How to explain the Occupy Movement

This morning around 5:30AM I awoke to the sounds of helicopters flying over head. That can never be a good thing for Occupy Oakland. My guess is that the police are taking down the encampment....again.  Will report back later.

in the meantime, this was my planned post for today.

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Do you have any friends that still do not understand why people are taking part in the Occupy movement? If so, direct them to this article by Matt Taibbi (I just love Matt). Maybe it will give them a clearer understanding (but more than likely they are among the group of people who already have their minds made up and NOTHING will change them until they are faced with the ugly reality of what is happening - because it has now happened to them)

Rolling Stone Politics

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests

Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become.

By Matt Taibbi

November 10, 2011 8:00 AM ET

I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

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I'm Just Sayin!