Romney: Occupy Wall Street 'wrong way to go'

[anvi]

It seems that "pitting Americans against other Americans" is only something that happens when any blame or demand for accountability is laid at the doorstep of corporations and business.  There's nothing wrong with favoring the interests of some Americans over those of others when it comes to busting unions, decimating pensions, outsourcing jobs and whole industries, and allowing middle class wealth to grow many times slower than upper-class wealth for three decades.  Eric Cantor and Mitt Romney can shove that line somewhere.  If these guys want anybody in the middle class to believe that they're really in favor of lifting all boats rather than more of the last three decades for the middle class only at an accelerated rate, then they should talk about what their vision for rebuilding the middle class in America is, rather than just blaming people who are hurting for being mad about it.  This call for us to be "one nation" only works if you can make it real.  And if you don't believe that, ask Obama how much of the political mandate he won with that very same rhetoric in 2008 is left.

[anvi]

It certainly is the case that the protestors are expressing sheer outrage without pursuing a coherent agenda.  I looked at the national website for the Occupy movement this morning in search of a set of goals they desire to achieve, and found only a bunch of discussion threads with a lot of nasty back and forth between posters and everyone who had something to bitch about joining the party, as generally happens with these things.  But, despite how tricky it is to do good "messaging" in the buildup to a primary battle, I think the best way to deal with movements like this is to get a sense of what the core frustration is, find out the reality behind it, and try to address it.  Obama can no more be the leader of "one nation" by blaming all his political travails on the TEA Party, without grasping what is at the core of their anger and addressing it, than Mitt Romney can be the leader of "one nation" by talking to mad Iowans about "corporation-persons" and mildly scolding mad New Yorkers for feeling disenfranchised by corporations.  The middle class don't have cash reserves up to their ears and time to wait for investment opportunities to sweeten; they need to be offered a vision of what's in it for them.  

[anvi]

What oh what are the protestors trying to tell us, what is their way out, and does it make the slightest bit of sense?  Perhaps we should start from there...

Sure the government when they bailed out the banks should have taken all the stock too. So Obama/Bush screwed up. Blame them!

I think, and of course I could easily be wrong, since it's true the protestors don't have a coherent agenda, but I think their frustration stems from a feeling that government no longer defends the interests of the individuals that are struggling in a faltering economy, but instead defends at every turn the interests of corporations and Wall Street.  They don't know how to address it, but they think it's a fundamental problem that no one in government is sufficiently addressing, and in fact has no incentive to address given how moneyed interests drive the political process and how policies benefit the economy for economic players and not for them.  Are they going to get what they want by screaming at highrises?  No. But they're obviously not going to get what the want by staying submissively silent either.  I do agree with something jmf is implying, I think, in the sense that the TEA Party has a much smarter political organization; they protest, but they also have at least a clear agenda (lower taxes, smaller government, deficit reduction ect.) and they mobilize to get candidates elected.  Lefties are rarely that well organized, but they also are rarely as intellectually and politically homogeneous as the movements that gave rise to the TEA Party.   Incidentally, based on what I'm hearing, I think the protestors do blame Bush and Obama both; most are saying that, when it comes to economic policy that benefits business and not individuals, the two are practically the same person.  My point is that we're being very selective about whose anger we deem worthy of legitimacy here, and if our inclination is to just blow off people who are on the other side of the political divide, then we don't get to sing songs about "pitting Americans against Americans."  If Mittens wants to be the leader of the country and not just the captain of his own team, then he has to show those people in the streets the goods too.   

[anvi]

I maintain that these protests are composed of hipsters, college students, and ex-hippies, and I've not seen evidence to the contrary sans a few singular examples.

I was in St. Louis the other day, where Occupy protests have begun to be staged, and there were a fair number of teachers with doctoral and postdoctoral degrees out there who had lost jobs after one-year term contracts and are now unemployed, as well as some veterans and families that had recently lost their houses to foreclosure.  So, do these peopmle not matter in America anymore, or if economic circumstances have conspired to decimate their lives and they're having a hard time making it on their own, then to hell with them?  Call them hipsters and dope-addicts and social waste and get one with the business of austerity and reducing corporate taxes, right?   Make sure to plaster those messages on the campaign bus, they're real vote-getters.