s not possible. Someone has to actually do the work that moves a person, family, community, and country forward. Someone has to get up in the morning and make the donuts. Someone has to pump the gas. Someone has to mow the lawn. Those are the jobs that a civilized society needs filled.

We don’t need someone to sit around and debate the pros and cons of Shakespearean iambic pentameter in adequately representing the struggle for equality during Elizabethan times. Do people get to sit around and have this argument? Of course they do! Are those people ever going to be YOU? Not likely. The people who get to sit around and sip tea while having these high-minded discussions are the same ones who have been doing that for the last fifty years – and they’re not going anywhere any time soon.

In conclusion, I strongly recommend that the OWS protestors take that rage, take that anger, take that hatred towards a bleak future and direct it towards a societal system that nearly forces us all to go to college. The protestors are also complaining about mountains of student loan debt and no serious jobs to help them pay down the debt. Take it from a guy who graduated with a humanities degree (two, actually, when you count the master’s degree) and $121,000 in student loan debt – I feel your pain. You’ve been lied to all of your lives. However, don’t lash out like spoiled children are wont to do. Instead, now is the time to break free from the intellectual shackles that have been harnessing your free thought and true understanding of reality.

Rip off those shackles. Let loose your mind. Begin to think, seriously, about why the world is as it is today. Why are students graduating in a future where they see no hope? Why are corporations always going to put the concerns of their shareholders (i.e. profit) first? Why is it that your protests won’t mean a thing to anyone who actually matters?

Think about those questions as they exist in reality and work towards a reasonable solution. Strip your mind of the prejudices that an over-liberal education have harnessed them with and come to understand what the real world is like today, tomorrow, and into the future. Protesting the job creators is not the answer, folks. The problem is the perpetuation of a national standard that damn near forces its young people to enroll in a collegiate system that is hyper-focused on making a profit while largely shackling creativity by allowing students to graduate while still believing their own bullshit.

Fix that problem and everything else will eventually fall in line.

My strategy, simply, is to invest in what I know and stick with the basic fundamentals of investing in the stock market. For example, anyone who has been trolling around my network of websites for a while knows that I know a little something about professional wrestling. I’ve been keeping an eye on WWE’s stock performance for years. My study has shown me that the stock, generally, is cyclical around WrestleMania. In other words, the stock usually goes up a little bit around that time of the year and then falls after the show and its hype go away. With that in mind, I bought a bunch of WWE when it was in its lull and then waiting for WrestleMania time to sell. Easy enough, right?

But my strategy hasn’t really been the traditional “buy low, sell high,” rather it has been to take a reasonable amount of risk on those companies which are showing some resilience in the current market like Ford. In December when Ford went to Congress with hat in hand saying that it needed more funds, I wouldn’t invest in the company. But as soon as they came out with projections that showed they could sustain their business without a bailout I put a bunch of money into their stock. The total of my investments in Ford are up 157% as of this writing (and the stock is even down when this post is being written).

I did the same thing with Sirius XM. I know what their product is and enough about their financials to know that this company could be a real threat once it clears up its debt obligations so I invested a ton of money in the stock when it was trading at 14 and 16 cents. The stock now routinely trades in the 40 to 50 cent range and I expect it to trade even higher in the coming months and years. Not a bad deal overall, huh?

But I’m also investing in companies like Barnes & Noble. The difference with Barnes & Noble and the other companies is that I’m not looking so much for an increase in the stock price with this company, but rather I’m looking to acquire their stocks so I can enjoy their quarterly dividend (which, last time around, was a quarter per share). Earning 25% on your investment each quarter is nothing to scoff at – I’ll take it.

I guess the other difference between me and the stereotypical investor is that I’m not dropping huge gobs of money into the market. Where most people think that the typical investor is putting in tens of thousands of dollars, I’m content putting in just a few hundred every few weeks (which has now built me up to a few thousand overall).

I always keep in mind, though, what else I might use that money for instead of investing. For example, if I’m buying $100 worth of Barnes & Noble I might have otherwise used that money for a night out at the bar or a night down in Atlantic City. In the long run, putting the money in the market is a much smarter decision. At least I think so.

