How Convenient: Greedy Union Goons to Co-opt Wall Street Protest to Call for Higher Taxes

Sure, it's just a sudden grassroots movement or something that mysteriously looks as if it's being run from Obama campaign headquarters. These folks are joined at the hip, so pretending this is anything but a wholly-owned Democratic Party exercise is folly.

No surprise, but the municipal labor unions and their various front groups announced they will be marching tomorrow in “solidarity” with the Downtown demonstrators.

There will be commonality of rhetoric -- the horror of “corporate greed” and “inequality” and so on.

But they won’t be empty words for the unions: They are seeking to pave the way for higher taxes in New York -- in particular, for the so-called “millionaire’s tax” that eluded them during the past legislative session.

“It’s the right fight at the right time,” said Michael Kink, of Strong Economy for All, a pro-labor coalition openly pushing for higher state taxes on the wealthy.

Certainly, the protest’s broadest underlying fantasy fits well with the aims of many of the city’s unions.

“The crisis was caused by the excess of Wall Street,” a Transit Workers Union spokesman said, “and the consequences have fallen hardest on workers.”

That’s truly priceless: This, after all, is the very union that won fat salary hikes of 11 percent over three years -- just as the financial collapse was throwing private-sector employees (including many from Wall Street) out of work.

Talk about greed.

But the irony here is actually far richer.

Fact is, for years, the financial sector has been generating the very tax revenues that have paid public-sector payrolls.

Between 2000 and 2007, for example, revenues rose by 41 percent after inflation -- with much of that driven by Wall Street.

Banking tax revenues skyrocketed by some by 200 percent.

Without that ready cash, City Hall would surely have had to absorb multibillion-dollar budget shortfalls over the years -- with the public employees paying part of the price.

“The tax revenues that the MTA collected during the real-estate and credit bubble,” writes the Empire Center’s Nicole Gelinas, “funded the union’s pay and benefits packages.”

The media has laughably tried to compare these anarchist with the Tea Party. How pathetic.

Occupy Boston — the latest fist-shaking, sick-of-politics-as-usual movement — has a lot to learn, the founder of the Greater Boston Tea Party said about the new protest group that has been camped out downtown since Friday.

“I feel bad for them,” Tea Party boss Christen Varley said. “They have no charter, no mission statement. They are talking about anarchy, but they are in chaos.”

The loosely organized Tea Party movement grew rapidly in 2009, quickly developing principles and leadership that heavily influenced national politics with its small-government, anti-taxation message. As of yesterday, the loosely organized group calling itself Occupy Boston — inspired like others nationwide by the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street — had failed to develop a mission statement or goals. The group calls itself a “horizontal democracy,” lacks leaders and devotes hours in “general assemblies” to getting group consensus on matters such hygiene and security, as well as arts and culture to entertain the campers, and media outreach — despite the lack of a cohesive message.

Sure they'll get plenty of media attention because these maniacs largely share the same ideology as most of the media. But mainstream America does not support these losers. It's clearly an effort by the Democrats to mobilize their base of whiners, malcontents and the braindead. In that regard it may succeed, but it will inevitably turn violent and will implode.