Friday, September 30, 2011

What's behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?

What's behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?

A few hundred demonstrators protesting against corporations march from nearby Zucotti park to Wall Street, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011, in the Manhattan borough of New York.

It's unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street. Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists. That's just the nature of protests that take place outside approved channels, an inevitable by-product of disruptive dissent: those who are most vested in safeguarding and legitimizing establishment prerogatives (which, by definition, includes establishment media outlets) are going to be hostile to those challenges. As the virtually universal disdain in these same circles for WikiLeaks (and, before that, for the Iraq War protests) demonstrated: the more effectively adversarial it is, the more establishment hostility it's going to provoke.

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2 comments:

  1. I'm all for what these people are doing.  Today, there was even a protest at one of our millionaire senator's local office to demand tht he pay a faire share of taxes.

    But it seems like this is an endless uphill struggle, this and everything worthwhile that people are engaged in, such as the protests in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen,etc.; and attempts to slow or stop deforestation in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, where they have stopped a road through their amazon region.

    All of these people are heroes, maybe someday more will recognize this.

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