This isn’t a suggestion for everyone out there to jump into the market, but I would encourage everyone to give it some thought. If you would otherwise blow the money on useless stuff, then why not?

Robert Shireman, a senior adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, says he expects the default rate, which reflects the early part of the recession, to continue to rise. “When people are facing a job loss, figuring out how to pay their student loan is not No. 1 on their list,” he said.

That’s right. For better or for worse, the last thing on many people’s minds at this time is their student loans. Like Mr. Shireman reports, if you’re losing your job and you’re at risk of going into default on your mortgage, then the last thing that you care about is paying back a student loan that is ten, fifteen, or twenty years old!

But you’ve got to make those payments, folks. Student loans are among the few pieces of debt that cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy filing. Further, the government can (and will) garnish your wages if you default on your student loans.

All of this gets back to a point that I’ve made a few times in the last few weeks on this blog – that one of the best ways to stimulate the economy would be to cancel some, if not all, student loan debt for existing borrowers. And this point is related to something else that I think many of us stunted by student loan debt understand that the rest of the people out there don’t get yet – namely that even with all of the stimulus plans and other money being pumped into the economy, those who have a great deal of student loan debt are not going to be able to contribute to the economic recovery.

Now, if there were only a few of us, then the effect wouldn’t be so bad. But the number of people with out of control student loans is growing and that is not a good thing for the economic recovery…

Really, President Obama needs to liven things up a bit. We’re looking for change from him, not the same old boring “what the hell is he talking about?” crap! I will say, though, that it was nice to watch the President of the United States and not have to worry about him saying something that made absolutely no sense. On the other hand, while the rest of country goes crazy over Obama’s speaking style, I really, really hate it. I know that the biased liberal media will never publish a negative thing about his speaking style, but this man relies on “ehhh” and “ihhh” WAY too much when he talks. Go back and listen to the entire speech (if you can stomach it) and try to count how many times he interjects “ehhh” and “ihhh” in a single sentence. It’s alarming.

Again, the alternative could be, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…you can’t fool me twice.” Good grief.

But even as I take my own potshot at President George W. Bush, I have to say that it was a little gross that Obama cited the federal leadership of the last eight years as the reason for the current economic downturn. Look, I agree with the rest of the gang that the folks running the world down in Washington were a little goofed up, but that includes the Democrats, too. Further, the biggest perpetrators of our current problems were the greedy people on Wall Street and the ignorant people on Main Street. The root of this downturn is the devastated housing market. The root of the devastated housing market are people who were buying $500,000 homes when they could only afford $150,000 homes. The side-root of that same problem were the bankers who gave mortgages to people who couldn’t afford their homes!

Ugh…it’s not all about Bush! I had hoped that Obama would bring this country past the Bush derangement syndrome, but after his campaign-style speech last night, I guess that real change hasn’t come…yet.

Yet when Congress first confronted the issue early in the week and decided to do nothing, the vote told us that beyond Washington many Americans just didn’t see it that way.

The president, Democratic leaders, the two presidential candidates all called for immediate action. Yet some members of Congress told me their phone calls and e-mails were running 90-to-1 against the rescue plan.

Get it? Americans did NOT WANT this bailout plan! Everyday Americans did NOT NEED this bailout plan! People working for greedy organizations on Wall Street wanted the bailout and because money talks while (apparently) everyday Americans walk, they got what they wanted. It’s bull.

Americans need to take action on this disgusting bailout immediately.

This means that you, as a taxpaying citizen, need to demand the best from your legislators. They just took $700 billion of YOUR dollars to give to gigantic, multibillion dollar banks. Hold them accountable. If you’re so disgusted with the bailout bill then vote against anyone in your district who voted for it. Send a message. If you don’t want to go that route, then stay in touch with your elected leaders and make sure that they are exerting the proper amount of oversight and that they overseeing the funds in a way that YOU want them overseen.

Americans need to become re-engaged with their government. This is definitely the election year to do so. This bailout bill was unnecessary – greedy people had what they had coming to them and the government bailed them out. Where’s the bailout for student loans? Where’s the bailout for the Americans who CAN make their mortgage payments, but just barely? Why would ANYONE continue to make mortgage payments now that they know the government is there to pick up their slack?

Disgusting.

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