Proving that the institutional right isn’t going to just roll over while Occupy Wall Street defames the poor oligarchs who ostensibly run our country, a leading K-Street firm has pitched a plan to attack the movement where it wouldn’t actually hurt them: by ‘punishing’ the politicians who deign to support the movement.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes had the first that we heard of it, which was a follow on to a HuffPo story containing an excerpt of the memo. The best of the excerpt reads:
“It shouldn’t be surprising that the Democratic party or even President Obama’s re-election team would campaign against Wall Street in this cycle. However the bigger concern should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies — and might start running against them too.”
The horrors! If there’s one thing that we can’t allow in this country, it’s for politicians to possibly bend to the will of the people they are elected to represent. Then again, given recent history, it’d be hard to convince anyone paying attention that Republicans (and most Democrats) suddenly choosing the side against Wall Street weren’t just a bunch of pandering pansies who would roll right back into their overlords’ pockets 10 minutes after the end of the next election cycle.
The memo does single out Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), according to Hayes’ site, which is curious, given that I live in Ohio, and I find it doubtful that Brown is getting a whole lot of sweet Wall Street cash these days.
Frankly this shouldn’t be a surprise. K-Street and Wall Street may be a few hundred miles apart geographically, but ideologically, they’re neighbors. Not country neighbors, but post WWII-era suburbs where bungalos were built 12 feet apart, and you could yell though the kitchen windows at each other and pass pies full of $100 bills back and forth. And this is nothing but a proposal from a lobbying firm to a Wall Street client, as far as anyone has reported thus far.
Chris Hayes has promised to release the full text of the four page memo later this morning, we’ll keep you guys posted.
Update-11:45 AM
The full memo is out there now, and boy is it a beauty. A few gems:
“It may be easy to dismiss OWS as a ragtag group of protestors but they have demonstrated that they should be treated more like an organized competitor who is very nimble and capable of working the media, coordinating third party support and engaging office holders to do their bidding”
I have a feeling that if you looked at communications sent through Ohio and Wisconsin in the past year, the same things in the second part of that quote were being said about the labor unions.
“OWS bears many of the hallmarks of a well-funded effort and media reports have speculated about associations with George Soros and others.”
Let’s just let that one marinate. I wonder which ‘media reports’ have ‘speculated’ about Soros’ involvement.
My personal favorite, however:
“Individual companies under threat by OWS and its adoption by Democrats likely will not be the best spokespeople for their own cause. A big challenge will is to demonstrate that these companies still have political strength and that making them a political target will carry a severe political cost.”
There’s such a combination of hubris and pure dickishness there that make up this perfect Feudalism Stew.
Further, the document outlines states that should be targeted for ‘research’, in which it will not surprise you to see that there are a number of high delegate, battleground states named.
Again, you can check out the memo at the link above, and see that it includes deliverables and a discussion on time frame and budget, which certainly lend an air of authenticity to this document.
A curious point is that it is dated November 24, 2011, so it’s from the future? More likely, this was to be rolled out as part of a larger meeting with a few leading firms, and left behind as a summary.
It will be curious to see, over the next couple days, how much play this gets on the networks, and if Murdoch’s people light themselves afire defending the free-market-ness of all this. I still won’t turn on Fox News to find out.
