Protest Comparison

One may ask, "Why is OWS currently more popular than the Tea Party?" After all, the Tea Party went after those corrupt over-spending politicians while Occupy Wall Street is attacking those innocent job-creating bankers and businesspeople. Nevermind that those same bankers and businesspeople have played a part in corrupting politics.

I can give two good reasons, and they're pretty recent.

First: banks are still foreclosing on people, fueling OWS anger.

The number of U.S. homes that received a first-time default notice during the July to September quarter increased 14 percent compared to the second quarter of the year, RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.

That increase signals banks are moving more aggressively now against borrowers who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments than they have since industrywide foreclosure processing problems emerged last fall. Those problems resulted in a sharp drop in foreclosure activity this year.

Second: the GOP is not helping the Middle Class; in fact they are doing the opposite.

In recent months, nearly every major Republican candidate has name-checked a popular statistic that 47% of Americans who file taxes paid no income tax in 2009. Given the GOP’s anti-tax zeal you’d think they’d be celebrating. Nope!

“Right now we know that 53% of Americans pay income taxes and 47% do not,” Michele Bachmann told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday. “I think we definitely need to change the tax code. We need to get more in line. Everybody benefits from this magnificent country. Everybody pay something.”

Not only do statements like Bachmann’s seem to defy past Republican orthodoxy, but the candidates are explicitly making the argument on the same fairness grounds that progressives like Elizabeth Warren have used to demand greater taxes on the rich. The idea isn’t just that tax breaks for the rich trickle down the poor — it’s that they also deserve them more than freeloading Americans. Rick Perry made this moral outrage a key line in his campaign kickoff.

“We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax,” Perry said in his announcement speech. “And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more.”

So the identifiable enemy of OWS (banks) are still acting like asses while the party that backs (and has been infiltrated by) the Tea Party is essentially proposing to do what they blamed "government" for doing up to the 2010 midterms: wasting/taking taxpayer's money. This is a big reason why OWS is currently more popular than the Tea Party.