Criticism of the occupy movement
Critism of the Occupy movement refers to the negative reaction to the Occupy movement, including Occupy Wall Street by various groups and individuals. Criticism comes mainly from its ideologic opponents in the political forum, religious groups, and individuals who live in the urban areas where the protests of the movement occurs.
Conservative criticism[edit]
Conservatives have portrayed the OWS protesters as fearful of responsibility and envious of the rich, saying that OWS protesters want big government to make it unnecessary for them to work.[1] Conservatives and Tea Party activists say OWS is a shiftless, indolent, messy, anti-Semitic and drug-addled mob of unemployed left-wing zealots engaged in class warfare, and that the protester's grievances are far removed from the political mainstream.[2][3][4][5][6][7]On October 5, 2011, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh told his listening audience: "When I was 10 years old I was more self-sufficient than this parade of human debris calling itself Occupy Wall Street."[8] Glenn Beck said on his internet television network GBTV, "Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you are wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you. They will do it. They’re not messing around."[9] Newt Gingrich, front-runner in the Republican presidential primary race said "All the Occupy movements starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, go get a job right after you take a bath."[10][11][12][13]
In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, pollster Douglas Schoen wrote that the protesters reflect "values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people" and have "a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas", and that politicians who support them will be hurt in the 2012 elections.[14]
A group of bloggers, led by conservative political commentator Erick Erickson, organized a website criticizing the movement entitled "We Are the 53%," referring to the 53% of Americans who earn enough income to pay federal income taxes.[15] An opinion piece by CBS contributor Jim Edwards, comparing the We are the 99% blog to the 53% blog, commented that "once you've looked at both blogs, the impression you come away with is that the recession is as devastating to conservatives as it is to liberals, but that conservatives regard their misfortunes as their own fault whereas the liberals see structural forces at work -- lack of health insurance, student loans -- that they cannot overcome."[16]
Mike Brownfield of The Heritage Foundation argued that rejection of the capitalist system and the policies that OWS protesters advocate, including limits on trade and student loan forgiveness, would not lead to improved economic conditions for unemployed Americans. According to Brownfield, the Foundation believes it is "right to decry out-of-control bailouts and corporate subsidies" and there are valid concerns regarding the economy, unemployment rates and low job creation. However, Heritage argued that capitalism is key to improving the economy and that the movement is focusing on the wrong solutions to the problems they protest: it should be protesting the expansion of government instead of calling for more government intervention.[17]
Religious criticism[edit]
Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, said that while Occupy Wall Street has succeeded in getting attention, it is limited because it is only attracting religious support from the left.[18] He said that a call for the government redistribution of wealth and reliance on street activism did not appeal to those with conservative political or religious leanings.[18] The protest has been criticized for tolerating anti-Semitic activists.[19] The Emergency Committee for Israel ran an ad condemning anti-Semitic remarks and calling on Obama and other political officials to do likewise.[20] These allegations lead the Anti-Defamation League to call on the movement "to condemn anti-Semitic signs and comments that have appeared at some of the protest rallies across the country and around the world".[21]
Following an attempt to occupy a Catholic Church during Sunday mass by Occupy Vancouver and its affiliated Occupy the Vatican, criticism emerged that the movement was anti-Catholic.[22] [23]
Local jurisdiction criticism[edit]
As part of its action plan, the Occupy Movement "occupies" cities and parks in larger cities and selected universities to spread its message. This has caused criticism from local jurisdictions.
New York City[edit]
Some residents of the area surrounding Zuccotti Park have voiced complaints about the demonstrations. A caller to a radio show complained that the park has been rendered "unusable" by the protesters, and that "a general atmosphere of incivility," together with loud shouting and drums, prevailed; another complained that the drums from the protest, which he said "start in the morning" and get louder in the evening until 11:30 pm, made it difficult for his children to sleep or do their homework. Another resident complained that protesters had been vandalizing and urinating in the vestibule to his apartment building.[24] Responding to a caller to his radio show complaining about noise and incivility at the park, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said "we couldn't agree more."[24] The Mayor has been criticized for alienating both supporters and critics for his stance that seems supportive of the protests one day and opposed on others. The Mayor has vowed to crack down on the protester's behavior as well as saying he’ll allow the protests indefinitely.[25]
Protesters and community residents clashed at a standing room only Community Board One meeting October 20. Residents complained about inadequate sanitation, verbal taunts and harassment, noise, and related issues. One resident angrily complained that the protesters "[a]re defecating on our doorsteps"; board member Tricia Joyce said, "They have to have some parameters. That doesn't mean the protests have to stop. I'm hoping we can strike a balance on parameters because this could be a long term stay."[26]
Boston[edit]
Baltimore[edit]
Chicago[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ Occupy Wall Street: a New Culture War? The Chronicle Review November 12, 2011 By Andrew Hartman "By focusing on caricatures of pot-smoking, drumbeating hippies, instead of on the economic messages related to the "We are the 99 percent" meme, some in the media appear to be redirecting the national debate away from what unites us and toward what divides us...Replicating this decades-old culture-war paradigm, many conservatives and pundits view the Wall Street protesters as envious ingrates looking for government handouts because they fear responsibility. As a widely distributed statement by one Tea Party group put it, demonstrators want "a bigger more powerful government to come in and take care of them so they don't have to work like the rest of us who pay our bills.""
