For a week now I've been following
@OccupyWallSt. It's the biggest protest you never saw. It now has over 10,000 followers and posted over 2,400 Tweets in just it's first week, but unless you were on Twitter you probably never heard of it.
Occupy Wall Street is a movement, a revolt against Wall Street and economic problems that it has caused. It's a few thousand people strong and has lead to several arrests over the past week and no doubt more as NYPD grows bored watching the peaceful protesters. Thankfully though it has been and should continue to be a peaceful protest that is slowing starting to spread to other cities in other states. However, unlike Egypt that had mainstream media coving every move of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street has very little media attention.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann has covered it and
Real Time with Bill Maher also has talked about it, but by and large CNN, ABC CBS, Fox, NBC, MSNBC and all the other mainstream media outlets have ignored it. Thousands of people in the streets, in the rain, protesting for a week and it probably has not gotten more than 10 minutes of air time in the just over 10,000 minutes there are each week.
Even Twitter seems against them. A movement this large and none of the hash tags like #OccupyWallStreet, #USDoR, #takewallstreet, #ows and many others used ever seem to make Twitters Trend List, but #WhyIKiva, #That1friend and #2thingsIKnow did. Really, why is that? What is Kiva and why should I care if you Kiva? I care about how and why Wall Street was allowed to screw us all over.
So why is that I wonder, although the cynic in me already knows why. Why is that we saw hours upon hours of Egyptians but barely minutes of Americans protesting on TV? I think it is because we lost control. There have been at least 10 million foreclosures in that last three years and at least 10 million TV commercials about Banks in the same amount of time.
Wall Street controls our Congress, that's why they got Congress to bail them out with TARP in 2008 so they could pay the same idiots that caused our economy to tank millions of dollars in bonuses. Wall Street controls our media too. They buy millions of dollars worth of commercial airtime, so they can control what makes the news based upon that alone. If mainstream media covered a revolution on Wall Street, they just might lose all that ad revenue, so they ignore it and pocket Wall Streets money instead.
The Occupy Wall Street movement deserves our support. They are the ones brave enough to stand up to the powers that be and tell them enough is enough. They are the ones that speak for those too scared to speak. They are the ones brave enough to face arrest in an attempt to let the world know and perhaps make things right again. I just wish I could see them on TV and not YouTube.