Contrast the Occupy Wall Street protests with the beginnings of the Tea Party.

While the Tea Party was rife with discussion of 9-11, the NWO, Rothschilds, and the Federal Reserve (in fact, those conspiracy theories are what created the Tea Party), none of that is present at the OWS protests.

The anger has been directed at the 1% at the top and the arguments are broadly anti-capitalist in a revolutionary sounding way, but as far as I can tell, not in substance.

Matt Taibbi (who came by OWS to give advice on specific proposals), has proposed some five reforms that are actually strangely lame and misplaced.

A small tax on all stock and bond trading, for instance, is highly unlikely to hamper the largest high frequency traders. It will burden small day-traders (mostly the middle-class) and smaller professionals. And from the point of view of fairness or morality, it’s completely misdirected, since these people were some of the main victims of the casino markets of the last couple of decades. The big fish were literally living off the losses of the small fry, whom they shook out of the market with each sudden movement up or down.

Changing compensation at Wall Street is also a curiously modest demand for a movement that tries to cast itself as a ground-shaking revolution.

It looks like the rhetoric and imagery are intended to scare.

The ideology is communist, or at least collectivist, but the proposals are reformist. Which makes me still more convinced that the whole movement has come out of the ruling classes to begin with.

It is likely intended to create a groundswell of approval for various kinds of insider generated regulations and redistributions of wealth, as well as for an increase in central power, masquerading as “decentralized direct democracy.”