"Michael Lind" - 6 Reasons Why Occupy Wall Street Protests Won't Help Democrats

By Michael Lind, Salon
Posted on October 11, 2011, Printed on October 12, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/152693/6_reasons_why_occupy_wall_street_protests_won%27t_help_democrats

Can the Occupy Wall Street movement do for the Democrats what the Tea Party has done for the Republicans? Will a spontaneous grass-roots uprising against the rich neutralize the manipulated “Astroturf” Tea Party movement’s assault on big government, assure a second term for Barack Obama and lead to the new New Deal that progressives have been waiting for?

Alas, probably not. Ever since Richard Nixon won his reelection victory in 1972 by appealing to many of the discontented populists attracted to George Wallace, the Republican Party, formerly a party of big city boardroom types and small-town Rotarians, has been based at least in its rhetoric on right-wing populism. The Tea Party movement is merely an extreme exaggeration of the mainstream GOP.

But the Democrats since George McGovern captured the party’s presidential nomination in the same fateful year of 1972 have been the opposite of a left-wing populist party. Thus while right-wing populism reinforces the existing Republican story about America, any genuine left-wing populism would challenge the basic constituencies and values of the McGovern-to-Obama Democrats. There are six reasons in particular why Democrats are unlikely to benefit as much from populism as Republicans.

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"Dean Baker" - David Brooks, Bard of the 1 Percent

Published on Tuesday, October 11, 2011 by Beat the Press

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-bard-of-the-1-percent

by Dean Baker

David Brooks delved deep into his storage locker of misinformation to tell readers that the idea of blaming the richest 1 Percent for the country's problems is just silly. He told us that the really big ideas aren't about reversing the upward redistribution of income from the top, they are from centrists who want to do things like cut our Social Security and make us pay more for health care. Let's have some fun with Mr. One Percent.

First he begins his piece by telling us:

"The U.S. economy is probably going to stink for a few more years. It is beset by short-term problems (low consumer demand, uncertain housing prices, too much debt) and long-term problems (wage stagnation, rising health care costs, eroding human capital).

Realistically, not much is going to be done to address the short-term problems, but we can at least use this winter of recuperation to address the country’s underlying structural ones."

In other words, Brooks wants all those people who are unemployed and losing their homes to just suck it up. Nothing is going to be done to help you: get over it.

And why is nothing going to be done to help the 26 million people who are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work altogether? The reason is that people like David Brooks and rest of the 1 Percent don't give a damn about you.

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"Addicting Info.com" - Rasmussen Releases Occupy Wall Street Poll

Addicting Info.com   October 9, 2011

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/09/rasmussen-releases-occupy-wall-street-poll/

The right-leaning Rasmussen Reports returns from the field with what I think is the first poll about Occupy Wall Street.

The buried lead: At the moment, the protesters who’ve been mocked on CNN and Fox News, accused of class warfare by Mitt Romney, and handled delicately by the White House, have… decent favorable ratings.

Americans are divided on the protestors themselves.

Thirty-three percent (33%) have a favorable opinion, (and a plurality of)

Twenty-seven percent (27%) hold an unfavorable view,

Forty percent (40%) have no opinion one way or the other,

Fifty percent (50%) of Democrats have a favorable opinion. (while a plurality of )

Forty-three (43%)   Republicans say the opposite.

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"William Rivers Pitt" - Bank on It -- They're Scared

Sunday 9 October 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/bank-it-theyre-scared/1318020817

Internal bank memo shows just how afraid of the occupiers the banks actually are.

Far be it from me to accuse Gandhi of missing a note, but in the case of the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests, the Mahatma's famous quote appears to be lacking a few essential words. "First they ignore you," he said, "then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

That's not quite correct.

Certainly, the OWS protests began with a great whistling silence from the "mainstream" news media. It is only because of the resources available to the average person in this marvelous technological age we live in that word of the protest ever reached beyond its original location.

Thanks to cell phones, video cameras, digital recorders, and of course, the internet - all wielded by patriot citizens - reports, images and video of the protest began to dribble out via Twitter, Facebook and a variety of blogs and alternative news media sites like Truthout. But from the "mainstream" news, there was nothing, and nothing, and nothing.

