Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge? by Michelle Malkin |

How many times have you heard President Obama and his minions pat themselves on the back for their noble “investments” in “roads and bridges”? Without government infrastructure spending, we’re incessantly reminded, we wouldn’t be able to conduct our daily business.

“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,” Vice President Joe Biden infamously asserted. “Private enterprise,” he sneered, lags behind.

As always, the Beltway narcissists have it backward. Without private enterprise and free-market visionaries, public infrastructure wouldn’t exist. Take the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, which turned 132 years old this week. It’s not a government official whose vision built that. It’s a fierce capitalist who revolted against unimaginative command-and-control bureaucrats in his home country.

Before he went on to pioneer aqueducts and suspension bridges across America, culminating in the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling was a government engineer in the German province of Westphalia. A cog in the Prussian building machine, he chafed under autocratic rule. No decisions could be made, no actions taken, he complained in his diary, “without first having an army of government councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it for ten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many long reports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compound interest for ten years, the work could have been completed.”

Via: Human Events

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SECOND 'OCCUPY' WAVE COULD BE MORE DESTRUCTIVE

When the “Occupy” movement began a year ago, many initially dismissed it as a gathering of harmless college students. But the late Andrew Breitbart saw in the movement professional left-wing anarchists and radicals who sought to use the “Occupy” protests to violently overthrow the United States government, then destroy its institutions and the free market system.

Breitbart’s friend, Stephen K. Bannon, was one of those who had initially not taken the “Occupy” movement seriously until he saw occupiers shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. He knew then Breitbart was right, and immediately started a project with Breitbart that would turn into “Occupy Unmasked,” a movie that opened nationwide in theaters this week that systematically dismantled the notion that the Occupy movement was good-natured and peaceful. 

The lessons from the movie “Occupy Unmasked” are important to keep in mind as liberal intellectuals again try to mainstream a radical and violent movement to breathe life into something that, for now, has faded. The movie documents all the violence, filth, rapes, and systemic coordination between left-wing radicals and labor unions like the SEIU that was the real story behind the "Occupy" movement. 

In glorifying the “Occupy” movement and looking ahead to the its future, liberals revealed that a potential second coming of “Occupy” could be even more dangerous and violent than the first. 

Last week, progressive journalist Zeeshan Aleem, writing in The Huffington Post, claimed the Occupy movement “rivaled the Arab Spring” when it started. Though he was being complimentary in his comparison, his analogy may have been more apt than he realized. 

The Arab Spring led to violent radicals like the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in countries like Egypt and heralded a wave of violence throughout North Africa and the Middle East -- attacking U.S. interests and murdering and ambassador in Libya -- as radical Islamists gain more of a foothold. Liberals celebrated these radicals and the “Arab Spring,” which ended up becoming more of an awakening for violent Islamists. 

Similarly, the second phase of Occupy has the same potential for more widespread destruction, chaos, and violence. 

Aleem conceded that for now the second phase of Occupy has not been as successful as the first. He admitted that a recent “Occupy”-style protest attempt on Wall Street “could not be called a success,” mainly because the NYPD was better prepared this time around.

But Aleem disturbingly asks, “What if instead of being fragmented into dozens of free-forming groups, all the Occupiers targeted one bank or one intersection simultaneously?”

These flash mobs, often violent, have popped up throughout the country, with crowds beating up random strangers or stealing merchandise from stores. 

Could these focused, violent flash mobs be in Occupy’s future? 

Via Breitbart

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