The more I see of the Occupy This And That crowd, the more they annoy me.  One of their most annoying habits is claiming to be the “99%”.  Even the most math challenged should be able to understand that this is decidedly not the case.

I’m going to be generous (and lazy) and give them a total of 500,000 protesters in Canada.  Judging from the reports in a variety of media sources, there aren’t that many, but like I say, I’m feeling generous.  A quick Google search for the population of Canada reveals that in 2009 there were 33,739,900 people here.  If you divide the protesters by the population, you find out that the Occupy Whatever movement actually accounts for less than 2% of the available bodies.

Of course, “We are the 99%.” sounds much more impressive than “We are less than 2%.”  But hey, what do I know?  I’m not part of a magazine that specializes in inflammatory, anti-capitalist images and soundbites like AdBusters.  For those of you who hadn’t heard, that’s who’s behind the “spontaneous” Occupy Wall Street movement.  The nice people at AdBusters claim they were inspired by the Tahrir protests in Egypt.  Because of course we have so much in common with people living under a military backed single party system.  Sure we do.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.  The people in Tahrir square weren’t there because they were too lazy to get involved in the democratic process, they were protesting the total lack of a democratic process to be involved with.  The issue in Canada and the U.S. isn’t that people can’t change the system, it’s that they can’t be bothered.

The tragedy of Democracy is that you end up not with what you wish for, but rather what you deserve.  The system isn’t broken, it’s ignored.  It gets ignored for the same reason our personal debt is so high.  (If you said “Corporate Greed”, consider yourself slapped.)  It’s all because people want short cuts.  They want what they want, and they want it right now.  Thank you very much.

Instead of saving up to buy a house, car and big screen TV or pay their tuition, they borrow and then blame their debt on the “greedy banks” with easy credit and high interest.  Instead of years of political action and organizing and hard, slogging work, they expect the system to change because they spend a few weeks or months camping in a bunch of parks.  Yeah.  That’ll work for sure.

The biggest indicator of how the protests are failing is the media coverage they are receiving.  Think about who owns the major media outlets.  Those nasty, “greedy” corporations.  If the Occupy Yourselves Protesting movement offered even the slightest threat to them, do you think they’d give them any ink at all?  Sure, you’re reading this online,  but answer me this.  Who gets more voting eyeballs, YouTube, or CNN?  That’s my point.  Those big corporations don’t feel threatened because a couple of thousand people in a park are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

They are just another part of the Roman “bread and circuses”.  They occupy the attention of the people and repeat the message that the system is broken.  That means that people won’t engage with the system, and that ensures status quo, and that’s good new for all those evil corporate types.

So to wrap up, the math is pretty clear.  half a million (inflated to salve the organizers egos) divided by thirty four million is not ninety-nine percent.  Nobody voted for you, so you should stop saying you represent the ninety-nine percent.  Next time AdBusters decides to stir people up , it would be nice if they could do it during an election year and try to stir them towards the polling stations.

Oh yeah.  One more quick note.  When movie stars and directors show up in support of people protesting against the “economic divide”, it looks a little bit… what’s the word I want?   Oh yeah…. HYPOCRITICAL!

Cheers, Winston