May 2012

Guest Post: Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street, PART II

l3wis May 4, 2012 10Comments

Movements of the human spirit and messaging control through history are at the root of ruling / political classes. The 99% must always be controlled. Look at the roots of the worldwide spring uprisings in 2011, the Tea Party, Occupy, civil rights and other movements. When you examine each of these movements, consider how each of them has very similar roots. Every person, when joining each movement, is doing so based in one or more frustrations.

Each of the movements mentioned above did not just happen. Some movements arise through orchestration and others arise as if by spontaneous combustion. I will let you decide how your favorite movement compares. Our value systems are based on deep-seated values, beliefs and coping systems derived from our backgrounds and the educations. How are we taught to deal with challenges to our belief systems?  Is your method avoidance, confrontation, analytical or somewhere in between? When economies fail or long held beliefs are challenged, people will respond using an existing organization or create their own, to express the frustration, anger or view.

The Tea Party was a creation of pollsters, political operatives and billionaires to capture low information people into an umbrella organization.  The descendants of Fred Koch, a wealthy southern financier of fear movements, has continued to follow their father’s lead and create bogus grassroots umbrella groups.  The Tea Party was created to look like a real grassroot movement, made to seemingly catch the political class totally by surprise so they would over react in response to it.  It was well controlled from its start by former GW Bush employees and their friends to gain more power over us the 99%. At the root of this movement is fear.  Fear is a powerful motivator and to move a process, the ‘real’ leaders must be well coordinated in how the message is responded to. Create an information vacuum by a complicit media. Only tell the planned message, followed by images easily digested, so low information people can be hooked. These low information fearful will band together to use the prepared one voice without regard to its origin or to the consequences.

As long as the Tea Party owners talked only fiscal issues, there seemed to be one simple to digest mission. As more people began to take the Tea Party concepts further to the right into unapproved areas, the movement disintegrated.  If not for the massive money contributed by the owners, we would not hear about the Tea Party any longer.  As long as there is complicity between the owners, corporate media, and lobbyists to continue to spread fear, it will remain out on the fringes, as if was real.  Think Citizens United and the 1% discussions and repercussions.  Consider in 2012 how our local Tea Party cannot even gather more than 20 people for a candidate’s ‘debate’ in Sioux Falls.  There were almost more candidates attending than voters.

What we do hear in daily life is an undercurrent of real frustration and pain, based on the collective loss of our Constitutional promises, rights and dreams.  We the remaining 99% still don’t have a place to express the many things bothering us.  We see and hear this pain from all regions of the globe, but we will find it only if we listen and look real hard for it.  Our national and global mainstream media, like our local outlets, is owned and controlled by the owners of the Tea Party.  If it is not part of their messaging, it must be ignored.  When the messages are found and discussed, the messenger is ‘conspiratorial’.

Each of us, our families, friends and millions of people we don’t know, has life challenges not being met by society.  Whether we like it or not, we all are interconnected in multiple ways, shapes and forms.  When we do join together in our schools, churches, jobs, bars or clubs we are doing it for the reason we showed up.  We each have our own reason but use the ‘join together’ to accomplish the need we have at the moment.  This is the Occupy movement.  The people who showed up arrived to express their own frustration, show their pain and try to find answers.  Look at the disorganized nature of the crowds, the hand drawn signs, the messages passed out to anyone willing to take and read and the mic-check method of broadcasting.  The original Occupy Wall Street gatherings like the Arab Spring uprisings were beautiful because they were spontaneous and uncontrolled.  Spontaneous and uncontrolled people strikes fear in the 1%.  The strongest true grassroot movements are created by people, expressing their collective frustration, just by being a mass of people just showing up.  A constant complaint of the Occupy is the lack of a single message.  Who cares?  It is not one cute message, hat or preprinted mass produced signs to hold up for a news camera to see.  The media does not know how to drill down the multiple messages into cute sound bites so the grassroot messages are derided as if a joke.

All great political shifts or realignments happen when people just show up.  The WW I Veterans Bonus March on Washington, DC in 1932 was one such event resulting in a political shift of massive change.  At the depth of the Great Depression, World War vets just showed up and many died at the hands of President Hoover and Douglas MacArthur asking for change.  FDR responded to the 1933 March by hiring the Bonus Army for the CCC and a New Deal was formed.  Americans trying to use free speech and the right to assemble overwhelmed the corporate messaging system and in return built a stronger democratic society for us.  Conversely in Europe, the continent was falling into fascism because the more easily controlled masses chose to answer the fear with totalitarian rule by an elite group of corporate and political leaders.  Remember the World War II result?

As a student of history, politics and human nature, I ask you to look at the list presented yesterday and ask which side of history you wish to be part of.  What is your plan?