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.

Gaffe-Prone, Science-Bashing Right-Wing Derides Occupy Wall Street

Tea Party darling House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called them a "mob." New York Mayor and sometime-Republican Michael Bloomberg sicced his pepper spray-wielding cops on them and bemoaned their besieging of poor, defenseless banking giants. Right-wing chatrooms and bloggers derided them as "even dumber than first thought."

A right-wing obsessed with black helicopter plots, bashing climate change science and decrying evolution denounced Occupy Wall Street, the grassroots movement fed up with big-money plutocrats subjugating middle America.

"If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs on Wall Street and the other cities across the country," Cantor opined Friday at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., the Politico reported. "And, believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was unimpressed. "I didn't hear him (Cantor) say anything when the Tea Party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol. And, he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them," she told ABC's This Week.

Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer complained the demonstrators, "don't even know why they're out there protesting on Wall Street," but that their goals were "completely unrealistic." Kremer did not explain how a group that didn't know why they were protesting could have goals, unrealistic or not.

Right-wing talk radio's Sean Hannity, under the guise of interviewing an OWS participant, launched into a hysterical tirade, deriding his guest as a "Marxist," and screaming "you don't believe in liberty, you don't believe in freedom."

Tea Party zealots alternately whined that Occupy Wall Street was being lavished with media coverage, and shrieked that the Occupy Wall Street movement was nothing like their own.

In fact, Occupy Wall Street was very different from the Tea Party. Occupy Wall Street was a spontaneous, grassroots movement, which, unlike the Tea Party, wasn't organized and funded by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and coal magnates Charles and David Koch. Occupy Wall Street didn't ride into town on air-conditioned buses chartered by Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth. Occupy Wall Street wasn't shilling for, well, Wall Street.

Right-wing chatrooms and blogs were filled with anti-Occupy Wall Street hate, decrying the movement as "even dumber than first thought."

However, San Francisco PBS affiliate KQED's This Week in Northern California found Occupy SF protesters, the local Occupy Wall Street group, remarkably well-informed and eager to discuss arcane details about the fractional reserve banking system. "This is not your grandfather's protest," reporter Mark Calvey said.

Nonetheless, a right-wing that denied climate change science, declared vaccines caused autism, and rejected evolution to maintain a supernatural justification for white supremacy said Occupy Wall Street was deluded.

A right-wing, whose champion, Sarah Palin, said Paul Revere warned the British; told disgraced racist talk show host Laura Schlessinger "don't retreat, reload!;" and said, "obviously, we have to stand with our North Korean allies!" derided Occupy Wall Street as dumb.

A right-wing, whose presidential aspirant Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said HPV vaccine caused mental retardation; lethal carbon dioxide wasn't a harmful gas; John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father at age nine; swine flu outbreaks occurred during the Carter Administration instead of the Ford Administration; and actor John Wayne was from Waterloo IA, although he was from Winterset, IA, and the John Wayne from Waterloo was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, ridiculed Occupy Wall Street as ignorant.

A right-wing, whose presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and orchestrated his state's infamous pay-for-play influence peddling regimen, but dipped in recent polls for being soft on immigrants, denounced Occupy Wall Street as anti-American.

A right-wing, whose American Family Association leader Bryan Fischer claimed gays caused the Holocaust; wanted Muslims banned from military service; and said freedom of religion didn't apply to Mormons, decried Occupy Wall Street as divisive.

A right-wing, whose Dallas First Baptist Church pastor Robert Jeffress Friday introduced Perry to the Values Voters crowd as "a genuine follower of Jesus Christ," then went outside and called the Mormon Church a cult and said rival candidate Mitt Romney "was not a Christian," mocked Occupy Wall Street's values.

A right-wing, whose Tea Party minions would abolish Medicare, Medicaid and even employer-sponsored health care benefits, then cheer for the deaths of the uninsured, dared to insinuate Occupy Wall Street, or anyone or anything else alive on the Earth, was more repugnant, more despicable, more irredeemably evil than themselves.

Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing were schoolyard cliques of jocks and cheerleaders, inanely obsessed with their nipped, tucked, siliconed, botoxed, collagen-injected Stepford appearances, deriding anyone outside their clique.

Republicans, Tea Party zealots, and the right-wing, seemingly obsessed with taking off their clothes whenever possible, reigned over social conservative legions of schoolyard goons and toadies that coveted approval while indulging their own hatred of foreigners, immigrants, persons of color, gays, science, and followers of non-evangelical faiths.

Together, they devoted themselves to currying the favor of the rich, lavishing them with more and bigger tax cuts, breaks and subsidies, while scheming to pay for that largess by dismantling vital health care entitlements, plundering Social Security, and slashing all the services and oversight all Americans depended on.

That Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing denounced Occupy Wall Street proved Occupy Wall Street was on the right side of history

Republican Attack on America Abetted By Democrat Collaborators

The Republicans are poised for their final push to destroy America.  The Republican agenda seeks to dismantle all government oversight of business and industry and plague the world with toxic pollutants and useless, dangerous products; to hand over government buildings and infrastruture to GOP plutocrats like the Koch brothers; to plunder Social Security and Medicare for private gain; to strip workers of their right to organize and redress grievances; to wreck any chance of economic recovery by slashing the nation's investments and unleashing a $5 gas attack.

Every step of the way, the Republican plutocrats and their white supremacist minions have had insidious help among the Democrats.  It is not just that Democratic politicians also sought to curry favor with the GOP's plutocrat masters.  It is not just that President Barack Obama styled himself a progressive when he was in fact a tool of corporate plutocracy.  It is that Americans abdicated their role as informed, engaged participants in the democratic process and allowed a fringe of Tea Party extremists, racist sociopaths and plutocrats with visions of godhood to hijack the democratic process.

Take Barack Obama. Remember when Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the shoo-in for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008? Then, a blitz by corporate media raised Obama, out of nowhere, to frontrunner status. The corporate media gave some weak excuse about Obama's grassroots organization, but in fact it was the unrelenting drumbeat on the newsnets that kept Obama atop the 24-hour news cycle and foremost in the minds of Americans. Then, progressive white Americans committed the intellectual crime common to all progressive white Americans: they assumed that because Obama was black,  he must also be a progressive.

Yet, it was obvious throughout the campaign that he was solidly to the right of Hillary, who is herself a centrist.  That the corporate newsnets were relentlessly pushing Obama while disappearing Hillary was a clear signal that Obama was their dog in the fight.

So, now, while the Republicans offer Americans the choice between a total government shutdown or a government so crippled it cannot function, Obama and Congressional Democrats only bicker about the size of the cuts and the severity of the crippling, rather than bringing the fight to the plutocrats by addressing vital revenue reform to eliminate the plutocrats' reign of terror. While Republicans destroy the American workforce with layoffs, offshoring, and union-busting, Obama and the Congressional Democrats stand aside offering only muted support for labor ideals.  While Republicans scheme to plunder Social Security and Medicare, Obama and the Democrats mumble about finding bipartisan solutions.  Anyone who believes it is a good idea to hand the Social Security trust funds and Medicare accounts to GOP plutocrats in exchange for worthless IOUs and vouchers simply has rocks in his head.

The Republicans took thirty years to destroy America.  They dismantled the nation's public school system, the cornerstone of democracy, so that, while the wealthy could send their kids to private schools, poor whites would homeschool their children on misinterpretations of the Bible and racist hatred. They crippled the nation's ability to insure safe food and water, to curb unfettered investment and banking frauds, and to forestall industrial environmental disasters. They eviscerated the nation's manufacturing and service economies with gratuitous mergers, layoffs and offshoring.  They did all this by fostering a tax code that enabled them to accumulate unprecedented wealth and power and incentivized profiteering at the expense of the economic security and physical well-being of the American people.

And, every step of the way, Democrats enabled, abetted and ignored the GOP onslaught.

The final Republican push is at hand. Unless the GOP is stopped at any cost, the cost will be your freedom.

Media Buries Wisconsin Collective Bargaining Issue

Wisconsin Republican state legislators and Governor Scott Walker moved to strip collective bargaining rights from state workers, thousands protested, and Democratic legislators fled the state to prevent the required quorum for a vote.  Meanwhile, network television news framed the issue in such a way that the casual viewer would think that greedy unions were refusing to make wage and benefit concessions in spite of gaping budget deficits.

The networks passed over the collective bargaining issue, which is the actual crux of the conflict.

While the Governor is calling for wage and benefit concessions, and asking public workers to contribute more to their pension plans, the primary issue at stake is the collective bargaining agreement. The network news played up the wage and benefit concessions, but failed to explain the slashing of collective bargaining rights.

For example, the CBS Evening News displayed a graphic featuring four bullet points outlining the issues and anchor Katie Couric's voice-over explained the bullet points relating to the wage, benefit and pension plan issues. The fourth bullet point read "Collective bargaining agreement," but Couric's voice-over did not explain what that bullet point meant.

A viewer who wasn't already informed on the topic would have no idea that the collective bargaining issue was the heart of the matter, and, if the viewer hadn't been watching the screen for the few seconds the bullet point appeared, wouldn't even know the issue existed.

The net effect would be to make the viewer believe that the state workers were simply being intransigent during a time when everyone else was making sacrifices to keep the state going. Obviously, the intent is to make viewers believe the state workers shouldn't be entitled to generous wages and benefits everyone else wasn't getting.

The CBS Evening News had found a clever way to report the news and mislead its viewers at the same time.

For many years, going after unions has been the fashionable thing to do. Wide swaths of the electorate fall for the "I don't get those kinds of benefits, why should they?" ruse without considering that perhaps they themselves should be getting the same kinds of protections and benefits, and organizing toward that end.