Joe Lapointe is a segment producer on "Countdown"
The Occupy Wall Street movement was never just about camping in public spaces. But such efforts elevated Occupy’s profile, channeled legitimate economic anger and helped ignite a political grassfire across the land.
The whole point was not to just march and demonstrate sporadically or to heckle Republican presidential candidates, although these tactics express the honest fears of middle-class Americans who have been hustled and played for suckers over three decades by the greed-is-good ethos of Reaganism.
What Occupy has accomplished — and will continue to accomplish — is a sharp and significant change in the political dialogue. Imagine, even two months ago, a high-profile politician charging Republican presidential campaign leader Mitt Romney with “vulture capitalism.”
Last autumn, even a Democrat would have been attacked for using such a belligerent expression. Few would have dared to speak it.
To hear it come from the right wing of the right-wing party — from the Republican Texas governor, Rick Perry — is to realize that for the first time in a long while, liberals and progressives (not necessarily Democrats) are framing the debate.
And Occupy did it by raising class consciousness and focusing on economics instead of the phony “cultural issues” that artificially divide Americans.
A survey released by the Pew Research Center this week, as reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, showed the greatest source of tension in American society is the conflict between rich and poor.
The perception is growing and now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born.
The share — nearly two-thirds, at 66 percent — is the largest since 1992 and represented about a 50 percent increase from 2009, replacing immigration as the greatest source of tension.
“Rich and poor aren’t terribly distinct from secure and unemployed,” Christopher Jencks, professor of social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told The New York Times.
Even the right-wing media has been influenced. Rupert Murdoch’s reactionary Fox News Channel has had to mix the topic into its usual unsavory stew of poll-spinning, race-baiting, car chases, country music interviews, immigrant-bashing, religious rabble-rousing, the beatification of Ronald Reagan and all those missing white girls.
Even the ordinarily cocky Sean Hannity of Fox has been off his footing lately, timidly asking his Republican infomercial guests if attacks on “free enterprise” by Perry and Newt Gingrich are good for the Republican Party. (Pssssst, Sean! They’re not!)
On Fox, all political issues are either “good for the Republican Party” or “bad for the Republican Party.” Imagine the fun President Obama will have with a belligerent foil like the Republican House. It will return to work with its own presidential candidates calling their leader a robber baron.
Oh, hello, Paul Ryan! Got any fresh new ideas to “solve” our problems with social security and “entitlements”? Speak up, young man. Wisconsin is listening, you’re running for re-election. See how angry those Badgers are at high-handed right-wing bullies like Governor Scott Walker? Stand by him, won’t you?
The internal numbers of the Pew survey were also dramatic and revealing. Between 2009 and 2011, the greatest rise in economic conflict consciousness came from independents (up 23 percentage points), whites (22 percentage points), and people between the ages of 50 and 64 (22 percentage points).
These groups decide elections. They vote in larger numbers than some other groups, and they are motivated when they have time on their hands that is a result of unemployment prolonged by a Republican Party that has tried to sabotage the economy for the first three years of the Obama presidency.
They are not the type of people likely to be impressed that a high-rolling Las Vegas casino owner is bankrolling Newt Gingrich’s mud-slinging campaign against Romney in South Carolina before the primary.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on November 10, 2011 in New York City. (Photo credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Treating our economy like a casino on Wall Street helped get us into this mess, particularly in the second term of George W. Bush, when — according to the U.S. Census Bureau — the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of the population increased to 56 percent in 2009 from 49 percent in 2005.
What’s a right-wing demagogue to do? Even little Ricky Santorum, the homophobic mascot among the remaining big dogs of the pack, dared to criticize Romney last week for using the phrase “middle class.”
Such words, Santorum implied, suggest a class system. And such words (at least in Republican Foxworld) might lead to “class warfare.” But it is hard to accuse Obama and the Democrats of this “warfare” when Gingrich, Perry and Romney are throwing the grenades at each other.
In some ways, the climate of the moment recalls the late 1980s, the second Reagan term, when Gordon Gekko was Hollywood’s poster boy for Wall Street predators and “Bonfire of the Vanities” exposed the values and lifestyles of the One Percent.
Perhaps it would be good to again screen the movie “Wall Street” and to again read the Tom Wolfe book. What’s old is now new again. Wealthy people always know what’s best … don’t they?
