Quote:
|
"if you have it so good, then maybe you should work 30 hours a week, and someone else can work the other 30 and have half of what you make. You are just hoarding it for yourself"
|
Awesome.
In the battle for hearts and minds, Occupy Wall St. is starting to lose.
One thing you're going to see come up more often in copycat style is municipalities making public their costs to service the Occupy Wall St. movement.
Calgary was one of the first with the $40,000 claim to repair damage/vandalism at Olympic Plaza. Phoenix is now saying they've spent $204,000 of taxpayer dollars on this, particularly on overtime. A frustrated city councillor in Phoenix wants to pass that bill onto the protestors.
http://www.azcentral.com/community/p...-thousand.html
Those are the kinds of cost-based pronouncements that infuriate taxpayers, the very people the Occupy movement needs to embrace.
Then you're starting to see articles like this in Toronto and today in LA, small business owners saying the Occupy movement is hurting business:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,3865505.story
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toront...merchants.html
A sympathetic columnist in the LA Times is getting tired of the "endless slumber party" and wants the group to get off its ass and do something, anything. His suggestions:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...4348313.column
Its a common theme across most municipalities - some sympathy to the thought but are you really going to just camp out, get in the way, and do little else?
Municipalities, with some exceptions, are essentially sitting back to see which way the wind is blowing, suspecting this movement will eventually fade away through lack of inertia and an eventual public backlash . . . . . which appears to be happening now.
The settlements will never go to zero, however, which is where municipalities hopes will be dashed. There will always be a hard core group and they'll have to be forciably evicted, which, for PR reasons, is Occupy Wall St.'s hope. Arrests are good visuals for Occupy Wall St. Scenes of violence are even better.
The tipping point for municipalities, where public anger/sympathy shifts sufficiently to the side of authorities so political blowback is minimal at the moment of forcable eviction, will be different in each city.
In the meantime, while we wait and the bills to taxpayers pile up, one of the best things cities have going for them is Occupy Wall St. doing all the talking. The more various messengers for this group talk and spread their message, the worse they look.
Cowperson