Neil Cavuto and guest Malia Lazu discussed the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, on September 17, by debating whether or not the movement has made any difference. Cavuto didn’t hide his disdain. He said up front, “You have to have a point to a rally… There seemed to be a lot of bitching going on here, and not a lot of clarifying going on here, and I think that diluted the message.”
Lazu answered, “I think that the press couldn’t follow a broad message.”
Cavuto said this was “one time” not to blame the press. “I really wouldn’t hang it on the press, Malia. I would hang it on the demonstrators.”
Lazu noted, “No one was talking about the wealth inequality and the wealth gap before Occupy came on and if they have a umbrella message, it’s that. Now how do we get our wealth inequality to not be so great? That’s where you start seeing the fragmentation… I get to choose a lot of different types of laundry detergent, why not have a lot of different options on how to make America more fair?”
As others have done on Fox, Cavuto held up the Tea Party as an example of a superior movement. He said, “The Tea Party’s a good example, Malia... The Tea Party worked within the system to change the system and elected 80 some-odd new members of Congress.”
Lazu answered, “I don’t know if I would necessarily agree that everyone on the Tea Party is working in the political examples that you’re giving. I do want to highlight that The Occupy movement does things every day. They’ve been able to get Cuomo to reverse his stance on the millionaires tax, they’ve kept this idea of wealth inequality.”
Cavuto said incredulously, “You’re crediting the Occupiers with getting Cuomo to blink on that?”
“A piece of it… Absolutely,” Lazu replied. She added, “They’re feeding the hungry in Oakland. They were able to protest a biomedical lab in Oxnard.” She said that small, local protests are probably more effective, even though they don’t get the same media attention. “If you think that there were 100,000 people with Bayard Rustin planning the March on Washington, or if you think that Rosa Parks was the first person to sit in that bus to get arrested, then you have no idea about the civil rights movement.”
Cavuto called that comparison “night and day.”
Lazu responded, “There’s a reason why Dr. King started talking about socialism within a democracy.”
Cavuto sneered, “Martin Luther King is rolling in his grave right now.”
”Do not whitewash Martin Luther King by trying to make it seem like he did not care about the wealth inequality,” Lazu admonished.
Huffington Post highlights seven issues put in the spotlight by OWS.
But, enough about the teabaggers . . .
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First off, there’s the whole context of their methods: OWS brings debate and keeps their bad element out. The Tea Party brings guns and threatens to kill people. This is further reflected in the context of their arrests: OWS gets a thousand arrests, and footage from the incident proves the police justified it with someone mouthing off or a minor act of civil disobedience. The Tea Party has mass murderers, cop killers, rapists, serial rapists, violent black blocs and traffickers.
Not that facts like this matter to the far right- in some cases where they couldn’t deny it exists, they conveniently left out who was with whom there.
There’s also the matter of what the politicians they support stand for. Tea Party politicians stand for corporate interests and censoring women. Politicians supported by OWS are for bringing accountability to corporations, giving us a greater place on the international stage and ending outsourcing so we can have jobs again.
This is why I’m proud of my affiliation with OWS. I’ll stand with them to the end, because I know they’re the good guys in this argument.