It turns out that the OWS Protesters Are Just Like the Tea Partiers After All! [Reader Post]

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The Occupy Wall Street Movement has been mother’s milk for bloggers and political writers from all ends of the spectrum. Whether seeing them as kindred spirits of the Arab Spring or childish spirits in dire need of Irish Spring, almost everyone who writes about politics has weighed in. Aside from one brief post I’ve steered clear of this subject since it meets my two criteria for topic avoidance 1) Too many others have written about it and/or 2) Someone smarter than me has written about it. All of my regular readers (thank you, both of you!) have probably noticed this trait in my blog, but I haven’t seen any posts that actually connect the dots and draw up the one glaring similarity that both protests share.

Vice President Biden recently remarked that the OWS protesters and the Tea Party have a lot in common. OK, the vice president actually only said that the the two movements share common origins (protesting bank bailouts), but I thought I’d take this point a bit farther and compare and contrast them. Yes, I understand that the blogosphere has already got its share of postings comparing both, but I haven’t seen anyone tie all of the pieces together for the larger message that ties these two groups together.

First off, let’s look at the two minor traits that both groups have in common. Both have their share of critics who claim that these movements are nothing more than astroturfed mastermindings of George Soros / The Koch Brothers that have manipulated all of these hopeless rubes into dancing to their tune. There actually is a small degree of truth to the backing, as both protest movements have support that has received funding from their respective would-be overlords. That said, there are too many people who have come out on either side to simply dismiss either one as simple puppeteering. I’ve spent enough time at protests for both sides to state that the people at these protests are there because they truly believe in their causes. And yes, I know that left leaning groups play a larger role in OWS than group organizers did with the Tea party, and I’ll come back to that shortly.

Both the Tea Party and OWS are both opposed to the government bailouts, although OWS seems to be a day late and a dollar short in their complaint. Where were all of you two years ago, OWS? Still, better late than never.

And that’s about it in terms of the minor similarities. I’m sure that by now you’ve all read something listing differences between the two, but it’s a lot tougher to make my concluding point without briefly summarizing a few key points. So without further adieu, here are some key differences:

While the Tea Party has been portrayed as angry mobs on the verge of violence by the mainstream press, in reality you’ll never find so many law abiding, peaceful people in one setting. Compare that to how somehow the MSM narrative has managed to overlook this string of crimes and other inconvenient truths about the OWSers.

For that matter, the left had such a difficult time finding evidence supporting their claims about the Tea Party that they had to start planting people with fake signs. This had the dual effect of bolstering the Tea Party’s credentials while indicting the MSM, confident that any reporter would be so happy to find a sign that fit their narrative that they wouldn’t be bothered with such pesky steps like verifying that their source was an actual Tea Partier.

One of the reasons there is so little unrest at Tea Party events is that these are law abiding citizens who are unhappy with what the current political process has given them and work within the law to improve the situation. We saw this in what happened in the 2010 midterm elections and the efforts to fend off the leftist counterattacks against public union reform in Wisconsin. One of the reasons there is so much unrest at the OWS events is that the OWS group, under its sense of entitlement, feels that their objectives are too important to be worried about respecting the property rights of others, or their fellow protesters for that matter.

The Tea Party had simple, clear messages. Don’t destroy our health care system. Stop bailing out every company that spent more time donating money to your campaigns than running their business. Stop spending more money than you’re bringing in. The OWS is still trying to come up with a coherent message, or some demands that are actually feasible in the real world. Aside from the occasional “Repeal Glass-Steagal!’ (which quite a few Tea Partiers would support, actually), coherence and any connection to reality have been sorely lacking in their demands.

The Tea Partiers were accused of racism for opposing a president who has shown us  higher unemployment, greater debt, and more regulatory invasion into our lives than George W. Bush could have ever dreamed of – all substantial reasons. Ironically, the same people on the left who criticized Bush for these very reasons now can’t be bothered with criticizing the current president. Apparently the press has not figured out that, unlike holding people to equal standards regardless of skin color, holding someone to a lower standard because of their skin color is actual racism.

The Tea Partiers get labeled selfish for having these radical Ayn Randian notions of wanting freedom from the government in their lives (and that the rest of the 99% also be allowed to share this same freedom). The OWS crowd has a list of demands to give them guaranteed high wages, free college education, unconditional employment, etc. To someone without a degree in journalism that might sound a bit…selfish?

