Most of my argument with the tea party of the left as a bad idea, comes from watching US media pigeon hole Occupy Wallstreet into a false category, i.e. loonie right equals loonie left.
The alienation parallel is also wrong, because the tea parties were not alienated in any meaningful sense. Their faux alienation was like their pretend victimhood.
The tea party was a wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP, bought and paid for by the nut case far right Koch Bros et al. They had a very specific agenda which was to bring down or cripple Obamacare and the US government by cutting spending on every program of benefit to poor and middle income people---a near point to point corollary of the elite project. They engaged in endless varieties of hate speech. They used a lot of Repugnant mantras against taxes and cutting government.
They joined in specific and targetted election campaigns to get their rightwing nonsense into public office.
Their populist power and influence was overblown by US media and its rightwing scream channels. There were weeks of media discussion on the `meaning' of the tea parties and whether or not they represented some `real' current in the US society. I decided their appeal was too limited and manufactured to be a so-called grassroots or populist movement. There was nothing spontaneous about them, since they were cherry picking elections to target using classic marketing tools.
The tea partiers were organized around political candidates, which means the `real' leadership were front groups where the money came from.
Then too, their demographics were in states with heavy conservative representation and or where Democrats held bare minimum majorities, i.e. cherry picking through marketing surveys. They were middle aged, looked like many small business owners or property owners of some kind with enough money to go around in weird hats to various political rallies. Various statistics showed them to be college educated but that was hard to believe. They seem curiously ignorant or intentionally mis-represented many issues they claimed to protest or support. They often followed talking points radioed in from Andromeda.
None of the above is true about OWS.
The single issue the tea party-assholes and OWS might agree on is no more bailouts. But that is not a point of unity since it comes from opposite directions for opposing reasons.
The OWS demographic (from video) seems predominantly young, certainly younger than the tea party. They are out there because they got nothing but debt, struggle, and total political alienation. They look well educated and sound it. They seem predominantly urban or from spill over suburbs.
Here is #OWS `official' NYC General Assembly Declaration:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/02-1
It sounds nothing like a tea party list of demands.
OWS benefits from temporary spokespeople who show up like Graeber, Klein, Giroux and others and articulate OWS pretty clearly. There are very few of the irrelevant talking points the right uses to muddy discourse.
OWS GA refusal to issue talking points or demands is explicitly to avoid getting co-oped by media and pigeonholed into some wing of known politics that have failed.
I would guess most OWS voted for Democrats and expected some change and got none. I would speculate they represent the alienated base of the Democratic party protectorat of the uber rich.
Despite a few recent supportive op-eds, the US media in their intentional failure to represent OWS and marginalize it, they only underline their position and discredit themselves even further.
What seems to have replaced these channels of irrelevance is an ad hoc system using web news outlets like AJE, RT, France 24, (which also have their problems), along with a combination of news and commentary sources that people interested in following global movements for social, economic, and political justice assemble for themselves.
The effect of using an ad hoc alternate system is to discover a world that is rarely seen through the US mass media filters. It's like taking the red pill.
``That's why I believe the dominant media finds this movement so threatening. They're hysterical. What it suggests is not that young people are simply protesting. It suggests that they're not buying the crap that comes out of the dominant media, they're challenging it, and secondly, they're setting up their own circuits of knowledge and education. That's frightening to think that young people can actually create a culture in which questions of dialogue, dissent, critical engagement, global responsibility, can come into play - that truly frightens, in my estimation, financial and dominant elites.'' Henry Giroux (from already posted by mckenna192 on Pen-l):
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/occupywallstreet/2011/10/2011107172820297149.html
Giroux needs to ground the fear of financial and dominant elites. Part of that fear can be seen in the role that credit plays in most people's lives. To borrow means to gamble on a potentially better economic political future. When that potential is understood not to exist, a realization the elites fear, the true cruelty of the bargin sinks in, another realization the elites fear. That borrowed money was just to survive. If you try to pay it back, you can't survive. This equation aka unsustainable system, reflects the condition of many people who sum collectively into world regions, entire peoples, nations, and provinces or states in the US terminology.
CG