The American Bear

mohandasgandhi:

It’s getting rather exhausting listening to people try to use the Tea Party rallies as some sort of check on the Occupy Wall Street movement in order to demonize it. While the Tea Partiers do have some legitimate political concerns, for the most part, they were and still are pawns. Why was there constant mainstream media coverage of Tea Party demonstrations? Why were there so few incidents of clashes with police and zero arrests? Why were Tea Party protesters who carried guns, many semiautomatic riffles, untouched by law enforcement? Why were they taken so seriously? Why were they hailed as “patriots?” Why weren’t any Tea Party rallies shut down?

Because the Tea Party in no way threatened the establishment. They demanded completely privatized healthcare, eating right out of the hands of Big Pharma and healthcare insurance companies. They protested against corporate and environmental regulations, allowing big business to essentially steamroll over whatever they please, even if that meant destroying our Earth, with zero accountability. They demanded funding for services and programs that generally help the lower classes like Medicaid, employment insurance, Planned Parenthood, etc. be cut in order to “slash the deficit.” After billionaires like the Koch brothers poured money into their groups, they demanded it was unfair to tax big corporations and the rich because “they’re the job makers.” Maybe we should look at some of their corporate and mega-rich sponsors:

• Massey Energy
• Microsoft
• FreedomWorks
• Americans for Prosperity
• Armstrong Foundation
• Carthage Foundation
• Castle Rock Foundation
• Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
• Earhart Foundation
• Exxon Mobil
• F.M. Kirby Foundation
• Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation
• Jaquelin Hume Foundation
• John M. Olin Foundation
• Leadership Institute
• Philip M. McKenna Foundation
• Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation
• Rodney Fund
• Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Sarah Scaife Foundation 
• British Petroleum
• Bayer
• NewsCorp
• Heritage Foundation
• Manhattan Institute
• George C. Marshall Institute
• Reason Foundation
• American Enterprise Institute
• Scaife Family Foundation
• Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
• MetLife
• Americans for Tax Reform
• Family Research Council
• John Birch Society
• Ensuring Liberty Corp.
• AT&T
• Verizon
• Polaris Consulting
• Southern Co.
• Comcast
• American Airlines
• Time Warner
• Kirby Corp.
• Ernst & Young
• Publix
• Caterpillar
• Fed. of Amer. Hospitals
• Tyco International

There’s a major incentive to allow the AstroTurf Tea Partiers, which make up only 18% of the population, to stomp their little feet. There is, however, virtually zero incentive to allow the Occupy movement, which denounces such overreaching corporate power, to even open their mouths and let out a single utterance. So, how do you suppress an all-inclusive movement with legitimate and striking concerns regarding the unequal balance of power? You beat them in the streets and try to do everything possible to cut off their resources because your corporate overlords, guys like Bloomberg who made billions by doing business with Wall Street, said, “jump.” Because you’re part of the 40% the top 1% owns. They buy you with their massive amounts of wealth to do their bidding in order to increase that wealth.

I will give these critics of the Occupy movement one thing though: it’s difficult to figure out how the system really works because of how horribly broken it is. However, it doesn’t take a great mind to understand the very fact that it’s broken in the first place or pinpoint who broke it.

(via randomactsofchaos)

An excerpt from OWS: Fighting the politics of illusion by Paul Rosenberg:

As Occupy Wall Street has grown, there have been a growing number of comparisons between it and the Tea Party. Francis Fox Piven, offered one of the briefest, no-nonsense accounts, contrasting them as inclusionary vs exclusionary, forward-looking vs backward-looking, and “mainly young, racially diverse, happily counter-cultural” vs “almost all white… better-off and older”. She also wrote that “The Tea Party, under one name or another, has actually been part of American politics for a long time. It is a movement that yearns for the restoration of an imaginary past….” 

It also instinctively identifies itself as made up of “real Americans” - which in turn helps to account for dramatic differences between how conservative elites praised the Tea Party effusively, only to heap scorn on Occupy Wall Street. This conservative double standard toward people’s democracy was anything but surprising. If there is one thing conservatives believe in, it’s double standards. The defence of social hierarchies is their core value, which virtually demands very different treatment for those who support vs. those who challenge the powers that be. Decades of research in political psychology - particularly right wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation - support this conclusion, and a new book by Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, offers a detailed critique of how this orientation has expressed itself through the complexities of actual history.

Particularly significant is Robin’s analysis of right wing populism, a more sophisticated view than Piven’s, which he summarised succinctly in his response to a deeply wrong-headed review in the New York Times. Right wing populism “assumes one of three forms,” Robin wrote, “none of which involves false consciousness or conspiratorial trickery.” These are:

• Democratic feudalism: Giving real, not imaginary, power to members of the lower orders to wield over people beneath them. This can happen in factories (supervisors), families (husbands/fathers), and fields (overseers, slave catchers, etc). It can also happen in certain forms of nationalism and imperialism.
• Upside-down populism: Get the lower orders to identify with the higher orders, not through deception but through an emphasis on the one experience they share: loss.
• Outsider politics: Because the conservative defence of privilege occurs in the wake of a democratic challenge, it must develop a new ruling class and “a new old regime”, in which the truly excellent - not the lazy inheritors of privilege but the very best men - rule. These men often hail from outside the traditional precincts of power, proving their mettle in one of three places: at the barricades of the counter-revolution, on the battlefield, and in the marketplace.

Of course, these different forms can also intermingle, or co-exist side-by-side. Herman Cain, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and Republican presidential hopeful, for example, fits neatly into the “outsider politics” category, but he’s quite comfortable using the rhetoric of democratic feudalism or upside-down populism as well.

What is more, underlying all three forms that Robin describes are another bundle of defence mechanisms that help ordinary people identify with those above them, thus defusing the experience of being taken advantage by them. The three most significant are:

• Identification or introjection, the obverse of projection. It involves identifying with someone else, rather than denying anything in common, taking on their personality characteristics as one’s own. In Anna Freud’s original analysis, it was specifically “identification with the aggressor”. Closely related is: 
• Idealisation, the unconscious perception of another as having more positive qualities than they actually possess. Idealisation and identification can work together, creating ideal images of higher class people to model oneself on, rather than resent, regardless of how they actually treat one.
• Fantasy completes the triad; this defence mechanism helps compensate for the fact that such ideal images do not correspond with reality.

The workings of these defence mechanisms can perhaps most easily be seen in works of art or literature romanticising the past - the less realistically, the better. Examples such as Gone with the Wind or Birth of a Nation come to mind. But it’s also reflected in Tea Party fantasies identifying themselves with Revolutionary War figures with whom they may actually have very little in common - Deists like Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, for example, or high-tax colonies like Massachusetts, where representation rather than taxation, per se, was the over-riding issue. Such fantasy-based narratives work to heighten the identification with traditional, conservative elite figures - real or imagined - and lessen the identification with real-world others situated similarly to themselves. 

Stepping back from this description, we can clearly see that Occupy Wall Street involves shedding or stripping away defence mechanisms that serve to hide uncomfortable truths, while the Tea Party, as a form of right-wing populism, activates a greater number of defence mechanisms, making those truths increasingly obscure, and difficult to comprehend.

In short, the outward similarities of these two groups mask a difference as profound as any that can be found in American history. Will we go back to an imaginary past in which we are hopelessly confused and mislead by a welter of different defence mechanisms hiding painful truths from ourselves? Or will we go forward into a future we knowingly shape together for the mutual benefit of all? Those are the two visions before us, which the weeks and months ahead should make increasingly clear to one and all.