I am doing a little bit of traveling this week and my trip started with a business stop in Asheville, North Carolina. I stayed there one night and the next afternoon went downtown and got some lunch. They got some of those Occupy Wall Street people there next to city hall and I decided to walk over and see what they are about for myself.

You may have seen some news stories about them. If you live in New York you know about it, because they had big demonstrations and clashes with police in the Wall Street area this last Fall. After that they sprouted up in other cities in public areas.

They aren't in my area yet. In fact where I live almost no one knows about them, because the media doesn't really report on them too much. But the times they do they usually do so in a very sensational manner just like they report on everything else.

The TV news likes to provoke you and make you angry and scared all of them time so that you will sit there and keep watching and the powers that be want you to be like that too because then you can be easily controlled and manipulated into believing anything they want. Couch potatoes are a docile and obedient bunch.

I really didn't know much about the occupy people, but I was curious. This is a big thing that has been going on and I want to know what is really happening to this country for myself. So I went over and talked with them.

I wanted to know who they were, what they believed, and what they were trying to do for myself. And I made this video to share with you what I found.

The media paints the occupy people with one big brush and gives them one big label. They say they are radical and dangerous. That they are a bunch of hippies and communists. They say they are the enemy and they must be feared.What I found is that the Occupy Asheville group is made up of all kinds of different people from different walks of life for their for different reasons. Some are there to express their ideological views. Others are there because they found it to be a safe haven in a time of economic hardship.

It made me think of scenes at the start of the movie They Live.

In that movie a character played by Roddy Piper loses his job and comes across a shanty town camp for the dispossessed and hangs out and gets help. Then he stumbles upon a pair of glasses that reveal to him that the advertising and media messages are all subconsciously programming everyone to obey and consume.

If the economy does not get better and the trend of the shrinking middle class continues then more occupy type Wall Street tent areas will sprout up across the country much like the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression and in fact there may one day be something like a bonus army march that the fella I talked with in the video, Preston, mentioned.

You know we have more in common with each other than we do with Ben Bernanke and the international bankers on Wall Street that wrecked the economy and caused the real estate bubble and 2008 stock market collapse.

Obama got in office but he never removed the people responsible for the collapse. They are still at charge at the Treasury and the Fed and in the banking sector most of those responsible at the mismanagement level got rewarded with corporate parachutes.

And of course the country is now saddled with trillions of dollars in government debt that threaten to bring us down the road of Greece thanks in part to socialism for the rich policies of bailout for the banks.

They said they had to do it because the banks were too big too fail. But this was a lie. The government could have paid the depositors with FDIC and let the big banks go bankrupt. Then the regional banks that weren't bankrupt would have taken their police. But those bankers had plenty of Congressmen bought and paid for that did their bidding and scared the rest of them into thinking they were indispensable.

The politicians have done nothing to fix the situation or bring any real change for the better. In my view most of things Obama has done the past four years have been for the worse and I really don't think we can expect Mitt Romney, who is completely owned by Wall Street, to do any better.

That's why I told Preston we have to stand up for ourselves. We have to turn off our televisions and leave our homes and go out talk with your friends and other people and do stuff. Voting isn't enough.

You have to let your own voice be heard. Go to meetings in your local community and let your local politicians and Congressmen know what you think. Make demands. Play your own part. Don't be afraid of people but talk to them. We all have more in common with each other than with the elites that ruined the country. They need to be removed, but they maintain their power by dividing us up into Republicans and Democrats or whatever. But this isn't a football game. It's our lives and none of these politicians are going to do anything anyway. Stand up for yourself.

Copyright © 2012 Mike Swanson