Visual source: Newseum
Will Oremus digs into the details of Google's search report:
We already knew more Americans support the Occupy Wall Street protests than support the Tea Party movement. A new analysis by Google suggests people find it more interesting, too.
A post on Google’s Politics & Elections blog examines web search trends related to the two movements. Google’s analysts find that search interest for Occupy Wall Street surged ahead of that for the tea party as early as Sept. 24, before the protests had really spread nationwide.
The disparity has widened since then, with OWS-related searches peaking on Oct. 15, when a “global day of action” brought demonstrations worldwide. Interest in the movement has subsided somewhat since then, the data show, though it still easily outpaces that of the Tea Party. When compared with the height of interest in the Tea Party movement, in 2009, the gap is narrower, but Occupy Wall Street still outdoes its more conservative counterpart.
Roger Lowenstein explains why it's not just "hippies" protesting:
In its grassroots and leftist character, Occupy Wall Street bears a superficial resemblance to protests from the ’60s and early ’70s. But the Woodstock Era was different in ways that tell us important things about the current siege. Then, radical students preached an affinity with the “working class,” but it was rare that the students and any members of the working class actually joined arms. [...] Economically, the U.S. is a different country than it was in 1970—and it will remain so regardless of how long the Occupy Wall Street protests endure. In the America of the early postwar decades, economic progress and a plenitude of jobs were axiomatic. Today they are not. Then, blue-collar jobs in steel, autos, machinery, and similar industries lifted families into the middle class; today, new workers at General Motors are hired at $29,000 a year, and even people with college degrees are hurting. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is no higher today than it was in 1989. During the just-ended economic cycle (ending before the bust), median income actually fell. Capitalism may have triumphed in China—even in Vietnam—but in America it’s in a quagmire. This is what has brought the protesters to Wall Street. [...]
Joe Connelly takes on the right-wing smear machine:
The Seattle cab driver pulled over and given a ticket, for the offense of honking his horn to support Occupy Seattle, was hit with a greater penalty than bank and home mortgage executives who set off America's Great Recession.
Is it any wonder that national opinion surveys -- the latest, a CBS News/New York Times poll -- show a plurality of Americans supporting the goals of nationwide protests dubbed Occupy Wall Street?
The protests have alarmed the country's right-wing media and its wealthy keeper-manipulators. The tireless promoters of the Tea Party "citizen" protest in 2009 have set out to discredit what has in 2011 become a big, spontaneous -- if loosely organized -- citizen protest.
Paul Krugrman analyzes the policies that led to the economic crisis:
Financial markets are cheering the deal that emerged from Brussels early Thursday morning. Indeed, relative to what could have happened — an acrimonious failure to agree on anything — the fact that European leaders agreed on something, however vague the details and however inadequate it may prove, is a positive development.
But it’s worth stepping back to look at the larger picture, namely the abject failure of an economic doctrine — a doctrine that has inflicted huge damage both in Europe and in the United States.
The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.
Eugene Robinson looks at new CBO data that explains why people are fed up with income inequality:
The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party claim to despise the redistribution of wealth, but secretly they love it — as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.
That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-dropping new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory, see-no-evil deregulation and tax-cutting fervor have led to massive redistribution. Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.
Reuters reports that hackers have set their eyes on Fox News:
Anonymous, a group of hackers that has previously attacked Sony and Bay Area Rapid Transit, said it will shut down the Fox News website on November 5.
It announced its intentions in a video on YouTube, citing Fox News' propaganda against the Occupy Wall Street movement as reason.
"Anonymous introduces Occupation Fox Hunt," the video's disembodied voice says. "It intends on destroying the Fox News website because their continued right-wing conservative propaganda can no longer be tolerated."