It is hard not to think that there is an agenda at play when you watch the western media’s limited coverage of the Occupy Movement. The talking heads continue to dismiss the movement at every turn and now that a movement called OccupyMARINES has begun America’s right has started to attack them for being traitors and cowards. It is hard to believe that a country that would send their kids off to fight in wars halfway around the world, and then send them back again would dare to say that these people are traitors and cowards.
The Occupy Movement, despite the media’s inability to understand even the simplest of messages, is actually pretty clear - end the bailout of corporations and banks, provide health care for all, and affordable post-secondary education. What it really boils down to is that the protesters want a more level playing field. The movement is not anti-capitalist like the media has tried to claim nor is it some evil socialist plot. The people who now occupy space around American and the world are people just like you and me. They are WWII veterans and Iraq War veterans. They are lawyers, students, the unemployed and the employed. They are people who have homes and who have lost their homes. They are the people of America, or what politicians like to refer to as “Main Street Americans” meaning the non-elite. There are Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents, grandparents, parents, and children. They are America.
It is hard to really understand why there is such hostility toward the people of the Occupy Movement since until recently they only marched up and down the street chanting and banging on their drums, and at night they slept in a park. They are not very threatening unless their message is striking a chord. Remember when the markets originally tanked and the government went after a few big wigs who they ended up throwing in jail for a little bit of time? The people of Occupy Wall Street think that there should have been a lot more of those people going to jail. Then the presidents, both Bush and Obama came along and said the banks were too big to fail and gave them massive bailouts. America was broke, literally owing nearly 15 trillion dollars, so in order to bail out the banks it needed to borrow more money. It’s not the politicians who will end up paying that money back. It will be the taxpayers who have seen income inequality grow, their jobs dry up and their homes lost. What that mob in those parks is trying to say makes sense.
Not all of America sees it that way though. Take the Tea Party for instance. Its members seem to believe that bailing out Wall Street was the right move to make and that people who lost their homes deserved it. Rick Santelli famously said in his rant on the floor of Chicago Stock Exchange, “Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?” The sad part about this is that the Tea Party is made of working Joes too that have paid a heavy price for Wall Street’s greed. It’s just too bad they can’t see that they too are part of the 99 per cent.