The Argument that 99-Percenters Offer No Solutions is a Really Stupid Argument

Imagine you're driving along and you hear a sound somewhere under your car. "Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung..." You're going to take that to a mechanic, right?

Now imagine that the mechanic asks you what you want to do about the sound. "I want you to fix it," you tell him.

"Sorry," he's says. "That's not specific enough. I need you to tell me exactly what needs to be done. What component I need to replace. What tools I need to do it. I need step-by-step instructions on exactly what repairs you want done."

"I'm not the mechanic," you answer, "you are! I just want you to fix the noise. I don't know how to do it."

"Come back when you have real solutions," the mechanic says.

That's the problem facing the American people and, specifically, the protesters in the streets of New York and other cities right now. The problem is obvious -- unemployment, a tax structure that's way to lopsided toward those at the top, corporate crime and runaway greed, out-of-control higher education costs, etc. Our entire economic system is going "Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung." Yet, when the protesters point out there's obviously something wrong here, they're dismissed by politicians and the media for having no solutions.

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Police Violence at Occupy Wall Street Protest was the Result of Police Incompetence

We're going to start right off with the ugly, just to get it out of the way. This was the scene last night in New York City, as the Occupy Wall Street protest once again turned into a police near-riot.

Fox 5, New York:

While covering the Occupy Wall Street protests on Wednesday night, Fox 5 photographer Roy Isen was hit in the eyes by pepper spray from a police officer and Fox 5 reporter Dick Brennan was hit by an officer's baton.

The protests on Wall Street continued to grow all day. The rallies and their participants are showing no signs of slowing down.

In the evening, crowds surged past barriers and NYPD officers moved in to contain the protesters. By many accounts, mayhem broke out.

Officers, many wearing white shirts indicating supervisor rank, swatted protesters with batons and sprayed them with mace, video from the scene showed.

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GOP Candidates to Struggling Americans: 'Let Them Eat Cake'

Hey, want to get really, really angry? Here you go:

I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these [Occupy Wall Street] demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! [...] It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.

That's GOP rising star Herman Cain, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, making what in any sane world would be a "major campaign trail gaffe." We don't live in any sane world. Forget the insane conspiracy theory of a White House "orchestrating" protests that lay a lot of blame at the White House's door. Instead, concentrate on the "let them eat cake" part that blames unemployment on the unemployed, financial problems on the struggling, and implies that anyone who isn't rich is a failure.

ThinkProgress:

...Cain’s claim about the unemployed is especially heartless and uninformed. There are simply not enough jobs to go around, with 4.32 unemployed people for every job opening in the country. So even someone looking hard for a job will have a difficult time finding one. Moreover, Cain fails to understand the astronomical income inequality in the U.S. and the negative effect it has on economic growth.

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Real Populism vs. Corporate PR

There is one not so obvious or immediately noticeable difference between the Occupy Wall Street protests and your average Tea Party protest. Sure, the crowds seem to be younger, signs featuring Obama as Hitler are entirely absent, and there aren't many people who are dressed like Uncle Sam sneezed stars and stripes all over them. There are no guns or demands to see the president's birth certificate. But the less obvious difference is in buses. While the Tea Party protests always feature big buses covered with flags and eagles, buses at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are used to haul the protesters to jail.

I bring this up because teapartiers like to pretend they're running their own show. That their protests are grassroots and their organizations are of their own construction. But those buses carting them around from protest to protest didn't just appear out of nowhere. Someone paid for them, someone gave them their ultra-patriotic paint jobs, someone's buying all the gas. All that takes funding and, as much as the 'baggers like to pretend they're an independent movement, they're all bought and paid for -- and then moved from square to square like pawns on a chessboard.

On the other hand, Greg Sargent has this to say about the Wall Street protests:

...If there's one thing that's growing clearer by the hour, it's that this is an entirely organic effort, one that's about nobody but the protestors themselves. In this sense, we're seeing a replay of the Wisconsin protests. Those ended up falling just short of what activists had hoped to achieve, but their months-long showing was still important -- it demonstrated that left wing populism is still alive and well and sent an important message about the mood of the country. The key was that it grew organically with little to no involvement from Beltway Dems and the White House.

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Koch Crimes and Tea Party Chumps

We got a preview of how damaging an upcoming Bloomberg Markets magazine story on the Koch brothers would be last week. Salon's Justin Elliott reported that "an anonymous person or persons in the orbit of the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch try to discredit a forthcoming story in Bloomberg Markets magazine."

"Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report," he continued, "the Bloomberg story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by the conglomerate Koch Industries."

That's right, prebuttals. They want to discredit the story before it ever even hits the newsstands. But this weekend, Bloomberg put up what Politico calls an "early glance" of the article up on their website and what's there is explosive. And detailed.

There's plenty there; illicit business dealings with Iran, bribery in Africa, India, and the Middle East, firing the company's internal investigators for not turning blind eyes to obvious wrongdoing ("They didn't know what to do with me," says one. "They were really kind of baffled that I had ethics"), and general corporate culture of lawlessness and corruption. If you want an idea of what the perfect corporate climate would be for the Koch brothers and the Tea Party, look no further. Just imagine nearly everything they're already doing, only made legal.

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