Malkin: An Evil Cat That Never Shuts Up

In what has to be the top “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” moment of the week, 24-hour full-service horrible human being Michelle Malkin has penned an article in which she condemns the Occupy Wall Street movement for…being a burden on the taxpayer.

Oh, she throws in some other delusional right-wing boilerplate — “paid rent-a-mobsters for unions”, “entitled Kamp Alinsky Kids”, advocates of violent revolution, etc. — but the main message is that the OWS participants are “professional freeloaders” because their actions are soaking the taxpayers for so much money.

It hardly seems necessary to say anything more about this, but because there are people who apparently take her seriously, needs must we explain in very simple terms:

1.  She’s assuming that no one participating in the OWS movement is also a taxpayer.  This is, to put it mildly, wildly inaccurate.

2.  She’s accusing people protesting Wall Street financial institutions — the people who made themselves wealthier than any humans have ever been since the dawn of time after having received a gargantuan taxpayer-funded government bailout — of being terrible because they cost the taxpayers money.

2a.  For example, if you sum up all the dollar amounts she spits out in her incoherent hissy fit, the total — much of which she has likely pulled out of her priveleged, non-contributing ass — the total is $6,325,000, spread across four different cities.  By comparison, Bank of America alone received $7.5 billion from the Asset Guarantee Program, $15 billion from the Capital Purchase Program, $967 million from the MHA mortgage relief program, $20 billion from the Targeted Investments Program, and a $97 billion loan-loss backstop.  That’s a total of $140.4 billion to just one bank.  So those freeloading mob goons of OWC are costing taxpayers, at most, one half of one thousandth of a percent of what the good people of BofA got.

2b.  I don’t think Malkin quite understands what “freeloading” means, because she uses the word to describe the donations of food, clothing, and other items of utility by private citizens of their own free will to OWS participants who requested them.  This is known in human society as “kindness” or “charity”, but to the Malkin mindset, which operates by Adam Smith’s vile maxim, it is largely incomprehensible, and thus is reduced to the blanket term of “freeloading”, which describes every exchange which is not pareto-optimized.

2c.  Also, it is worth considering that when the banks took Herculoid-sized bailouts, they largely used the money to (a) escape the natural market consequences of their own incompetence and greed and (b) fund mergers and takeovers that would make them even richer.  They certainly did not do anything so crass as job creation or loan forgiveness with the money, and only indulged in mortgage relief and refrained from padding their bonuses because such restrictions were part of the terms of the bailouts.  The taxpayer money being spent on OWS, meanwhile, is being spent mostly on police overtime.  Few people outside of the capitalist imps at play in the fields of Michelle Malkin’s mind would consider the benefit received by banks from their soaking of the taxpayer (huge, interest-free loans to dodge the fallout of their own colossal failures) to be comparable to the benefit received by OWS participants from their “freeloading” (being beaten and maced by cops).

3.  Since being called out on her spongier-than-normal bullshit by a columnist at Mogulite — hardly a bed of Marxists and bomb-tossers — Malkin has back-flapped her wings furiously, like a duck that has inadvertently attempted to make its nest inside a jet engine.  She makes the disingenuous claim that she is against all unnecessary government spending, and was opposed to the bailouts, as if this renders her column any less asinine.  The Mogulite writer does a job of defending herself and assailing Malkin, so I’ll just add — without any links, since they are so plentiful on the web — that Malkin had nothing negative to say about the bailouts until they became plausibly attached to Barack Obama, and that she certainly expresses more fury at desperate working people who are marching to call attention to the unsustainable income disparity that exists in America today than she ever has at the bankers who fattened themselves at the taxpayer’s expense.

The entirety of right-wing punditry consists of frauds, lunatics and human boils who simultaneously trumpet the all-consuming greatness of productive capitalism while contributing a big, velvet-lined zero to society by any measure.  But Malkin in particular is a barnacle on the ship of state, a woman who makes her living off the resentment, hatred and fear that she conjures up out of lies and fantasies she invents herself.  If anyone’s a waste of taxpayer money, it’s her; I wish I could get a refund for every time she’s driven on one of the interstate highways I helped pay for.  A thousand monkeys flailing away at a thousand Selectrics for a thousand years could never write the kind of pernicious garbage she comes up with on a weekly basis.