This is interesting, one of the founders of the Tea Party expresses support for the Occupy Together movement:
“One of the things that the Occupy movement seems to have going for it is it has not turned around and issued a set of formal demands,” said Denninger. “This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Everyone is looking for a set of demands.” Denninger added that once the protesters formally approach the banks and government with a list of demands, “then somebody is going to say, ‘Well, we gave you 70 percent. Now go home.’”
In the case of the Tea Party, Denninger says such organization was actually the group’s downfall. “One of the things we wanted was the end to bailouts and an end to government deficit spending, and as you can see that didn’t happen,” said Denninger, who today manages The Market Ticker.
Denninger added that demonstrators with Occupy Wall Street and the offshoots across the world shouldn’t just abandon their goals. “Stay on message, which is that the corruption is not a singular event,” he said. “You can’t focus in one place. You have to get the money out of politics, which is very difficult to do, but at the same time you can’t silence people’s voice.”
Look, I don’t buy into Hamsher’s tea party/hippie alliance idea at all. The Tea Party may have had some well-meaning grassroots component but it quickly became dominated by Koch/Murdoch astroturf and, well, racism. At the same time, the Occupy movement’s anti-Wall Street sentiment may strike more of a chord with some Tea Party types than you might think.