I’m really not all that surprised that the people who have the most to fear are doing everything possible to target anyone who has anything to do with the Occupy Wall Street movement. At first, it was an attempt to paint the movement as extreme, something that no one is interested in. Then it became popular, so they had to try other tactics, like attempting to fool listeners into believing OWS was filled with hypocrisy (“OMG! They have Ipads and they’re complaining about big businesses that might make technology stuff!”). That didn’t work because unlike previous movements of the past, the people attracted to the movement aren’t generally stupid. The movement has been appealing to a pretty educated crowd. It’s hard to derail that when those derailing it aren’t that much smarter than the people they hope to discredit.
So, the anti-protest movement, which I define as “people who have an incentive to keep things as the status quo”, is now targeting specific individuals as an attempt to destroy the entire movement. One obvious target has been Michael Moore, who likes to see himself as the everyman complainer, but according to Fox News (not exactly the most objective source, as it was the voice of the Republican Party during the entire Bush Administration), because Michael Moore has an expensive house, he’s really one of the one percenters, rather than one of the many included in the 99%. Here’s where that math doesn’t add up: Yeah, he’s rich, but just because someone is rich does not make them automatically a part of the problem.
Much of Michael Moore’s success has come on the coattails of debunking the myths of the rich, and empowering those without any power. As a result, he has become very wealthy for his actions. That should be seen as a good thing, not something to somehow force his followers to throw him to the wolves. Just because he made a success at pulling the veil back from the hidden excesses doesn’t somehow make him part of the hidden excesses.
The movement is about the fact that there are some really greedy, bad people out there who are trying to pull shell games on the rest of us. For way too long now, corporate entities have cloaked themselves in the shadows while doing all sorts of crappy things to the rest of us, like poison our water supplies, sell us damaged goods, sell wars for profit (not our profit, but theirs only), and allowed the changing of money that served to devalue the work of those who handle the actual work but benefit those who control how the money gets spent. When you have businesses built up with the sole purpose of generating more money from money, there’s seriously something wrong. When scientists are pulled off the assembly line of science and told its a lot more profit to be a businessman instead, there’s seriously something wrong.
There are a lot of pissed off people right now mainly because our education system has been teaching us that the American Way is the best course for the future. But we’re now starting to realize that those who make it rich in this country aren’t the ones who bought into the American Way (work hard and build a great country) but profited off of those who did. The ranks of the 1% should be filled with educators, scientists and innovators, not speculators, bankers, politicians and lawyers. THAT is why so many people are upset.
A lot of those people out on the streets right now are the ones who stood behind Obama when he was running for office in 2008, because his campaign promised a bright, brilliant future. Instead, we got a term of exactly what we had before, No more, no less. Hope and change yielded absolutely nothing but false promises. And the people who put Obama into power are smart enough to realize that no matter who they put into office next (Obama again, or a generic Republican), the promises are still going to be made with the reality that the next four years are going to be exactly what came before.
That’s why people are complaining. And discrediting Michael Moore isn’t going to change that.