A meeting of the sharpest minds on the day's most important topics
About Robert Weissman: Robert Weissman is president of Public Citizen where he is an expert on economic, health care, trade and globalization, intellectual property and regulatory policy, and issues related to financial accountability and corporate responsibility.
Oh, yeah. Sure.
Occupy Wall Street is a tiny group of maybe a few thousand spoiled brats, leftists, professional operatives and drugged up street people. They don't know what they are protesting or what they want. They are just Democrats and Obama voters who drank the Koolaid and now all that “hope and change” has left them with no opportunity and no future other than taking handouts from the productive members of society.
So they want to whine about it and use violence and intimidation to try to force the politicians to take money from the honest and productive people to support their leisured lifestyle.
The Tea Party represents millions of honest, hard working patriotic Americans who understand the Obama Administration is destroying America. All they want is to prevent our great country from being destroyed.
It’s a blank slate onto which you can transfer whatever your desires and aspirations are, and shape it into whatever you want to be.
Sort of like the Obama 2008 Campaign.
Wait a minute...
Robert, what I can gather from reading your article is you are nothing but a socialist democratic jerk. Try doing your home work. This OCCUPIED OUTHOUSE aka PEE PARTY bowle movement is nothing but a failed attempt to try and match the political power of the TEA PARTY who are kicking the socialist’s rear end. This bowle movement was conceived by the brain trustsof the communist and democrat parties in hopes of reviving the failed obama administrations socialist agenda. It will fail miserable along with the socialist democrats in 2012.
Yeah (yawn) it's unstoppable, it's a tidal wave picking up steam like an avalanche, yeah, yeah...
...Occupy Wall Street may serve as a spark to that political movement, something far more powerful and transformative than the Tea Party...
Not much doubt now that what we've been saying for the last month is true: this thing is laughably contrived and breathlessly reported by people whose sole object is to marginalize a legitimate populist movement by publicizing a phony one. It doesn't look as if it's working but you can bet we'll be told that it is, all the way to November 2012.
One has to gaze in open-mouthed wonder at the degree to which this cheerleading is dissociated from the real world. The OWS people have, states the author, "resisted" some fictional demand to settle on a single objective. It is not, as the author implies, a virtue; what we hear is, in fact, an incoherent torrent of mindless platitudes, ill-formed accusations, and heady abstractions to which no coherent program ever could be attached. Precisely how much "transformation" the author expects from a movement with no objectives is a marvel of modern political doublethink. Nothing will be transformed, but an old game might be repackaged.
That is also a fair working description of the 0bama campaign of 2008 and the one to come in 2012. Make no mistake about it: this is 0bama's campaign for re-election taking shape and it is as inchoate, disorganized, self-contradictory, and incompetent as his administration has been.
Not.
USN&WR shouldn't let their columnists write while under the influence of mind altering substances.
OWS has a few hundred professional protesters hanging around, objecting to city insistence on cleaning the space.
Tea Party had a half-million regular folks show up at once with little planning, and left the place spotless.
The former’s demands are little more than the latter pay the former’s way.
The latter’s demands are little more than the former pay its own way.
No comparison beyond “yin, meet yang”.
The original Greek protests, which the OWS movement is attempting to copy, is much more focused. BTW - The Greek government just ignored the protesters and voted for an austerity package.