Occupy Wall Street For Dummies (aka Pundits)

Tom Tomorrow

"If you are a political pundit and you still don't know what Occupy Wall Street stands for, you are an idiot," says Hunter at Daily Kos.  And to help those idiots, he provides a primer.  Here is a condensed version:

-- It a protest specifically against the members of the financial sector, who were bailed out at taxpayer expense after wrecking the economy
-- It is a protest against the perceived entitlement of the wealthy, for whom any slight economic injury (say, from taxes) is seen as an apocalyptic event, and for whose sake austerity must be imposed on every other group.
-- It is a protest against a government that seems to exist solely to meet the needs of wealthy and corporate benefactors.
-- It is not a protest against TARP; it is a protest against the failure of TARP to achieve even a stick of reform in exchange for the body blow dealt to the rest of us.
-- It is not a protest against political parties, but against a system that has been so corrupted that the needs of the one percent are considered of greater merit than that of the entire rest of the population.
-- It is not "against corporations." It is against the excesses of corporations
-- It is not "against the rich." It is against the rich being catered to at the expense of every other citizen.
-- It is about the unemployment crisis being absolutely ignored.
-- It is pro-worker, in that it is a reaction against workers being treated as increasingly disposable, abusable commodities by the companies that employ them.
-- It is neither pro-tax or anti-tax; it is against the disparity of treatment between rich and poor, when it comes time to pay those taxes.
-- It demands a voice in government, and a voice in the punditry that struggles so painfully to grasp what the little people are going on about.
-- Above all, perhaps, it is an objection to the notion that corporations do not just have rights and privileges equal to people, but in fact have rights superior to the rights of people, rights which are appended on in the name of free enterprise and seen by lawmakers and courts alike as being far more obvious and inviolate than those of you or me.

Pretty straightforward.  And for those pundits who remain baffled by the Occupy movement, Hunter concludes:

If you feel ideologically bound to ignore it, fine, but claiming you do not understand it only brands you as a mind too easily taxed to be of much use in the public sphere.  If you understand the grievances of the Occupy movement, feel free to either engage or rebut those complaints. If you do not understand them, then go away, for you are too lazy, too self absorbed, or too ignorant to do the job.