Despite accusations of astroturf, Tea Partiers came to their events, protested, and left. They can’t occupy anything since they are part of the productive class and have to go back to their responsibilities, such as their jobs and families. Tea Partiers don’t have the time or money to simply take an indefinite camping trip in a city park. Contrast this with who makes up most of the OWS – people who live off of the labor of others. Most of these protesters are students, union employees (not workers who happen to be union members, but the people on the union payroll itself. Of course, this does include union members in a number of the protests), and other groups of professional agitators (ACORN, Code Pink, etc.) who could not exist without the productive class. Somehow the press seems to be uninterested in how the funding for these occupations and the donated food, etc. is coming in – certainly not astroturf.

Taking the last point a bit farther, the Tea Partiers can’t have prolonged protests because they contribute to society in different ways. They set about uninteresting tasks such as managing the Wal-Mart that sells power bars and bottled water, or driving the truck that ships iPads for Amazon.com, or running the servers that keep AT&T and Verizon’s broadband service running, working at the bank that finds ways to finance student loans for degrees in Transgender Studies, maintaining the local town or city’s water works that ensure that toilets will flush and that water will come out of a spigot when a knob is turned, or stocking the shelves at the local Target with items like blankets and tents. For their efforts doing these mundane activities the Tea Partiers are given incentive to come back and do it again each day by being rewarded with something far greater than that inner glow that can only be gained by spending days on end in public places and chanting and banging on drums while eschewing personal hygiene and living off the generosity of others – the Tea Partiers get paychecks.

The OWS crowd enjoys donated items such as water bottles, power bars, blankets and tents. They feel that the local shops should allow them in to charge their iPads so they can upload their blog posts and pictures of the evil policemen up to their web sites hosted by Verizon or AT&T, and those same shops should allow them to use their restrooms to bathe in their sinks. And the evil banks should forgive their student loans since they can’t seem to find a job that pays well enough to repay the loan needed to get a degree in a marketable skill such as Transgender Studies.

In an amazing twist of irony it doesn’t seem to register that none of the goods needed to sustain these protests would be possible without the very system they seek to overthrow. To steal a comparison made by Mark Steyn, like the Eloi from Jules Verne’s The Time Machine the OWS just expect food to appear each morning and never give a thought as to what effort was needed to bring it there. It is lost on them that the very system they seek to overthrow might actually be the very one that gives them access to all of these products that they enjoy. Note to any aspiring Morlocks: do not try to eat any protesters. They probably taste even worse than they smell.

“And I thought they smelled bad…on the outside!”

I also have one curious observation about how the left and right views the two movements. For all of the angry, ignorant and hateful attacks that the left has launched at the Tea Party they are only too eager to put them on par with the OWS to give their own movement credibility. On the other side nobody even remotely tied to the Tea Party wants to be associated with the OWS in any way, shape or form for obvious reasons.

After looking at all of these factors how can one possibly conclude that these groups are alike and that the OWS is what lefties are desperately trying to label “The Tea party of the Left”? When one steps back and looks at all of the factors there is one unifying theme that both movements share. The OWS movement is just as perfect a representation of the liberal ideology as the Tea Party is of Conservatism.

If one positive development is coming from this, every dollar used to fund these professional agitators’ camp outs is one less dollar going into the Obama reelection fund.

Cross Posted at Brother Bob’s Blog

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Nice,

For all of the angry, ignorant and hateful attacks that the left has launched at the Tea Party they are only too eager to put them on par with the OWS to give their own movement credibility. On the other side nobody even remotely tied to the Tea Party wants to be associated with the OWS in any way, shape or form for obvious reasons.

Even the so-called intersection on bank bailout opposition is false. All you have to do is peel away one more layer of the onion and ask yourself why each group opposes the bank bailouts. Conservatives & TEA Party faithful (the productive class) opposed them on the principled grounds that gub’ment should never be picking winners and losers. The OWS Leftists just think this government chose the wrong winners, and now it should be their turn.

d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”

@LibertyAtStake: It is my opinion that OWS’ complaint re bank bailouts is just a scam

Good post, Brother Bob.

I identify with the Tea Party, but I have friends across the political spectrum, including friends involved in Occupy Portland. I think another similarity between the two movements that doesn’t receive the attention it should is this: Many people on both sides love their country and are deeply and genuinely saddened by her decline.

