The surest sign that Occupy Wall Street is beginning to scare the money party is this:
Conservative activists have created a Tumblr called “We are the 53 percent” that’s meant to be a counterpunch to the viral “We are the 99 percent” site that’s become a prominent symbol for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tumblr is supposed to represent the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes, and its assumption is that the Wall Street protesters are part of the 46 percent of the country who don’t. “We are the 53 percent” was originally the brainchild of Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.org, who worked together with Josh Trevino, communications director for the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, and conservative filmmaker Mike Wilson to develop the concept, according to Trevino.
The greatest hoax of the last couple of decades has been the ability of the right wing to co-opt members of the struggling lower middle class and lower class and pretend they speak for them while enacting policies that enable the super-rich. They’ve used wedge issues like gay marriage and abortion and the baby Jeebus to alienate folks from their own economic interests, feeding them a steady diet of hatred of minorites, the educated, science, and, well, reality to create a voting block of people so guided by hatred of the “other” that they would crawl over broken glass to cut their nose off to spite their face. I could go on at length about this, but you’d be better off just reading the book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and the excellent discussions Anne Laurie hosted here.
And so, because the message of the #OWS crowd has an organic message that resonates, one that surpasses the fraudulent tea party nonsense of the Koch brothers funded Tea Party, the money boys strike back. And who else to lead the pushback than two folks who owe their entire existence to the wingnut wurlitzer. Red State is a fully funded operation of Eagle Publishing, the owner of Human events and Regnery Publishing. The members of the money party are scared, so they’ve sent out their astroturf specialists to meet it head on. It will fail.
You may be able to divide people on social issues in times of wealth and prosperity, however fraudulent those eras of credit card living and false profits were. But not when this is going down:
A police officer watching the crowd march by said as long as the protest stayed peaceful “I’m with them. I’m part of the 99 percent, too.”
This is not going to end the way the money boys and their mouth pieces want. And no amount of bullshit from wingnut blogs will get in the way.
Not that they won’t try.