by Jack Lee
They say politics creates strange bedfellows and it sure seems to be playing out that way in New York. We have a left wing version of the Tea Party occupying Wall Street and demanding economic change just like their right wing cousins did in Washington a year ago.
The anger among conservatives went viral and it became known as the Tea Party, a movement born out of frustration with government squandering vast amounts of the people’s money and putting them deep in debt. And here we have just a year or so later the frustrated and angry left, marching on Wall Street, following more or less the footsteps of the Tea Party. The Wall Street protestors are demanding economic change too, but this time it’s in the form of jobs, sharing of the wealth, while protesting the criminal excesses of Wall Street and their undue influence on Washington law makers.
Both are economic movements born out of frustration with a nation in severe financial hardship. Both movements want immediate reforms and more accountability, but in slightly different, but nonetheless dramatic ways.
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are spreading coast to coast, even though they lack the focus and coordination of the Tea Party movement. The new rebels are younger and their voices are a mix of protestations, but if you look close enough it’s still an identifiable message for very specific economic reforms.
Ironically, both of these movements were attempted to be hijacked by outside forces. The republicans wanted to lock up the Tea Party and now it looks the democrats want the Wall Street movement. The Tea Party has remained conservative, yet independent, and that has made it a viable force for change, ready to challenge democrat and republican lawmakers alike when the need arises.
If the Occupy Wall Street folks are going to survive long enough to make the change they want, then they better take a heads up from the Tea Party and find more focus, then keep their independence and unique identity.
Why aren’t these dirt bag Wall Street protestors being arrested for vagrancy? I say it is time to bust out the water cannons and make sure they are all well showered.
Whenever you make a comparison or draw an analogy between two things, you have to be aware of the differences as well as the similarities. Often, there is a superficial similarity, but the differences are overwhelming, rendering the comparison useless and misleading. In classical philosophy and rhetoric, this is known as the false comparison fallacy. That is the case in this comparison. The Tea Party, like their colonial-era namesake, is protesting high taxation by a distant government. The British used the American colonies as a source of income to the home country, by excessive taxation, which the Brits needed to pay for all their costly wars with the Spanish and French. The British also controlled the importation of tea, which the colonists were addicted to. Thus, one of the early forms of rebellion was to dump a ship load of British tea into the Boston harbor. The parallel to the modern Tea Party is that we are also currently burdened with excessive taxation to pay for things we don’t need, such as Obamacare. They do not want or need government help. They just want the government to leave them alone so they can create their own success. However, there is no comparison to the Wall Street protesters, who are mostly unemployed and unemployable bums who pay no taxes whatsover but want the US government to tax the rich even more, in order to pay for their selfish benefits, such as food stamps and college tuition. The Tea Party people are responsible citizens. I recall that one of the first big events was held in a city park, and reporters were astonished that at the conclusion of the event, there was no trash left behind. The participants had cleaned everything up. In fact they left the site cleaner than when they arrived. Contrast that to the Wall Street protesters. They have turned the sidewalks into massive dumps. Also note that the Tea Party people do not engage in property damage or illegal acts and no deliberate in-your-face confrontations with police. The Wall Street people are constantly in confrontation with the police, and 700 of them had to be arrested in one day. The Tea Party people are patriotic. The Wall Street people are anti-American. Have you seen any of them wearing a VFW hat, a Support Our Troops t-shirt, or anything like that? I could go on an on with this, but you get the point: It is a false comparison.
Jack,
Here are two videos I watched this morning that support what you stated and provided additional information. The first is of a woman ranting her frustrations and the second is of a woman being interviewed who is involved with organizing the sit ins.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/video-exposing-occupy-wall-street-was-organized-from-day-one-by-seiu-acorn-front-the-working-family-party-and-how-they-all-tie-to-the-obama-administration-dnc-democratic-socialists-of-america/
Big difference between the Tea Party and the Flea Party. Tea Partiers don’t use violence, the protest on weekends because they have jobs, they clean up their trash and don’t need union organizers or others to give them their talking points.
