Occupy Wall Street has changed the conversation about ‘vulture capitalists’ and other Republicans

http://current.com/shows/countdown/blog/occupy-wall-street-has-changed-the-conversation-about-vulture-capitalists-and-other-republicans

The Occupy Wall Street movement was never just about camping in public spaces. But such efforts elevated Occupy’s profile, channeled legitimate economic anger and helped ignite a political grassfire across the land.

The whole point was not to just march and demonstrate sporadically or to heckle Republican presidential candidates, although these tactics express the honest fears of middle-class Americans who have been hustled and played for suckers over three decades by the greed-is-good ethos of Reaganism.

What Occupy has accomplished — and will continue to accomplish — is a sharp and significant change in the political dialogue. Imagine, even two months ago, a high-profile politician charging Republican presidential campaign leader Mitt Romney with “vulture capitalism.”

Last autumn, even a Democrat would have been attacked for using such a belligerent expression. Few would have dared to speak it.

To hear it come from the right wing of the right-wing party — from the Republican Texas governor, Rick Perry — is to realize that for the first time in a long while, liberals and progressives (not necessarily Democrats) are framing the debate.

And Occupy did it by raising class consciousness and focusing on economics instead of the phony “cultural issues” that artificially divide Americans.

The internal numbers of the Pew survey were also dramatic and revealing. Between 2009 and 2011, the greatest rise in economic conflict consciousness came from independents (up 23 percentage points), whites (22 percentage points), and people between the ages of 50 and 64 (22 percentage points).

These groups decide elections. They vote in larger numbers than some other groups, and they are motivated when they have time on their hands that is a result of unemployment prolonged by a Republican Party that has tried to sabotage the economy for the first three years of the Obama presidency.

In some ways, the climate of the moment recalls the late 1980s, the second Reagan term, when Gordon Gekko was Hollywood’s poster boy for Wall Street predators and “Bonfire of the Vanities” exposed the values and lifestyles of the One Percent.

Perhaps it would be good to again screen the movie “Wall Street” and to again read the Tom Wolfe book. What’s old is now new again. Wealthy people always know what’s best … don’t they?