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"Progressive Radio Network Danny Schechter, Fridays @ 1pm(EDT") - As the COP Blames Obama For Wall Street “Mobs’ The Occupy Movement Spreads Nationwide And Is No Friend of The President

By Danny Schechter

Author of The Crime Of Our Time

Who is behind the Wall Street protests?

The Republican minority leader, Eric Cantor, has searched up and down in his usual rigorous manner and found the culprit.

In his knee-jerk view, it’s President Obama. His latest crime: encouraging these “mobs:”

In one sentence, he blamed the President who in GOP conspiracy think, is to blame for everything, including bad weather. He also not so subtly conjures up the memory of the Mafia, New York’s perennial bad guys.

In one phrase, Obama stood accused of encouraging these…. pause for righteous indignation—MOBS!

Never mind that if you spend any time at Occupy Wall Street, you will encounter as many criticisms of the President’s policies---save the questions about his birth and “real Americaness” -- as you would at a conclave of the Tea Party.

Only the criticism is different. In the latter world of make-believe, he is a hard line Socialist. In the former, he is, in effect, a Republican, a backer of the Wall Street capitalists the occupiers are battling.

And if my memory of history has not faded, wasn’t it the British who called the original Tea Party a “mob?”

Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a partisan shmear.

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"Bill McKibben’s" - Speech at Occupy Wall Street

http://www.nationofchange.org/bill-mckibbens-speech-occupy-wall-street-1318175259

Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built.

On November 6, one year before the election, we’re going to be in DC with a huge circle of people around the White House and they’re going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to DC to find out where they have locked that guy up. We have to free Obama, because there is some sort of stunt double there now. So on November 6, I hope we can move, just for a day, Occupy Wall Street down to the White House and get them in the fight against corporate power.

The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.

I spend a lot of time in countries around the world organizing demonstrations and rallies in solidarity. In the last three years at 350.org, we’ve had 15,000 rallies in every country except North Korea. Everywhere around the world, poor people and black people and brown people and Asian people and young people are standing up. Most of those places, don’t produce that much carbon. They need us to act with them and for them, because the problem is 20 blocks south of here. That’s where the Empire lives and we’ve got to figure out how to tame it and make it work for this planet or not work at all.

Thank you guys very much.

"Mark Egan" - Occupy Wall St, The Start of a New Protest Era?

Published on Friday, October 7, 2011 by Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/07/us-wallstreet-protests-history-idUSTRE7964CY20111007

by Mark Egan and Ben Berkowitz

NEW YORK - When Paul Friedman met the rag-tag youth camped out near Wall Street to protest inequality in the American economy, he felt he was witnessing the start of a protest movement not seen in America since the 1960s.

And Friedman should know. The 64-year-old was a student organizer during the anti-Vietnam War movement, protesting from 1964 for 11 years until the war ended. He also joined Civil Rights actions against racial segregation in America.

On Wednesday, as thousands of union workers marched to show solidarity with the movement called Occupy Wall Street, he walked shoulder-to-shoulder with dreadlocked college dropouts, unemployed youth and students, who for three weeks have camped out near Wall Street and who have no plans to leave.

"It felt in my gut very much like what I was a part of in the 1960s," Friedman said. "What people are expressing ... is an experience that their opportunities are shrinking, not growing and their hopes are shrinking, not growing, and that is an unnatural feeling for the young," he said.

The protesters object to the Wall Street bailout in 2008, which they say left banks enjoying huge profits while average Americans suffered under high unemployment and job insecurity with little help from the federal government.

What the Occupy Wall Street movement has in common with the 1960s, he said, was that the weak economy hits home, just like racism or the chance that you or your boyfriend or brother or your son might be drafted to fight in Vietnam.

Most protests since the 1960s - against U.S. actions in Central America in the 1980s or against free trade in the 1990s or the impending Iraq War in 2003 - were in solidarity with an ideal. This, like Civil Rights and Vietnam, is personal.

That more than anything else is why the Occupy Wall Street movement could spread, Friedman said.

TEA AND SYMPATHY

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"Robert Reich" - The Wall Street Occupiers and the Democratic Party

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Wall-Street-Occupiers-by-Robert-Reich-111008-948.html

October 8, 2011 By Robert Reich

Will the Wall Street Occupiers morph into a movement that has as much impact on the Democratic Party as the Tea Party has had on the GOP? Maybe. But there are reasons for doubting it.