- ↑ Occupy Wall Street: More popular than you think By Brian Montopoli October 13, 2011 "The conservative criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it is a "growing mob" (House majority leader Eric Cantor) of "shiftless protestors" (The Tea Party Express) engaged in "class warfare" (GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain.) whose grievances - whatever they are - are far outside the political mainstream. The polls don't back that up. A new survey out from Time Magazine found that 54 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the protests, while just 23 percent have a negative impression. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, meanwhile, found that 37 percent of respondents "tend to support" the movement, while only 18 percent "tend to oppose" it."
- ↑ Wall St. Protest Isn’t Like Ours, Tea Party Says The New York Times October 21, 2011 By Kate Zernike "...conservatives and Tea Party activists have rushed to discredit the comparison and the nascent movement. They have portrayed the Occupy protesters as messy, indolent, drug-addled and anti-Semitic, circulated a photo of one of them defecating on a police car, and generally intimated that Democrats who embrace them are on a headlong road to Chicago 1968."
- ↑ The roots of American disorder By Matthew Continetti, CBS news November 22, 2011 "The conservative reaction has been similar. A great many conservatives stress the conditions among the tents. They crow that Americans will never fall in line behind a bunch of scraggly hippies. They dismiss the movement as a fringe collection of left tendencies, along with assorted homeless, mental cases, and petty criminals. They argue that the Democrats made a huge mistake embracing Occupy Wall Street as an expression of economic and social frustration."
- ↑ Occupy Wall Street Heckles Obama, Descends on GOP By Melanie Jones in International Business Times, November 22, 2011 "Some conservatives however, view reactions like Obama's as encouraging the protesters to continue what they view as disrespectful and disruptive actions by lazy leftist who want to destroy capitalism. The Republicans include Bachmann's fellow candidates in the GOP primary, as well as prominent Republicans like Karl Rove."
- ↑ Why Britain needs a written constitution By Linda Colley in The Guardian, Friday 4 November 2011 "A prime reason for this diffidence is suggested by some of the Republican attacks on Occupy. The demonstrators were "mobs", said Eric Cantor, the House minority leader. Occupy was waging "class warfare", claimed Mitt Romney, an accusation some Republicans also level at Obama. But it was a rival of Romney for the Republican nomination, Herman Cain, who voiced the criticism Democrats and demonstrators here fear most. Occupy, and those backing it, according to Cain, are "anti-American"."
- ↑ Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it By Douglas Rushkoff, Special to CNN October 5, 2011 "Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters' demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. They couldn't be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence."
- ↑ "Rush Limbaugh Flips Out, 'The Next President Could Come From (Occupy Wall St)'". PoliticusUSA's Archives. October 5, 2011. Retrieved 14 July 2017.
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedmediaite - ↑ Gingrich Takes GOP Lead, Takes On 'Occupy' National Public Radio transcript November 21, 2011
- ↑ Religion on display in Republican debate by Anna Fifield in the Financial Times, November 20, 2011
- ↑ Gingrich to Occupy: ‘Take a Bath’ The Daily Beast November 21, 2011
- ↑ Populist Movements Rooted in Same Soil The Wall Street Journal By GERALD F. SEIB, NOVEMBER 15, 2011 "You know how they have been pigeonholed: The tea-party movement is nothing but a collection of right-wing, under-educated rubes and radicals, while the Occupy Wall Street movement attracts only young, scruffy, unemployed left-wing zealots."
- ↑ Schoen, Douglas (18 October 2011). "Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd". The Wall Street Journal.
Last week, senior White House adviser David Plouffe said that "the protests you're seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America. . . . People are frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don't seem to play by the same set of rules." Nancy Pelosi and others have echoed the message. Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform. The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.
- ↑ Luhby, Tami (2011-10-26). "The 53%: Occupy Wall Street backlash - Oct. 26, 2011". Money.cnn.com. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
- ↑ Occupy Wall Street: 'We Are the 53%' Counter-Protestors Are in the Same Boat By Jim Edwards, CBS News October 12, 2011
- ↑ Brownfield, Mike (October 18, 2011). "Morning Bell: Wall Street is the Wrong Place to Occupy". blog.heritage.org. The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved October 18, 2011.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 "Religion claims its place in Occupy Wall Street". Yahoo! News. 2011. Retrieved 23 October 2011.
Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an advocacy group for conservative mainline Protestants, said while Occupy Wall Street has succeed in getting attention, it's limited because it's only attracting religious support from the left. A call for government redistribution of wealth and reliance on street activism doesn't appeal to the swath of suburban churchgoers with conservative political and religious leanings, he said.
- ↑ Chandler, Doug (October 18, 2011). "ADL Urges Protest Organizers To Condemn Anti-Semitic Incidents". The Jewish Week. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
- ↑ Rubin, Jennifer (October 17, 2011). "Occupy Wall Street: Does anyone care about the anti-Semitism?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
- ↑ Foxman, Abraham H. (17 October 2011). "ADL Calls On 'Occupy Wall Street' Organizers To Condemn Anti-Semitic Remarks Made At rallies". Anti-Defamation League.
- ↑ "[DISCUSS] CV Offline Bookclub: 'All the Light We Cannot See'". www.catholicvote.org.
- ↑ Occupy Vancouver movement almost takes over Catholic church AHN[permanent dead link]
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedNY Post Bloomberg article - ↑ Einhiorn, Erin. "After conflicting remarks, Mayor Bloomberg chooses words carefully on Occupy Wall Street". New York: NYDailyNews.com. Retrieved November 11, 2011.
- ↑ Saul, J. (October 20, 2011) "Angry Manhattan residents lambast Zuccotti Park protesters" New York Post
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