For nightly network news to portray "Occupy Wall Street" as our own "Arab Spring" is like putting honey out for bears. Good for bears. Bad for people.
NBC last night trotted out some expert no one ever heard of, drawing parallels between disaffecting youth. That is wrong. As flat out wrong as the notion to the unemployed, under-employed, or educated college students with no job prospects, that the economy is in risk of a "double dip recession". Watch the television images from the networks: the visuals are picking out "hippies" in the crowd. In the Daily News, Mike Lupica writes, "There were college kids down here, and old hippies in a world where you don't even hear that word - hippies - much anymore. There were Vietnam vets who marched against that war once, and young women in sleeping bags and guys handing out a broadsheet newspaper with this headline on the front: "Declaration of the Occupation."
Some history of bear traps like this. Those television images of hippies marching against the war in Vietnam in the late 1960's and early 1970's helped transform the right-wing in America. Up to that point, the right-wing had been mainly organized around segregationist John Birchers. A 2005 article from AlterNet by Don Hazen described how the right-wing was transformed: it was "... panic among conservatives, especially in corporate boardrooms, that capitalism was under serious attack, and something drastic had to be done about it. The National Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a former head of the American Bar Association and member of 11 corporate boards, to write a blueprint of what had to be done. The result is one the most prescient documents of our time. The memo lays out the framework, the goals and the ingredients for the conservative revolution that has gained momentum and power ever since. Two months after penning the memo, then-President Richard M. Nixon appointed Powell, a Democrat, to the U.S. Supreme Court."
What is so interesting about the current disorganized series of protests is that nothing-- and I mean,
nothing-- has been heard from the "Tea Party" whose televised events are staging areas for Republican causes. The Tea Party that is now standing up is a different one, from that co-opted by the radical right, and its organizers need to understand how the media portrayals will fuel the same opposition that arose those long decades ago.
"Powell told the conservatives that they needed to confront liberalism everywhere and needed a "scale of financing only available through a joint effort" focused on an array of principles including less government, lower taxes, deregulation and challenging the left agenda everywhere. The conservative right, starting with seed money from the Coors Brewing family and Richard Mellon Scaife's publishing enterprise, moved forward to implement virtually every element of the Powell memo. It is a story of how the conservatives – in spite of political differences, ego, and competing priorities – were able to cooperate and develop a methodology that drives their issues and values relentlessly.
Starting with just a handful or groups, including the Heritage Foundation, in the early '70s, the conservatives built a new generation of organizations – think tanks, media monitors, legal groups, networking organizations, all driven by the same over-arching values of free enterprise, individual freedoms and limited government."
Eventually and over time, those values became the Potemkin Village through which big government and corporate subsidies deformed democracy. The protesters in NYC and Miami and other cities around the nation ought to be thinking of themselves as the inheritors of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, which followed the complaint of taxation without representation.
Today's parallel and object of protest is a democracy that taxes people more than corporations and empowers corporations over people. The fig leaf of the 2008 Tea Party covers up the fact that the progeny of Powell are radicals and extremists who glorify corporate power and authority: this is the Manifest Destiny of Bush Republicanism that is still, despite the economic crash, alive and well in so many forms because none of powerful interests have been held accountable, at all, for their roles in steering the economy on the reef from which the remnants are being scavenged. (On the tiny scale, in Miami-Dade County, read G.O.D.'s description of the effort, promoted by county commissioner Lynda Bell, to further empower rock miners and big ag in South Miami-Dade over environmentally sensitive lands.)
For a new generation of political activists, some advice: don't let the mainstream media paint you into the same corner as protesters in the 1960's. Those images of latter-day free spirits in Manhattan are meant to serve up old antagonisms that generate significant campaign money at election time for candidates who, among other lies, pose as sympathetic to Tea Party rank and file.
Keep it simple: corporations are
not people and must not have the same rights as people.
There is a litmus test.
