The Daily Bell
October 3, 2011
Wall Street: From Protest to Politics … When elected leaders largely ignore a disgrace like the financial collapse of 2008, sooner or later popular protest fills the vacuum. The Wall Street protests are heartening – but also a measure of the utter failure of the usual machinery of democracy to remedy the worst pillaging of regular Americans by financial elites since the 1920s. For three years, we have been wondering, where is the outrage? For a time, it was co-opted by the Tea Parties – a faux populism, attacking government, financed by billionaires, delivering nothing to the 99 percent of Americans not represented by Wall Street. Now authentic protest directed against the real villains is finally here. The ingenuity of occupywallst.org, its spread to other cities, its blending of Internet-organizing with on-the-ground protest, is inspiring. – Huffington Post/The American Prospect
Dominant Social Theme: The tide is rising. Popular indignation and outrage will give way to political reconfigurations.
Free-Market Analysis: This article by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, is in our view a perfect example of the way the Occupy Wall Street meme was supposed to play out. The positioning (see excerpt above) of the protests is likely intended to replace the Tea Party and to create credibility for the current faux-populism now playing out.
Who is Kuttner? He is a “Distinguished Senior Fellow at the think tank Demos, and a longtime columnist for Business Week, who continues to write columns in the Boston Globe.” In this column, he claims that the Tea Party was “financed by billionaires” and delivered nothing “to the 99 percent of Americans not represented by Wall Street.”
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