Across America, Cops That Coddled The Tea Party Crack Down On Occupy Wall Streeters

In Denver, armoured cops Friday arrested 23 and destroyed Occupy Denver's base camp on the Colorado State Capitol grounds. In San Francisco, cops demolished Occupy SF's Market Street base camp just as the movement was getting started. In New York, Friday's planned 'clean-up' sweep of Zuccotti Park was postponed just before it was set to begin, but more than a dozen arrests added to the list of hundreds rounded up during Occupy Wall Street's first month there.

From Des Moines to Boston, the Occupy protesters have from the beginning been besieged by the same authorities that coddled and shielded the right-wing Tea Party.

• In Des Moines, police arrested dozens, including a 14-year-old girl, at Occupy Des Moine's first event Sunday. 
• 10 Occupy Seattle protesters were arrested in Westlake Park Thursday.
• In San Diego, police detained demonstrators and broke up their camp Friday.
• Police Thursday arrested four Occupy Austin protesters for refusing to clear City Hall Plaza.
• Eight Occupy Houston protesters were arrested and charged with criminal trespass Wednesday outside the Mickey Leland Federal Building, site of Republican U.S. Sens. John Cornyn's and Kay Bailey Hutchison's offices.
• Police arrested 100 Occupy Boston protesters Tuesday when they refused to evacuate their Rose Kennedy Greenway park camp.
• 10 Occupy LA protesters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles Thursday at a Bank Of America branch when they demanded the bank cash a $673 billion check.

Occupy Wall Street's New York demonstrators have been subjected to arrests almost daily, including 700 rounded up Oct. 1 on the Brooklyn Bridge. Occupy Wall Street protesters have been pepper-sprayed, battered and beaten, in sharp contrast to the red-carpet, kid-gloves treatment lavished on Tea Party zealots.

Tea Party zealots spat on Democratic legislators, shouted racist epithets, and brandished guns at town hall meetings, and were rewarded with fawning television interviews and book deals.

"The left is trying to create a counter force to the Tea Party, but it's almost laughable that anyone is comparing the two, because they're totally different," Tea Party Express honcho Sal Russo told The Politico.

The two movements were completely different, as Occupy Wall Street and its offspring were spontaneous popular uprisings, while the Tea Party was a calculated propaganda organ funded and organized by billionaires and the far-right wing of the Republican Party.

No blue-uniformed law enforcement officer worth his badge and gun would dream of pepper-spraying a Tea Party screamer backed by Charles and David Koch's and Rupert Murdoch's billions.

While Occupy protesters hopped Greyhound buses or drove themselves to events they organized through social media, Tea Party zealots were limousined in climate-controlled buses chartered by Koch Industries to access-controlled Fox News media circuses.

While Occupy Wall Street protested the injustice of rampant corporate plutocracy, the Tea Party demanded the expansion of plutocratic power.

While Occupy Wall Street was protesting Wall Street excess, the Tea Party was shilling for Wall Street itself.

Occupy Wall Street was more akin to the spontaneous pro-democracy occupation of Tienanmen Square, while the Tea Party was more closely related to Iran's choreographed pro-government rallies. While Occupy Wall Street protesters were uniformly attacked by cops, just as the Tienanmen Square protesters were attacked by troops and tanks, Tea Party zealots preened for Fox News cameras behind protective phalanxes of riot police, just as Iranian pro-government demonstrators chanted and waved banners for the cameras behind the protective curtain of armed Republican Guard thugs.

Occupy Wall Street was more like the unruly mobs gathered with Danton and Desmoulins in the streets of Paris calling for removal of the aristocracy. The Tea Party was more like the organized crowds waving green flags and cheering for the continued majority of Moammar Khadafy.

In short, Occupy Wall Street was anti-establishment, while the Tea Party was super-establishment.

In America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the establishment was not government, but a junta of transnational corporate plutocrats. In America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the enemy was not the democratic institutions of government, but rather international corporate oligarchies and the overwhelming power of the wealth they wielded.

The enemy wasn't government per se, but those who had implemented policies that had concentrated 84% of the nation's wealth into the hands of 20% of the nation's wealthiest, and would maintain and expand those policies.

Republicans, spearheaded by their Tea Party shock troops, pushed to dismantle oversight of banks and financial institutions, and suspend regulation of oil, gas and coal companies. After defeating President Barack Obama's popular $447 billion jobs bill and its 5.6% surtax on millionaires and billionaires, Republicans taunted him with a GOP jobs plan comprised of warmed-over GOP demands to gut the National Labor Relations Board, impose a moratorium on government regulation, eliminate oil, gas and mining regulations, impose a balanced budget amendment, roll back health care reform, and repeal financial regulations. None of the GOP demands would create any jobs.

"We have to be for something," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said.

It was Tea Party stalwart Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), undaunted by his disgraced bid to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office revealed wouldn't cover a third of health care costs, who plotted to expand his scheme by dismantling employer-sponsored health care benefits was well as Medicare and Medicaid.

It was Tea Party ringleader Rand Paul (R-KY) who was behind the GOP's Jobs Through Growth Act, the Republican scheme to dismantle environmental, business, and financial oversight, and slash spending at a time when the government should be stimulating the economy.

Meanwhile, it was Occupy Wall Street that railed against corporations and the ultra-wealthy running roughshod over 99% of Americans.

Inexplicably, the police seemed always to coddle the tax-dodging wealthy elite that busted police unions and raided police pension funds, and seemed always to brutalize the taxpaying citizens that paid for police wages.