Would be interesting to know how many of the Flea Party folks are actually registered to vote . . . . .
Here is another video with Frances Fox Piven, at John Jay College in NY, talking to a class about the protest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lSnzKNbCw74
And another good read and watch from the “53%”.
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Meet The 53%. Who are they? The term 53% refers to the people who are actually paying taxes for themselves and the rest of the country.
The 53% is a group of responsible young people organizing across the country. However, this group is not camping out in parks around the country and demanding the entire capitalist system be destroyed. These men and women have jobs (most of them work at more than one job in order to make ends meet), but they are talking about attending the Minneapolis Occupy Wall St. protest scheduled for today Friday, October 7th.
Heres a statement from their web page;
So, like, when youre, like, community organizing for solidarity and stuff, its totally cool to have this little hashtaggy thingy when youre on twitter, so other people, like, totally know what youre talking about and stuff. So if youre, like, totally gonna spread the word about being one of the 53% of people who actually, like, pay taxes in America and dont just, like, hang out protesting stuff all day like, heres the hashtaggy thingy. See you at the protest! #iamthe53
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/the-53-want-the-99-to-learn-from-their-example/
Nice article, Jack. Keep in mind though, that the Tea Party in it’s infancy was not a very focused movement either.
It’s nice to see that Toby’s belief in free speech only applies to those who agree with him, and that he is ignorant of the unjust mass arrests which took place this week.
This hasn’t been verified, but I heard the other day that Quentin Colgan is calling the Wall Street Occupation movement a bunch of dim witted, brown shirted, fascist racists.
What unjust mass arrest would that be?
The organizers that created this movement have much more in mind that getting the attention of their representatives. They want to fundamentally transform America and destroy capitalism.
They have a right to protest, however, they will be counterred strongly in their efforts to fundamentally transform this republic into a Marxist collective.
I notice they are all wearing clothing, some have laptops, most have phones…all capitalist contributions. How many of these people have contributed anything? How many of them have been happy to be the recipients of the largess produced by wealth builders.
If there are instances of corruption and illegal activity on Wall Street our republic has a remedy. Our justice system is either complicit or failing terribly at their oversight dutues…OR nothing illegal was done.
These protesters would be better off learning about the corrupt policies that forced bankers to make bad loans, create toxic instruments, and ultimately crash. The source of the entire mess is a Marxist utopian idea of collective equality….spreading the wealth…redistribution.
The ignorance displayed in those videos is astounding.
Welcome home Peggy! What a fantastic car trip (9000 miles)!
It’s still early in the game, but as time moves on we should see some very definitive reasons show up behind the Wall Street protests. My belief is they do have some legitimate gripes about the Wall Street corruption, a failure of oversight, it’s influence on bad government and bailouts that squandered the peoples tax money. Many of us on the right believe this to be true.
Granted, there is this motley far left element present, but let’s give them some time and see where it goes before we form any hardened opinions. You guys are probably right about them wanting to change our system for something socialist, but for now lets see what turns up. You have to admit some of their issues are our issues too. That being said, I sure don’t like SIEU, Soros, Moveon. org, etc., having their prints on this, nor the trash nor the many arrests for disruption of traffic…that all sucks and could soon ruin whatever good things they might have to say.
Social Security is a tax. Anything that is forcibly taken by government from your pocket is a tax. They can call it a fee, an asessment or whatever, but its still a tax. On that Quentin we can agree.
What does vagrancy and asking the police to uphold the law have to do with free speech? So because I ask the question, I am wrong? Typical.
These dirt bags who are being paid to show up and bitch about something they are clueless about, I wonder if they will pay tax on it? I am betting not, any takers?
Well, I’m glad to see the rest of you have decided to compensate for Jack’s fair and respectful article with some good old fashioned inane ranting. There’s the Post Scripts I know and love.
Soaps:
“Whenever you make a comparison or draw an analogy between two things, you have to be aware of the differences as well as the similarities.”
I agree with this, but I find it extremely hypocritical that you followed up on this statement by comparing the Tea Party with the Boston Tea Party…without noting any significant differences, such as that the Boston Tea Party was primarily a protest over taxation WITHOUT representation.
