"Occupy" movement... a 21st Century "Hooverville" ?

[Ted King]

Seacrest wrote:
What's interesting to note re $tevie's post above, is that I have seen and heard quite a few RON Paul supporters at the Occupy movements (this is not going to be on your cable news shows), so it's kind of ironic that his son would say something so boneheaded.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126324071300124959.html

Wall Street Journal, JANUARY 12, 2010 (snippet)

Indeed, anger over Wall Street bailouts was in many ways the spark that brought the tea-party movement to life. Joseph Farah, publisher of WorldNetDaily, a Web site popular among tea-party adherents, said the financial-industry rescue plan launched in the closing days of President George W. Bush's term "got this ball rolling. That's where the anger, where the frustration took root.

Since then, he notes, the movement has gone off in multiple different directions, and anger has mostly focused instead at Democrats running Washington. Yet there's a long history of populist ire being directed at Wall Street and Washington simultaneously.

Since Jan. of 2010 when this article was written, many in the Tea Party movement seem to have all but forgotten that a fair amount of the initial impetus for the movement came from the Wall Street bailout. I remember being told here in this forum and reading elsewhere that the Tea Party movement wasn't about social issues, too. Somewhere along the line, though, the Tea Party movement in general seems to have lost interest in Wall Street wrongs and focused that attention on social issues. I don't know of any direct evidence that the movement was manipulated in that direction, but it certainly seems plausible. But maybe it was just a natural drift that was bound to happen without any manipulation.

Though most Tea Partiers seem to have forgotten about the populist anger at the Wall Street bailout that helped get the movement started, I'm sure there are still quite a few Tea Partiers that still feel strongly about it, so it's not surprising to me that some of them would join the Occupy Wall Street protest.