Is Occupy Wall Street the left’s ‘tea party’?

posted at 4:02 pm on October 4, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Media ]   

The bashing of the Tea Party, from the White House down through the dregs of leftist humanity (think Janeane Garofalo), has seemed cynical from the start. Ever since that fateful day in January of 2009 when the first “tea bagger” insult was hurled, one has had a nagging suspicion that some sort of perverse force—call it tea party envy—was at work.

Why else would a high-visibility media tool of the left like the Huffington Post bus 14,000 people to an anti-Tea Party rally in Washington to compete with a similar event engineered by Glenn Beck? Why would an elite source like Newsweek waste space on proving the Tea Party racist if so many on the left believe the movement is irrelevant? Why would the president refuse to condemn his second in command’s calling the Tea Party “terrorists” if he didn’t believe it himself and wish on some level that he had his own terrorist brigade to marshal against this one?

All are moot questions now that the president’s dream has seemingly come true. Michael Scherer of TIME writes:

The Tea Party was once a joke, an aberration, a bunch of funny people in funny hats with neither power nor a coherent message. That was back in 2009, of course, before the loosely-defined group, organized through new technology and fueled by anger over the state of the country, began knocking out incumbent GOP senators and transforming American politics. Back then, Rachel Maddow laughed at the crude implications of “tea-bagging,” and White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs joked about how little the White House cared.

Then, without expending so much as a word on how the movement has evolved, Scherer takes a giant leap forward to the here and now, to a new “marginal, rag-tag” movement that has “taken its name from its first act of civil disobedience: Occupy Wall Street.” Scherer urges his reader to “keep an eye on it. To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, something may be happening here.”

Discredited Obama green jobs czar Van Jones, an equally vocal and angry critic of the Tea Party, shares Scherer’s excitement, telling viewers of Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word,“Everybody should hold onto their [sic] seats. October is going to be the turning point when it comes to the progressive fight back. You can see it coming.”

How nice for liberals! After 32 months of scouring footage and photographs of Tea Party rallies, looking for the occasional imprudent sign or shout that demonstrates that the entire lot are unwashed, gun-toting racists (or inventing such evidence), they now have—or think they have—a tea party of their own.

Big Labor is tickled pink as well. A press release from Mike Fishman, President of 32BJ, a branch of SEIU with 120,000 members states the union’s solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, whose protests are described as stemming

from a deep and growing frustration shared by many people about the state of our economy and our country. We all saw that when our economy fell apart, the burden fell straight onto the backs of working people.

Up to that point, the release could have been written about the real Tea Party—the group that unions despise as much as their fellow liberals.

So how is the new tea party different from or for that matter superior to the original Tea Party? Well, let’s see. First let’s take a look at their goals and objectives. A website titled Occupy Wall Street offers up a list of 13 demands that if met will, according to the site’s writers,“create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.”

Some of the specifics include an end to free trade, establishment of a universal single payer healthcare system, free college tuition, a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending, and a racial and gender equal rights amendment. It’s all a little socialistic for my blood, but the more immediate problem that arises is how the protesters expect the captains of industry—who in essence run Wall Street—to implement these changes. It would appear that the real target of their grievances is the federal government and our nation’s leaders. (Then again, Occupy Washington is old hat.)

Another difference is their willingness to participate in what organizers optimistically call “civil disobedience,” which includes blocking traffic on public thoroughfares and the like. Say what you will about the Tea Party, but none of them has ever held a lane of the Brooklyn Bridge hostage for several hours.

Yet another difference seems to be the demonstrators’ aversion to soap. I have shirked my journalistic responsibility by steering clear of Zuccotti Plaza in downtown Manhattan, where the protesters have been camped out for three weeks. I will take it on faith from colleagues who have visited that the aroma is fairly ripe at this point.

One final difference is the almost total absence of black faces among participants in the rallies. I realize this is a claim that critics have leveled against the Tea Party, albeit falsely, but check it out for yourself. Skim the photographs at this page (again, it is the Occupy Wall Street site), and see how many people of color you can find. I count one in the still frame from the video.

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• Glenn Beck vs. Al Sharpton: A tale of two activists
• Newsweek cites “study” that shows Tea Partiers are racist

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