Also, the taxes protested by the Tea Party are in no way “excessive.” They are at historic lows.
“Often, there is a superficial similarity, but the differences are overwhelming, rendering the comparison useless and misleading.”
Such as your comparison between the Tea Party and the Boston Tea Party.
“However, there is no comparison to the Wall Street protesters, who are mostly unemployed and unemployable bums who pay no taxes whatsover”
Please provide a citation for this statement.
“but want the US government to tax the rich even more,”
Even more than this historically low rate, yes. We want the government to go back to the rates of the Clinton era. That is not an unreasonable demand.
“in order to pay for their selfish benefits, such as food stamps and college tuition.”
Wow. So food stamps and college tuition are just “selfish benefits.” What a despicable attitude.
Thanks Jack. It was a fantastic trip from Glacier Park, MT, Charleston, SC, Pensacola, Fl, North Rim of the Grand Canyon and a race home from Provo, UT to beat the two storms. Only place we didn’t go that we planned to was the north east because of the flooding. Made it safe and sound with God’s blessings the whole way.
Do not want to hear anyone complain about Calif. drivers ever again. There are crazy people out there in EVERY state. Also, know where the stimulus money is being spent… major freeway projects in every state and I don’t mean just road repairs. Whole interchanges are being redone. The gps would say, “Make a left turn onto…” Well, it’s now a right turn blocked by concrete dividers. I kid you not we were beat to death and frustrated with it all. But, the scenery and people were worth it all, and I did my part to contribute to the economy.
Still wiped out and brain dead right now, but give me a week and I’ll, hopefully, be able to contribute more than just links I read after I get up and running on what’s goind on.
As for this Wall Street protest…Yes, they have the right to protest, but are they sincere or are they paid by left-wing political organizers making them the “astroturf” as the Fox Piven video suggest and not real grassroots like the Tea Party. Time will tell, if the msm ever reports it. Not likely.
But, there is still hope we can beat BO. Even Biden said so. Love it when a democrat says something honest.
Tina: “What unjust mass arrest would that be?”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/04/occupy-wall-street-mass-arrests_n_995047.html
WASHINGTON — Ben Becker, 27, sat in the back of a police-commandeered transit bus on Saturday night, his hands placed tightly behind his back in plastic cuffs. He’d been marching on the Brooklyn Bridge as part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. And like hundreds of other activists railing against the inequities of the financial system, he had been swept up in a mass arrest by the New York Police Department.
Becker was one of the first placed in custody. His bus filled up fast. They waited, tied up for hours, and did not know their charges, Becker said. For many, this was new: the march, the chanting, the arrest.
“Some of the teenagers on the bus were extremely nervous,” Becker said.
But this was a scenario Becker knew well. He was the named plaintiff in the Partnership for Civil Justice’s 2001 federal class-action lawsuit against the District of Columbia, known as Becker v. D.C. That case stemmed from the D.C. police department’s mass arrest of anti-IMF/World Bank demonstrators on April 15, 2000. Becker was one of nearly 700 people arrested during that march. He was 16 at the time.
On Tuesday, the Partnership for Civil Justice filed yet another class-action lawsuit — this one again on behalf of Becker and others arrested on the bridge.
“I was telling the young people — the teenagers — the people who had been protesting for the first time, when we were sitting on the bus for hours, I was telling them the similarities to April 2000,” said Becker, who is currently an adjunct professor at City College of New York and a graduate student studying history.
The mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge resemble a clear, premeditated police tactic that has come to be known as “trap and detain,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice. The tactic goes something like this, she said: the police permit and escort marchers to proceed with their activities before suddenly corralling them into a closed off area and arresting everyone in one sweep.
The police will use a side street, a park, or, in the case of Occupy Wall Street, a bridge — usually an area where the people trapped cannot disperse, and where they end up having to beg the police to leave, Verheyden-Hilliard said. Journalists, tourists and legal observers are often caught up in these dragnets. A reason for the arrests is crafted after the fact, she said.
