White House feeds off protest anger

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Politics

Image not recoveredWhiteHouse.jpg

(From the ft.com) Weeks after taking to the streets in Manhattan, Occupy Wall St demonstrators are camped a block from the White House. Many of them are wondering: do they have a friend inside? While not endorsing the protests, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have expressed understanding of the movement that has spread rapidly across the country.

Mr Obama said people were angry because Wall Street had not been “following the rules”. His vice-president even compared the movement on Thursday to the Tea Party, the conservative movement which has upended national politics in the past two years.

“The core [of the protest] is: the bargain has been breached. The American people do not think the system is fair, or on the level,” Mr Biden said.

Underlying the protests, and the administration’s response, is the stubbornly stagnant economy that continues to sap voter confidence and challenge politicians.

On McPherson Square in Washington near the White House, the motley crew of protesters are lashing out in different directions, from corporate greed to the ballooning deficit to, above all, the political class.

Read more here: White House feeds off protest anger

Comments

1 · as published

Chris Sharp
Chris Sharp Says: October 8th, 2011 at 2:14 pm Being a history buff, these spontaneous demonstrations remind me a lot of the spontaneous demonstrations during the last years when the Bourbons and the Romanovs were in power. After a while, it was not the demonstrators who got tired marching — after all, they had nothing else they could go to. Instead, it was the police and the military that started getting tired of defending the “haves” against the “have nots,” when the police and the military didn’t have much themselves. Remember that the last Bourbons and the last Romanovs were considered liberal, like Obama and Biden, and that simply inflamed the demonstrators even more.