The All American occupation

english.aljazeera.net...

Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began more than a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange - and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country - may be a game-changer. If so, it couldn't be more appropriate or more in the American grain that, when the game changed, Wall Street was directly in the sights of the protesters.

After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, centre stage, as the preferred US icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history. And we can thank a small bunch of campers in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park for hooking us up to a venerable tradition of resistance and rebellion.

When in the years following the American revolution, Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the "moneycrats" and their counter-revolutionary intrigues - they meant Alexander Hamilton and his allies in particular - they were worried about the installation in the New World of a British system of merchant capitalism that would undo the democratic and egalitarian promise of the revolution.

Later in the nineteenth century, populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street "devil fish" (shades of Matt Taibbi's "giant vampire squid" metaphor for Goldman Sachs). Its tentacles, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy, but also corrupted churches, the press, and institutions of higher learning, destroyed the family, and suborned public officials from the president on down. When, during his campaign for the presidency in 1896, the populist-inspired "boy orator of the Platte" and Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan vowed that mankind would not be "crucified on a cross of gold", he meant Wall Street - and everyone knew it.

So, it seems that these "dirty, filthy, hippy troublemakers" are following a course that has been taken many times in the past in this country. These "un-American scum" , these "dupes of the NWO " and "anti-capitalist idiots " are carrying on a tradition that has it's roots with the founding fathers of this country.

How dare they be so American ? Who do they think they are ?

Here's a suggestion. Everyone on this site who hates the "occupiers ", take yourself down to one of the occupy sites and in as polite a manner as you can muster, tell them that you think they're un-American scum. Yeah, that's the ticket. Show them just what you're made of. Stand up for the right to express your opinion ! Don't let those "ignorant fools " keep you glued behind your computers. Be brave ! Show them you're not just a bunch of talking heads. Show them you have the courage to face those you don't agree with.

It's the American way !