Cavuto on Business spent a lot of time defending Walmart this weekend. In particular, the show focused on Mike Rowe’s new ad for the stores promoting their purchase of $250 billion in U.S. goods. But before long, the guests were taking cheap shots at Walmart and Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Ben Stein said, “The people who are demonstrating against Walmart are not people who’ve been put out of business - Mom and Pop stores, they’re college kids, they’re professional agitators, they’re professional complainers and whiners.” The comment was met with laughter.
Charlie Gasparino picked up on the attack. “Who are those protestors? I mean, who are the people that were down at Occupy Wall Street? Nine tenths of them weren’t even people who cared about Wall Street. They were professional socialist agitators. …You go down to Occupy Wall Street. Half of them were professional agitators.”
Adam Lashinsky stood up for the protestors. “I think it’s demeaning to call them professional agitators.”
Stein continued, “They’re professional cranks and malcontents and dissatisfied people who just happen to find something to complain about. They’re not working people. I would love for you to find some of those people who actually work for a living.”
Gasparino added, “I covered Occupy Wall Street. Guess what those occupiers were doing? They were screaming at people that worked on Wall Street that made 60, 50, 40,000 dollars a year. Those are professional agitators screaming at working class people.”
In fact, Occupy Wall Street was not just some fake get-together of union front people and malcontents. As Yes! Magazine noted, OWS effected some signficant changes. They include the election of Elizabeth Warren as Massachusetts Senator, a more deeply networked activist world and moving the term “1%” and issues of income inequality into mainstream discussions.
Yet nobody on the “fair and balanced” panel mentioned any positives from the Occupy movement.
Video below from the February 22, 2014 Cavuto on Business show.