Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

I Need a Pitchfork

Time to slay the corporate clowns.

Just click through the link.

Honestly, you have to be grateful that - to this point - the Occupy Wall Street people are mostly vegan-Buddhist-trustafarians.  Otherwise, we could be seeing violence beyond that being perpetrated on the protestors by the police.

At some point, someone is going to push things too far.  And I think we all know it will be either the privileged, belligerent sociopaths who work on Wall Street or the police.

The whole point of this schtick is to "heighten the contradictions".  The Tea Party assault on Democrat townhalls in the summer of '09 was in this vein, and it can be a powerful tool if the moment is right.

Obviously, I thought much of the Teatard assault on ACA and other things were paranoid overreactions.

And when I hear the Occupy Wall Street crowd talk about ending the Federal Reserve and other nonsense I think there are a fair amount of nuts in that brownie.

But... The presence of a movement that taps into genuine grievance and elicits a response that dominates the news can be a powerful weapon for change.

The Teatards gave us Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor.  Can the OWS crowd help focus on the real problem in our economy, namely the concentration of wealth at the top?

If so, that will be hard for Mitt Romney of all people to defend.

UPDATE: I should read my blogroll first.  Ezra Klein has a better take on it here.

UPDATE 2: Even more great stuff, this time by Charlie Pierce.

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