Yes, there are plenty of students and union reps, etc., in the OWS crowds, living off the labors of others while they seek to destroy the system that is serving them. But I have friends in Occupy Portland who have worked their entire lives, are now retired, are desperately worried about the future, and desperately want a better world for their children than the one they see forming.

Do I think they’re mistaken in their reasoning? Yes. Would I ever ridicule their hearts? No.

We’ve been “poor, uneducated and easily led” for twenty years now, clinging to our guns and our religion, and it’s hard not to give back in kind when we get the chance–and the OWS demonstrators certainly give us lots of chances!

But we have a choice. We can either sit in our little conservative bastions, preach to the choir and have a blast ridiculing OWS–and alienating the living daylights out of them and everyone else in the process–or we can get out in the wider marketplace and try to build bridges with other people who also love our country but who have never known anything but big government and socialist propaganda and so think the answers must lie there somewhere.

Not saying your post was vindictive, Brother Bob. I appreciated its even tone. It’s just that most conservative posts and articles I read about OWS *are* filled with name-calling and ridicule.

All twenty of our local OWS group (Occupy Long Beach) mosied over to the California University Regent’s offices yesterday to join the tenured professors (big part of the problem) and their grad student teaching assistants (want to be a big part of the problem) and their paper-pushing office workers (unionized and HUGE part of the problem) as well as a FEW students (all seemed to be La Raza folks) to storm the doors of the building and cause thousands of dollars in damages.
The reagents voted a 9% tuition hike to pay for the high cost of tenured professors (who don’t teach), their grad students (who try to teach) and their paper-pushing gigantic non-teaching unionized campus workforce.
Really want to solve the problem?
Get rid of the campus labor unions.
Cut out non-productive majors (still teach some of the classes, just not as a major).
Trade REAL grades for proof of knowledge of the subject (that would winnow out the professional students).
Oh, and fire all three university employees who were the three arrests yesterday.
And make THEM pay for 100% of the damages they caused.

They should be mad at obama. He just threw a bunch of oil and jobs to the Chinese whose pollution record is horrible.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577040430486060086.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

Hello Nan at #5 — check this article out:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016769522_international15m.html

On the front page of Seattle slimes they had a sub “feelgood” headline about how all the extra money being paid in out-of-state (read: country) tuitions was keeping the costs down for the state resident students — oh whoop de doo — meanwhile throwing the doors open to COMMUNIST china —

This rotten university “culture” (you know– that which grows in a petri dish from a sample of excrement) is nothing new — 40 years ago all the phd profs typically had no real world experience and only taught one course per quarter — usually poorly —

Long past time to take Big Ed down about 10 notches — at all levels

@Nan G: Good post. I live in Southern California and have twins in the UC system. What California fails to mention in all the discussion surrounding tuition increases, school cut backs, and the disaster of our educators is what I call the $9 billion dollar burrito in the room. If you look at tax dollars wasted on illegals within education and our health care systems you will find your answer to the problem.

@Budvarackbar:
Bud, you make a good point.
If the Ca State U system were to cut out all of the foreign students their engineering, chemistry, pre-med, physics and almost all other ”hard” science departments would either close or be cut down to nearly nothing.
The Chinese students are numerous in all of those departments locally.

@Common Sense:
CS, you also make a good point.
Illegals love using a student ID to get free medical care on campus.
They might have one sister attending while another two or three use her ID card to get the clinic care faster than a local ER.
One of my neighbors, who has done his residency and also serves at the CSU medical clinic on campus says he sees this a lot.
The sisters or brothers don’t realize that they are not fooling their doctor.
He has notes where one sibling has high blood pressure or diabetes, another comes in and doesn’t have it.Or he sees a mole that needs to be monitored on one sibling but is not there on the next visit because this is another person.
OY!

First off, sorry for being late back to the discussion. Things have been crazy busy here, hence the less frequent posting lately.

@Cry Beloved Country: You do raise a good point about reaching out, and I would put the question back to you – how do we build bridges with the OWSers? They’ve never shown anything but disrespect at best and condescending disdain toward the Tea Party at every turn.

Even though our president and congress have made their incompetence and outright hostility toward economic growth these folks refuse to peel off the Obama rose colored glasses and just angrily lash out at some faceless enemy?

If you have a way to reach them I’ll be the first in line, but I just don’t see how we accomplish that.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!