Strategist to GOP Governors: 'I'm so Scared of This Anti-Wall Street Effort'

One of my favorite arguments from the conservative side is that the wealthy deserve their wealth because they worked harder for it. While I don't doubt that a hedge fund manager puts in long hours, I do doubt that a single one of them anywhere in the world works harder than your average bricklayer on any given construction site. If the Republican formula of hard-work-equals-wealth were true, I'm guessing that construction workers, migrant farm workers, dock workers, soldiers, etc. would be at the top of every Forbes list and hedge fund managers, CEOs, mortgage company execs, money traders, etc. would be collecting food stamps.

Which is why this advice from conservative spinmeister Frank Luntz strikes me as so off-the-mark:

Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the 'middle class.' Call them 'hardworking taxpayers.'

"They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the 'middle class' and the public will say, I'm not sure about that. But defending 'hardworking taxpayers' and Republicans have the advantage."

At least he's being somewhat realistic. But when a Republican says they stand for the middle class, I'm not thinking, "I'm not sure about that" -- I'm holding my sides and laughing. Think of Mitt Romney talking about "the 80 to 90 percent of us in this country," as if he's just some ordinary fella who decided to run for president and not a bona fide member of the 1%.

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The Purpose of Protest is Not to Win Friends

I wrote about this briefly yesterday and, given the events of today, it deserves a bit more fleshing out.

To bring you up to speed, Public Policy Polling released a survey yesterday finding that Occupy Wall Street was losing ground in public opinion. At the time, I wrote that this in itself wasn't anything to lose any sleep over, because Occupy Wall Street isn't up for election anywhere. Successful protest movements are seldom extremely popular -- both the anti-war and the anti-segregation movements in the '60s were unpopular at the time, regardless of how Hollywood portrays them now. What's important in a successful protest movement is that people agree with you. The point is to mold the national dialogue -- in other words, to change the subject -- and get people to debate the issue or issues that you believe are of primary importance. It doesn't matter if people approve of how you do it, because generally they won't. Public protest is disruptive and inconvenient, which is the entire point. People talk about inconvenience and, if somewhere in the conversation the sentence "They've got a point, though" pops up, then mission accomplished. It's not about you or getting people to like you, it's about getting people to talk about the issue.

Which was why the PPP's Tom Jensen's analysis bothered me (emphasis mine):

I don’t think the bad poll numbers for Occupy Wall Street reflect Americans being unconcerned with wealth inequality.  Polling we did in some key swing states earlier this year found overwhelming support for raising taxes on people who make over $150,000 a year. In late September we found that 73% of voters supported the ‘Buffett rule’ with only 16% opposed.  And in October we found that Senators resistant to raising taxes on those who make more than a million dollars a year could pay a price at the polls. I don’t think any of that has changed- what the downturn in Occupy Wall Street’s image suggests is that voters are seeing the movement as more about the ‘Occupy’ than the ‘Wall Street.’  The controversy over the protests is starting to drown out the actual message.

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So BofA Dropped Their Debit Card Fee -- You're Still Being Screwed

When Bank of America announced they were dropping plans to institute a $5 monthly debit card fee, that was a win for consumers. The fee was an end run around new banking regulations that limited the amount banks could charge merchants for processing debit card purchases. In other words, the banks took a "stop screwing people" law and applied it as a "screw different people" law. It didn't go over real well.

The move was a PR disaster and other banks that had been planning similar fees backed off as well. For now, the debit card fee is all but dead. But that doesn't mean that a "stop screwing people" law has to be taken as a "stop screwing people" law. Meet the stealth screw.

New York Times:

Even as Bank of America and other major lenders back away from charging customers to use their debit cards, many banks have been quietly imposing other new fees.

...Facing a reaction from an angry public and heightened scrutiny from regulators, banks are turning to all sorts of fees that fly under the radar. Everything, it seems, has a price.

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The More People Know About the Occupy Movement, the More They Agree with It

You may not have heard, but Occupy Oakland and their supporters staged a general strike in that city yesterday. The fact that you may not have heard about it points to a new trend I'm detecting -- the media brownout, as opposed to a blackout. If you're not familiar with the term, a media blackout is a form of censorship where corporate media refuses to cover a story. What I'm calling a media brownout happens when corporate media refuses to cover a story well. Sure, there are mentions of it on a media outlet's website, but on-air or in-print coverage is brief and uninformative. As crappy as it is, most people get their news from TV, because that's all they really have time for. So, regardless of how thorough their web coverage is, an on-air snub keeps the story out of the public spotlight, for the most part.

