The GOP goes ‘Occupy’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The great success of the Occupy movement is that it has transformed the national conversation to an examination of the greatest wealth disparity since 1929, and to questions about what is morally just and what is fair. It is a direct challenge to the Ayn Rand laissez-faire "free market" moral nihilism of the faith based supply-side "trickle-down" GOP economics of the past 30 years.

The GOP candidates, led by Newt Gingrich and Governor Goodhair Rick Perry, have adopted the language of the Occupy movement in their attacks on "Mr. One Percent," Willard "Mittens" Romney, the vulture capitalist of Bain Capital. Six months ago this would have been unimaginable.

No wonder the banksters of Wall Street and their puppets in the conservative media noise machine are all in a lather over the attacks by Gingrich and Goodhair on Romney, equating attacks on the individual conduct ("personal responsiblity") of "Mittens" Romney to an attack on the free enterprise system itself. As Gingrich says, this is "baloney."

Wealth disparity is now a bipartisan issue for robust public debate, not for “quiet rooms,” as Mr. One Percent said on Wednesday (just what the hell does he mean, anyway?) E.J. Dionne has a piece on the sudden new bipartisan debate about the good, bad, and ugly sides of capitalism that has now been set in motion by the Democratic and Republican criticism of Mitt Romney’s years at Bain Capital:

Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008. The focus will be on whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole…

This lays the foundation for the Obama campaign rolled out in Kansas in December (echoing President Teddy Roosevelt's "Square Deal"), and innoculates Obama against the ever present "class warfare!" claims by conservatives because solid conservatives are saying the very same thing.

Here is the new DNC Web Video: "Don't Just Take Our Word For It."