The NYPD says its officers warned the activists not to take the motorway. There were claims police had not issued warnings, Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police, stated in an email to The New York Times. In fact, warnings were issued and captured on video.
The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Huffington Post.
Verheyden-Hilliard said the fact that the so-called warnings were videotaped shows premeditation. She added that the warnings were bad theater — police were speaking inaudibly into a bullhorn; they were for show only, she said.
Police departments may have popularized the tactic of snuffing out and intimidating protests during the anti-globalization movement a decade ago that criticized corporate capitalism. But Verheyden-Hilliard said the method has gone international in the last couple of years.
“It’s been used in London and in Toronto. They call it ‘kettling’ there in Toronto,” she said. It’s a particular tactic, a refined police tactic — you get boxed by police on all sides or, even easier, when there are buildings or a bridge and you block the front and the back.”
The tactic has been deployed by police in Oakland and other cities as well, according to Verheyden-Hilliard. But it was D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department that made “trap and detain” infamous.
On April 15, 2000, according to court records, demonstrators had gathered in front of the Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue NW and marched to a spot close to the International Monetary Fund on 19th Street NW. Police were very much a presence during the march. As the crowd headed toward Dupont Circle, where it was set to disperse, the activists were suddenly penned in on a side street by the police, according to Becker and court records.
The department at the time justified the arrests by arguing that the officers were trying to prevent chaos in the streets. “I apologize for nothing we did,” the then-Police Chief Charles Ramsey said at the time. “They have the right to sue us just like they had the right to protest.”
Along with the mass arrest, several plaintiffs in the Becker case alleged that they were beaten by D.C. cops. The court case produced a video that showed a police unit charging a group of demonstrators and beating them in the face with batons. The officers had obscured their badge numbers. Another plaintiff said he had been injured with pepper spray and alleged that the cop’s attack had been unprovoked.
“There was a police line in riot gear,” Becker remembered. “They refused to let us go. We turned around and the police line blocked. We were chanting for almost an hour, ‘let us go!'”
Becker said he heard the same chants on the Brooklyn Bridge this past weekend. People were chanting their lungs out when the march started at 3 p.m. Saturday at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, he said. It soon passed City Hall. Only 15 minutes in, thousands of demonstrators had picked out a few favorites.
“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” they chanted.
“We are the 99 percent!”
And in honor of the recent execution of a Georgia inmate: “We are all Troy Davis!”
Throughout the march, the throngs stayed on sidewalks. If people spilled onto the streets, police were there within seconds to admonish them to get off the roadway, Becker said. Becker and Joshua Stephens, another demonstrator interviewed by HuffPost, said everyone complied without hassle. “It was a very closely-monitored and marshaled protest up to the Brooklyn Bridge,” Becker recalled.
There had been a demonstration the previous day at One Police Plaza over a pepper-spray incident. A white-shirt cop had indiscriminately sprayed several women in the face; it had been caught on tape and gone viral. Becker said a thousand people showed up and said their piece without getting hassled by police.
The march became a bottleneck at the bridge, Becker said. The demonstrators first had to cross a street and then pass a narrow entranceway. Becker said he saw no cops as he passed on to the bridge.
When Marcel Cartier, 27, started marching on the bridge’s motorway, he said the police only insisted on keeping one lane open for cars. “We began marching on the street with police right next to us not saying anything,” he told HuffPost. “The most that was said — ‘Excuse me brother, could you move over?’ They kept one lane open for cars. It was fine. It was perfectly okay for us to be on that street on the bridge.”
After about 15 minutes on the bridge, the march came to a halt as the police formed a line and stopped the marchers, Becker said. Cartier and Becker both moved up to the front.
A police official took out a piece of paper and read from it into a bullhorn. “It was inaudible,” Becker said. “I couldn’t hear.”
Cartier didn’t get the message either. “I heard absolutely nothing,” he said. “No announcement that they were going to arrest people.” He didn’t know he was in trouble until three others were hauled away. Then a cop pointed at him and a few officers pulled him out and cuffed him, he said. He was the fourth activist arrested that day.
