OWS Versus the Tea Party Is Comparing Apples to Koch

Setting up the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement as the left wing's answer to the right-wing tea party is completely flawed for one simple reason: one is an actual uprising of concerned citizens, while the other is set up to have the appearance of an uprising of concerned citizens.

Any guesses which one is which?

If you are left to guessing, here is a video of multi-billionaire David Koch, owner of the second largest private company in the U.S., getting report backs on tea party member sign ups from state organizers:

The venue is the annual convention for a group called Americans for Prosperity of which David Koch is their Chairman and a major funder. This video isn't "evidence" of a theory that major corporate interests are behind the Tea Party, it is stark proof that the tea party is backed by major corporate interests and is nothing like the citizen-led and citizen-founded Occupy Wall Street movement.

For years I have been following and reporting on David Koch's activities and the emergence of Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party and other supposed "grassroots" organizations (here's a hint: if a group calls itself "grassroots" it most likely isn't). Such fake grassroots groups can be powerful because while people mistrust government and corporations, they trust groups that appear to have the concerns of everyday working America at the core of their principles.

But for anti-government regulatory groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Don't Tread on Me Tea Party they help organize, the motivation is protecting corporations from things like health care mandates for employees and environmental protections for the air we breathe -- corporations like David Koch's Koch Industries which has been the subject to major environmental violations over the years, including oil pipeline spills and dumping aviation fuel into Mississippi wetlands.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has no equivalent of David Koch or Americans for Prosperity. It is not holding big fancy conventions at high-priced ballrooms in Washington, D.C. It is a growing group of concerned people across America that are fed up with all sorts of things, like excessive corporate profits, polluting industries and the growing divide between the rich and the poor. The very fact that OWS has no unifying message tells me that there is no hidden organizing body equivalent to Americans for Prosperity or David Koch behind their activities.

This seems obvious to me. So why do many media outlets and politicians continue to make this comparison? I think the reason is that it is easy to compartmentalize this as a battle between the political left and the political right, when it is instead a battle between the 99% of us average working people and the 1% hiding behind smoke screens like the Tea Party.

 

Follow Kevin Grandia on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kgrandia

Comments

[Doug Brockman]

10:46 PM on 11/14/2011

should be I bet they employ.

[carolina919]

12:07 AM on 11/11/2011

It's one of those juxtapositions in life that make it all so very interesting....

In discovering the writings and credo of Wendell Berry I've found myself thinking about his wisdom in the context of the Occupy Wall Street protests which I am following with a mixture of hope and curiosity and a tad bit of concern.

But a couple of Berry's quotes come to mind and seem to offer some resonance for me with my hopes about the OWS movement too:

A community economy is not an economy in which well-placed persons can make a 'killing'. It is an economy whose aim is generosity and a well-distributed and safeguarded abundance. --
"The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a "new economy", but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy."

But also this quote:
Great problems call for many small solutions.

Which seems to me to be, not only true, but an encouragement that incremental acts and actions DO matter, cumulative efforts and effects CAN make a difference and a reminder that there is no one single 'magic bullet' or 'miracle cure' for the ills we now confront.

[Cecil Cain]

08:21 PM on 11/10/2011

The video makes a great point people overlook. These right-wing organizations actually organize tea party events. Yes, OWS receives financial support from unions but unions aren't organizing and planning these movements. In fact, OWS has been somewhat reluctant to allow the unions to co-opt them.

http://www.obamaftw.com/blog/tea-party/occupy-wall-street-ows-vs-the-tea-party-a-brief-comparison

[Mark Woodworth]

11:48 AM on 11/10/2011

This posting offers a biased opinion drawn from extremely shallow and illogical analysis. OWS and Tea Party can both be found to have important financial support drawn from politically-connected organizations. Both recognize crony capitalism as a disease that must be stamped out by the People. Despite the Progressive mantra, most Tea Partiers are not in any way co-opted by the demonized Koch brothers and are reacting to the excesses of the Progressive agenda as they see it; and they have a right to feel this way even if in disagreement with the Left. OWS has a right to protest peacefully and to make their case even if incoherent and mis-focused. There is some indication that OWS enjoys support from organized labor, elected progressive leaders in politics at all levels (some of whom are responsible for these very crimes against the People). OWS and Tea Party do share many common beliefs in fiscal conservatism, i.e. to reinstate the Glass–Steagall Act, establish term limits, and destroying the nexus between lobbyists and policy makers. They do dramatically differ on other issues, such as immigration and climate policy. Yet both movements are mere shadows of what is to come as negative economic forces propel the People to attempt to dismantle the corrupt system as practiced. Mark Woodworth, Ph.D.

[carolina919]

12:12 AM on 11/11/2011

........I disagree with you about the connecting the OWS movement with the bastions of support that you mention....I think the worldwide spontaneous replications indicate something far more universal than that....and certainly far more genuine than the morphed identity of the Tea Party since it was co-opted...but I absolutely agree with your closing sentiment.....
Wendell Berry wonders, whether....
We can't go on too much longer, maybe, without considering the likelihood that we humans are not intelligent enough to work on the scale to which we have been tempted by our technological abilities.
and also offers this observation:
"We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, profit-for-profit's-sake economy, and yet remain a God-fearing and a democratic nation, as we still apparently think of ourselves. This simply means that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence, and are reduced merely to talk."

It's past time for us as citizens and a country to put our principles to work....even if it takes a multitude of small incremental and seemingly unrelated steps to do it...we didn't get here overnight and we can't snap our fingers or use a single magic act to make it "right"....

[ennis438]

09:54 AM on 11/10/2011

Koch and his ilk are anti-American. Their desire to monoplize all the wealth in this country in the hands of one percent of the population is one hundred eighty degrees different from the wishes of the Founding Fathers of this country. It is a disgrace that one of the two major political parties in this country supports this nonsense of trickle down economics and the result should be a political party born that supports the poor and middle class and shuns this anti-American strategy of the Koch's and their political puppets who are bribed by these monsters to work against the majority of Americans.

[Cecil Cain]

08:23 PM on 11/10/2011

And let's face it; much of this nonsense is driven by racism...

http://www.obamaftw.com/blog/republican-party-racism/republican-tea-party-racism