There's a lot of fretting about establishment co-option of the Wall Street protests by people who are themselves co-opting the Wall Street Occupation. My feeling is that the bigger the coalition the less likely it is to be co-opted so I'm not particularly animated by that worry at the moment.
On the other hand, this really does define chutzpah:
In a post titled “Wall Street Protesters Should Instead Focus on the Federal Reserve,” a staffer for the group FreedomWorks claims
The Occupy Wall Street website—which surely does not represent the views of all the protesters—has released a 13-point list of pro-government demands. OccupyWallSt.org demonstrates their economic illiteracy by demanding free college education for all, one trillion dollars in infrastructure and ecological spending. One little detail is missing: who is going to pay for all of this?
FreedomWorks is a front group used by Wall Street lobbyists to concoct bank-friendly schemes. FreedomWorks is playing its usual role: masquerading as a grassroots group to confuse activists and help big corporations. Even the Wall Street Journal has mocked the organization for its astroturf campaigns, which often include
“amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of FreedomWork’s leaders.
Read the whole post for the full dossier on Freedomworks.
It does bring up something interesting about the protests. Like the very early Tea Party, these protests include quite a few Ron Paul adherents, which is fine. The more the merrier. But from what I have heard, many of them were drawn to Paul's anti-war stance and that in turn led them to embrace his loony economic theories, which despite some surface similarities are fundamentally opposed to the anti-corporatism that's brought most people into the streets. It's not clear if they've ever tested those ideas out among others, so many of them may find them challenged and changed as they exchange views with other members of the coalition on the ground. A big part of these occupations is education.
Certainly, the Fed is a problem and nobody suggests that they aren't culpable on any number of levels. But Freedomworks is a very bad faith actor working directly on behalf of the very plutocrats OWS is protesting. It's not just a "money in politics" thing --- they only exist to redirect populist anger away from the moneyed elite. It's the most insidious form of "co-option" there is, and it's exactly the sort of thing the movement really should anticipate as it gains altitude.
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