Posted on 10/11/2011 9:30:49 PM PDT by kristinn
By the time they got to Woodstock, they were half a million strong. But by the time they assembled on Freedom Plaza on Tuesday morning to plan the day’s civil disobedience, they numbered only 53.
Attempting to emulate the Occupy Wall Street protests, Washington activists and some out-of-town guests set themselves the lofty goal of occupying the Hart Senate Office Building. “We are there to shut the place down!” organizer David Swanson told his small band of followers.
But how to do this with only a few dozen demonstrators? Well, Swanson said, they could push all the buttons on the elevators — the way naughty children sometimes do in apartment buildings. “There are people who are wanting to go into the elevators and fill them and not get out and push all the buttons,” he said. “If you like that, do it.”
SNIP
The elevator dispute says much about the new movement’s troubled ascent. The Occupy Wall Street protests tapped the left’s pent-up populism and anger at corporate excess. But here in Washington, progressive activists attempting to duplicate the phenomenon have so far had difficulty broadening their ranks beyond the usual suspects from antiwar demonstrations.
I don’t say this with satisfaction: A revived populist movement could be a crucial counterweight to the Tea Party, restoring some balance to a political system that has tilted heavily to the right. But while the Occupy movement in the capital has invigorated left-wing groups — Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Common Dreams, Peace Action, DC Vote, Community Council for the Homeless and a score of other labor and progressive organizations are represented on Freedom Plaza — it has not ignited anything resembling a populist rebellion. To swell their ranks, protesters recruited the homeless to camp with them.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
53? Apparently the courier with the daily checks got stuck in DC traffic.
This just shows how out of touch & elitist the author of the article is because the Tea Party WAS a populist movement & still is a rather populist movement. Furthermore the OWS crowd were motivated by the SAME concerns [ ie: the banker bailouts & other fiscal irresponsibility ] as the folks of the Tea Party are. This sounds like establishment attempts at trying to divide the populists movements for financial sanity into stark left & right camps hoping to deflate the effectiveness of both by trying to get them to fight amongst themselves instead of against the folks setting the bad fiscal policies. Now if more Tea Party & OWS folks got together to occupy the Federal Reserve THEN we would start to see some real progress on this front.
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself “
Counter threat is sticking a 357 in the anarchists face and saying you will pull the trigger if they don’t leave now.
They will leave with tail between legs. Reagan did it to the Soviets.....it works.
How many are there of the OWS. The propaganda is trying to paint a picture of a large movement. I am not seeing it. There is a handful here and a few there. Even “near” Wall Street the numbers are not impressive. What are we talking about. Maybe less than 10K total?
These are questions any honest reporter would ask, because that's where the real story is and everybody knows it. One indication of just how corrupt the national press has become is that whoever actually does find answers will have their stories spiked by the envious and the tribal. Milbank knows the answer:
A revived populist movement could be a crucial counterweight to the Tea Party, restoring some balance to a political system that has tilted heavily to the right.
It's the sort of complaint Voltaire once made about God - if the movement did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it. And it turns out that it doesn't, and it is necessary to invent it. The despair in Milbank's voice is that the invention is so transparently unsuccessful, and there is apprehension as well - what if the power of the media to influence political matters as they did in the 2008 election is waning? What if there's a price to taking sides?
He won't be asking those questions either, at least not in public. But he'll be thinking about them.
The Tea Party is not a populist movement? Is Milbank really that stupid, or just blind?
Man, I can practically hear WaPo subscriptions being cancelled over this so-called reporting.
Milbank is the ultimate caricature of the clueless leftist.
This is the same idiotic response that leftists had to the fall of the Soviet Union which left the US as the lone superpower. They absolutely must have a counterweight to anything or anybody who is good or decent or valuable, or else they get their panties all bunched up.
53 protestors in DC? One would think you could get 53 people in any city that size to watch the lights change. This is an over-hyped farce.
Obviously the protesters should have started banging on drums. That seems to be the fashion for these lefties....bang on drums, and they will come. Sorta like a leftist Field Of Dreams or Street of Dreams. (smirk)
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