Becker, before he was arrested, asked an officer: “Why are you doing this?” He pressed that the police were the ones blocking traffic. Another cop grabbed him and escorted him to the police bus, he said. It would be the second arrest in his life, the first being in April 2000.
“I certainly was not expecting or wanting to be having a repeat encounter,” Becker said. “The arrests in 2000 were horrible for the people that went through them…There is still a lot of legal work to be done to correct that. This movement that’s developing has to take this on as a major issue.”
The April 2000 lawsuit resulted in record settlement with the District of Columbia in 2009 agreeing to pay $13.7 million to those arrested. The litigation also resulted in a ban on the “trap and detain” tactic. U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman wrote that it reminded him of the old discredited police responses to anti-Vietnam War protesters — “when thousands of demonstrators were arrested on a theory of ‘group’ probable cause on the steps of the Capitol, in West Potomac Park, and on the streets of the District of Columbia.”
A subsequent case was brought against the Metropolitan Police Department over the arrest of 400 individuals in Pershing Park in September 2002 for, once again, demonstrations involving anti-globalization activists.
Like the other “trap and detain” cases, the police surrounded the downtown-D.C. park and hauled away everyone inside — including tourists and nurses who werent necessarily involved but were merely taking a break from a nearby convention. That case, also filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice, was settled with the city in late 2009 for $8.25 million. A second lawsuit stemming from Pershing Park has yet to reach a settlement.
The NYPD, Verheyden-Hilliard said, should expect a similar fight. “I think people have to recognize the police are acting deliberately and intentionally,” she said. “It’s not that they’re reacting to some protest or misconduct or that they’re overreaching or maybe they had probable cause to arrest someone. They did not have probable cause to arrest anyone. They have been engaged in a pattern and practice to suppress dissent for years.”
“They ordered the arrest buses from Rikers,” she added. “When you are ordering arrest buses, you are intending to make mass arrests.”
Chris these protesters are not all alike; some are professional agitators. Now that we’ve heard the activists perspective it’s time to hear from a few others:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576605400999423790.html
NEW YORKMore than 700 protesters associated with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement were arrested Saturday afternoon for blocking traffic on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.
The arrests began at 4:45 p.m. and continued for hours. Brooklyn-bound traffic resumed at about 8 p.m. after being halted for roughly four hours, snarling traffic throughout lower Manhattan, according to Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of the New York City Police Department.
Protesters were taken to precincts throughout Brooklyn and New York, where many were issued tickets for disorderly conduct and released, according to Mark Taylor, an attorney working with the nonprofit National Lawyers Guild.
http://news.businessweek.com/article.asp?documentKey=1376-LSGQL40YHQ0X01-39T7QB30QTN7DVDBDI5RJ3IN49
“Tea Partiers don’t … need others to give them their talking points.”
Really?
Oh, Sarah!? (Don’t be setting yerself up like this.)
And it’s odd, I don’t remember anybody breaking out the water cannon on the assorted Tea Party events of … a year ago, now, is it?
You’ve all retired to the Perkos, which is where you old farts belong.
We have yet to see if anything comes of this other thing.
The Tea Party folks you are talkin about Libs are about your age, aren’t they? So be nice Libs. And as for your younger leftist demonstrators who are so pissed, hey, if they don’t conduct themselves properly they are going to lose a lot of support.
If you see any of them around Oakland/SF you should tell them to behave, pick up their trash and don’t break any laws to get themselves disliked. If they were not so snotty to the TP folks they might even get some support from them on a few of their issues they share. The TP people are their elders and they are models of decorum and civility that your side should learn from, not rag on!
“The Tea Party folks you are talkin about Libs are about your age, aren’t they? So be nice Libs.”
But you see, that’s where I’ve always gotcha … I put myself squarely in the old fart category, though on the lefty side, but I can manage a damned sight more objectivity … howsoever.
What you also don’t seem to see is how little impact the Tea Party has had. All you’ve managed to do is bring government action to a total halt. Do you think this impedes the robber barons? Think again.
