WOULD YOU BORROW A LOT OF MONEY TO BECOME IGNORANT?

Two of the most popular demands of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are for "free college education," and "debt forgiveness" for  student loans.

College students are not among those whom Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) called the "Wretched of the Earth."  These protesters demonstrate their "youthful idealism" by demanding free stuff for themselves.

The collegians do have a beef.  Many are discovering that despite their very expensive educations, they are essentially unemployable.  (The unemployment rate among 2010 college grads is slightly higher than the national unemployment rate is now.)

But it’s the colleges and universities that charge more and more for less and less that are responsible for their plight, not "Wall Street" or "capitalism."  Besides, no one held a gun to the students’ heads and told them to major in gender studies.

Their very expensive educations taught them little about the economic system they are protesting against, New York Magazine discovered when it polled 50 protesters in Zuccotti Park.  Most have no clue what the rich pay in taxes, how the federal government spends its money, or what the SEC is supposed to do.

President Barack Hussein Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have likened the OWS protests to the Tea Party protests.  I think this gives the Tea Party grounds for a defamation suit.  Tea Partiers were law abiding.  They cleaned up after themselves.  And they were demanding the government stop its reckless spending.

Hundreds of OWS protesters have been arrested.  Some have urinated and defecated in public.  And the OWS protesters want the government massively to increase its reckless spending.

There is one apparent point of convergence.  Tea Partiers strongly opposed the bailout of Wall Street investment banks facing ruin because of their reckless investments in mortgage-backed securities.  Many OWS protestors seem to agree.

But the OWS protesters have yet to figure out who it was that gave the investment bankers they dislike the bailouts they deplore.

"I understand the frustrations that are being expressed in those protests," Mr. Obama told ABC News Tuesday (10/18) during his bus tour of Virginia and North Carolina.  "The most important thing we can do right now is letting people know that… we are on their side."  Republicans, he warned "want to let Wall Street do whatever it wants."

His brazen hypocrisy would be reckless if the OWS protesters weren’t so slow on the uptake.

Most Republicans in Congress opposed the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  Most Democrats supported it.  Wall Street firms which received bailouts contributed mostly to Democrats.

And still do.  Despite his anti-Wall Street rhetoric, Mr. Obama has raised more money from the financial sector than has any Republican.

Why do Wall Streeters give so much to a guy who says such nasty things about them?

Because Democrats fill their pockets with taxpayer money.  The investment banks were lent TARP money for virtually no interest.  The Obama administration borrowed it back for a 3 percent markup.

"It was very clear by February 2009 that the banks were going to get a free pass," Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, told Businessweek.

Then Democrats passed the Dodd-Frank bill, which protects Wall Street banks that had a lot to do with the housing meltdown at the expense of community banks which had nothing to do with it.

So the president’s feud with Wall Street is a sham.  "It probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy," a banker who raises funds for Mr. Obama told the Washington Post.

Few journalists report these facts, so for the time being, Mr. Obama is able to have it both ways.  But Democrat pollster Douglas Schoen still thinks Democrats are making a "critical error" by embracing the OWS protesters.

OWS "comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence," he said.  "Virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda."

When you’ve borrowed so much money to become so ignorant, violence may seem to be the preferable alternative to paying it back.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.