Tea Partiers have been a mixed blessing for the GOP establishment -- a source of new ground troops and energy but also a pain in the assets with regard to attracting independent voters. As Rick Perry and Mitt Romney square off, that pain will become more evident.

So far the Wall Street Occupiers have helped the Democratic Party. Their inchoate demand that the rich pay their fair share is tailor-made for the Democrats' new plan for a 5.6 percent tax on millionaires, as well as the President's push to end the Bush tax cut for people with incomes over $250,000 and to limit deductions at the top.

And the Occupiers give the President a potential campaign theme. "These days, a lot of folks who are doing the right thing aren't rewarded and a lot of folks who aren't doing the right thing are rewarded," he said at his news conference this week, predicting that the frustration fueling the Occupiers will "express itself politically in 2012 and beyond until people feel like once again we're getting back to some old-fashioned American values."

But if Occupy Wall Street coalesces into something like a real movement, the Democratic Party may have more difficulty digesting it than the GOP has had with the Tea Party.

After all, a big share of both parties' campaign funds comes from the Street and corporate board rooms. The Street and corporate America also have hordes of public-relations flacks and armies of lobbyists to do their bidding -- not to mention the unfathomably deep pockets of the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey's and Karl Rove's SuperPACs. Even if the Occupiers have access to some union money, it's hardly a match.

Yet the real difficulty lies deeper. A little history is helpful here.

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"Mitch Potter" - Don’t Mistake Occupy Wall Street for Team Obama

Published on Sunday, October 9, 2011 by the Toronto Star/Canada

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1066942--don-t-mistake-occupy-wall-street-for-team-obama

Occupation Up, Obama Down

by Mitch Potter

NEW YORK—The mushrooming Occupy Wall Street protests, now on the verge of spreading to more than 1,000 cities and towns across the U.S. and beyond, may have come of age this week.

But the second most interesting number (apart from the anger-tracking figures updated at OccupyTogether.org) is 38 per cent — President Barack Obama’s approval rating, according to the latest Gallup survey.

Occupation up, Obama down. It’s an equation the White House is desperate to change, as the Democratic machine grapples with how best to harness the progressive populist uprising to generate electoral energy for November 2012.

The rolling fury that took hold of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park three weeks ago remains audaciously leaderless. But it is also changing quickly, as new blood arrives to bolster the cause, in ways that are dismaying to Occupy Wall Street’s earliest adopters.

On Wednesday, it was the arrival of Big Labor that seized the headlines, as unionists marched in the thousands through Manhattan’s financial district. But in the encampment that night — and truly, the hardcore actually sleeping on these paving stones comprise 140 characters or less — fear of co-optation was rampant.

The Occupy Wall Street hardcore sees itself as bigger than partisan politics. And the disappointment with Obama — after what they view as a series of business-friendly surrenders on financial regulation, the environment, budgets and even health-care reform — borders on contempt.

But they don’t own Occupy Wall Street anymore. That was evident Thursday morning, when the encampment began to fill with even more arrivals. And some of the new faces showing up in Zuccotti seem more representative of the working-class angst gripping the country.

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Robert Borosage: The Moral Clarity of Occupy Wall Street

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Whose-Side-Are-You-On-The-by-Robert-Borosage-111008-92.html

October 8, 2011 By Robert Borosage Once Occupy Wall Street demonstrations started to sweep across America, the mainstream media began to pay attention -- and sounded a chorus of criticism. The movement was disorganized; it had no agenda. It wasn't organized like the Tea Party. Fox News trotted out ace reporter Geraldo Rivera -- really -- to charge that European anarchists, paid illegal aliens, and out and out leftists were behind the innocent kids. Herman Cain led disapproving Republicans, calling the movement "un-American," when he should have been celebrating what it was doing for pizza sales. Virtually everything said about this movement is wrong. Stand back; take a clear look. Every politician should understand one thing: this is coming at you and you must decide. Whose side are you on? 1. Moral clarity Occupy Wall Street has no policy agenda, but it has utter moral clarity. The demonstrators have built an island of democracy in the belly of Wall Street. The bankers looking down on them would be on the street had not taxpayers bailed them out. And now they are confronted with students sinking under student debt with no jobs, homeowners who are underwater and can't find mortgage relief, workers desperate for work.

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