And there's a reason why the Occupy Oakland strike didn't get a lot of coverage. While companies like Men's Warehouse support the Occupy movement (see photo above), there's no shortage of companies that oppose it -- income inequality may not be good for retail, but it works out well for banks and other companies. These corporations are advertisers, news organizations are ad-supported enterprises, and... you get the idea. Corporations like Lockheed-Martin don't buy ad time on CNN because it sells a lot of jets, they buy ad time for the same reason they contribute to political candidates.

So it's a little ironic that CNN would put out a poll that both shows they've failed to cover the Occupy movement well enough and betrays the reason for that failure.

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Newest Smear: 99-Percenters are Secretly Rich

When you're running a smear campaign, you're not going to want to let things like facts or logic or math get in the way. You're just going to make stuff up. But the trick is to make things up that are as close to the truth as possible. That way, you can throw out numbers and statistics that -- while being either meaningless or actually undercutting your argument -- can be made to seem to support your smear.

And consistency isn't very important here -- especially if your target audience has the attention span of the common house fly. One criticism that contradicts a previous criticism is A-OK, just so long as the criticism sticks. If there's one thing a smearer can count on, it's cognitive dissonance among a significant portion of their audience.

So it should be no surprise that the latest smear against Occupy Wall Street contradicts the previous smear that they're all uncouth rabble (i.e., "smelly hippies"), made poor by their own bad choices in life, clamoring for a government handout.

Daily Caller:

Many "Occupy Wall Street" protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

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99-Percenters Winning the War of Popular Opinion

It's inevitable that comparisons are drawn between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, as much as people in both groups write off those comparisons. The media, after all, have their narratives and "everyone's freaked out about spending!" has seemingly changed overnight into "everyone wants to take on the wealthy!" So the media's natural reaction is to compare the two movements and see what, if anything, has changed.

But the Tea Party was never an actual movement, in the sense that it was the result of people demanding change. In fact, almost the exact opposite was true -- the people were the result of the "movement." The Tea Party was, is, and always will be a corporate PR stunt -- a guerilla ad campaign -- aimed at getting the rightwing talk radio/Fox News/wingnut blogosphere crowd (i.e., the gullible) out in public demanding that Republicans do what Republicans were already planning on doing.

The Occupy movement, on the other hand, seems to be the result of actual frustration with Washington. Republicans have been blocking everything and talking about "what the American people want," while totally ignoring polling that shows the American people want what the Republicans are blocking. Meanwhile, conservative and centrist Democrats -- including the Obama administration -- have often played along, watering down good legislation or compromising it out of existence. Where the Tea Party embodies manufactured outrage, the 99-percenters' is organic -- and justified.

We see this backed up in polling -- which should surprise no one. A United Technologies/National Journal poll finds "some 59 percent of adults either completely agree or mostly agree with the protesters, while 31 percent mostly disagree or completely disagree" with them. 68% support a tax on the wealthy to pay for the President's jobs plan and "nearly one-third of Republicans -- 31 percent -- completely or mostly agree" with the protesters' goals. Those are goals, by the way, that the media keeps telling everyone are a complete mystery. Apparently, the average voter finds them much less mysterious than the average TV pundit.

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Corporate Parasites and the Failure of 'Trickle Down Economics'

If you want one clear message coming from the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the 99-percenters, you can boil all they're saying down into one argument; Reaganomics has failed and should die. After decades of bending over backwards to make sure that helped the wealthy become as wealthy as humanly possible, we see no real positive results. "Trickle down" economics is really the economics of scavenging -- if the wealthy have a big feast, they'll leave a lot of crumbs. And, as we shift the role of government away from helping people to helping business, even the holes left by cutting spending benefit corporations. Remember that after Bill Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the only real positive impact the reforms had were for the financial industry. A whole new market opened up and payday loan outfits sprouted up all over the nation like mushrooms, charging usurious rates to people with nowhere else to go. And of course, poverty is at an all-time high.

If this is a successful economic model, I think I'd prefer the old "failures" of New Deal liberals, thanks.

Still, all that wealth is sitting up there, just waiting to trickle down. We've sent pots and pots of money up the economic ladder all these years with pretty much nothing to show for it -- except this:


Chart courtesy of Mother Jones

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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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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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