The powers will not reconsider their position until we not only fail to pick up the trash, but start setting things on fire … until America is no longer a safe place for rich people to be rich.
Look at this – the “Occupy WallStreet” event in Redding looked more like a Tea Party protest.
http://www.redding.com/news/2011/oct/08/rally-targets-corporate-greed/
Here’s what one organizer said: “Redding is a pretty conservative place compared to Arcata, Sacramento and Chico. The support we saw today was great. It shows that conservatives as well as liberals know the system is broken and needs change,” he said. “The change can’t come from the corrupt institutions like banks and mainstream politics that take money from the institutions. We have to get people back in control of government instead of institutions.”
Am I hallucinating … or have we reached consensus?
Libs, Jack here. We’re not that far apart are we?
I want to go back to Soaps’ statement that the people of the Occupy Wall Street movement are “mostly unemployed.” While I don’t think this is true, there are quite a lot of unemployed people involved in these protests. How does that hurt the legitimacy of the movement? Perhaps Soaps is not aware, but we are in the middle of a massive unemployment crisis. This is not because people are lazy, it is because there are literally not enough jobs to go around. The so-called “job creators,” despite historically low taxes and record profits, are not creating jobs. And many businesses are discriminating against the unemployed, refusing to hire or even consider people that are out of work. One of the demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement is for the government to step in and end this discriminatory practice. Republicans, of course, are against this demand, just as they are against extending unemployment benefits.
If anything, the fact that so many unemployed people are part of the Occupy Wall Street movement actually adds to the movements’ legitimacy. These are the people who have been hit hardest by our poor economy; they have actual grievances. Most of the Tea Party demographic–not all, but most–are more privileged. They haven’t suffered as many economic hardships when compared to those in the Occupy Wall Street movement. To me, the Tea Party’s complaints seem like a bunch of whining. And they have consistently supported positions and politicians that do nothing to solve the problems of the economy, and only make them worse. Their total lack of consideration for raising taxes on the rich, while at the same time having no problem with cutting benefits and programs that primarily serve the poor, indicates that they are more interested in protecting the pocketbooks of the wealthy rather than in helping the average American.
Jack, I agree that there are some similarities between the Tea Party and this new movement, but more and more Americans are figuring out that the Tea Party was the wrong answer to the right question. In the Occupy Wall Street movement, we may just find the right answer.
Peggy, I looked into the 53% and was surprised to find a very moving story by one of our economy’s true victims. The story is in response to the stories of faux “hardship” by those flea-ridden parasites that make up the 99% on their own website, where they complain about needing trivial things like “jobs” and “food” and other socialist giveaways. Here is the story of the founder of the 53,% a true American underdog:
“I work three jobs.
I have a house I can’t sell.
My family insurance costs are outrageous.
But I don’t blame Wall Street.
Suck it up you whiners.
I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.”
That was the underprivileged Erick Erickson, whose three grueling, low-paying jobs include radio host, CNN commentator, and…internet something or other. What bravery! What courage! Here is the true portrait of an American hero: someone who doesn’t blame others for his inability to sell the large house that he owns, or for the outrageous insurance costs that he has no problem paying. All he asks is that the government not confiscate any more of his hard-earned money that he makes by talking on television and typing on a computer, back-breaking labor for which he is paid a pittance of only a few million dollars a year! Clearly, if this is not enough to make Erickson financially happy, the only explanation is that he is too highly taxed, and his financial worries certainly cannot be attributed to a possible addiction to gambling, prostitutes, or PCP. Erickson should be an inspiration to us all, that we too can pull ourselves up by our thousand-dollar bootstraps and live the American dream of getting paid millions of dollars a year to insult people on television.
Moving, powerful stuff.
“Erickson should be an inspiration to us all, that we too can pull ourselves up by our thousand-dollar bootstraps and live the American dream of getting paid millions of dollars a year to insult people on television. Moving, powerful stuff.” Well there you go Chris! I’m so glad you could find something to strive for and yes, it was moving and powerful. We should all be so lucky!