More Occupy Wall Street

I read a fascinating interview with Michael Moore recently. The interviewer mentioned that anything Moore says or does is received skeptically, is usually mocked, by anyone to the political left of center. Moore then expounded on how anyone to the left of John Birch has their persona hijacked and turned into a cartoon character villain by Fox News, Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, et al.. He noted that there is a cartoon character named Michael Moore who he shares a name with, but he doesn't recognize the guy. It got me to thinking about this phenomena. I once saw a documentary in which a British journalist spent a week with Al Sharpton. I knew Sharpton as a cartoon character who was a radical rabble rouser who loved to see his face in the media. What the documentary showed was a literate, thoughtful, proactive guy who has made it his life's work to help people no one else is helping. The journalist asked him why he fought for poor blacks. His response was that lots of people and the entire system work to help the wealthy, and that if he didn't help people in his community, who would?

I mention this because Jesse Jackson had an op-ed in yesterday's SunTimes. Jackson is another one of those guys who everyone on the right presents as a hypocritical cartoon character scoundrel. It is so pervasive that I even hear liberals mock him. Jackson can be exasperating, but like all of us, he is made of flesh. His is a type A personality, just like the folks who are trying to dismantle the federal social safety net. He may be trying to make a buck like everyone else, but in the meantime he has spent a significant amount of his life dedicated to helping the least among us, and he is right on the mark when he discussing the Occupy Wall Street phenomena.

When 400 Americans have more wealth than over 150 million Americans, when our public purse is used to spend hundreds of billions to save Wall Street bankers from themselves, when conservatives want to gut Social Security and Medicare to pay for the Wall Street bailout, it's time for average Americans to make their voices heard.

Read more:       Occupy Wall Street Speaks for America     by Jesse Jackson : Chicago SunTimes