# Two crowds after the crash, and the one word used to dismiss them both Case studies Two crowds after the crash, and the one word used to dismiss them both Illustration, not an archive object - Home - Case studies - Two crowds after the crash, and the one word used to dismiss them both At a glance The bailout years produced a protest wave on the right in 2009 and one on the left in 2011. Opponents called each of them fake. The record shows real WhenFebruary 19, 2009ActorTea Party groups, Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Fox News…Full record at propagandaarchive.org ## What it said Each movement packed its case into a short phrase and a borrowed picture. The right chose a name from 1773. The left chose a number. The first spark was a television segment. On 19 February 2009, CNBC's Rick Santelli, standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, attacked the new administration's $275 billion mortgage plan and floated an idea while traders cheered. We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up at Lake Michigan, I'm going to start organizing. Rick Santelli, CNBC, 19 February 2009, as transcribed in the sources listed on the FRAME case study. Hand-lettered signs turned the name into an acronym, Taxed Enough Already, and rallies flew the Gadsden flag beside placards reading We bow to no king. Tea Party Patriots stated its program as Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets. Occupy began as an email. On 13 July 2011 the magazine Adbusters sent its list of roughly 90,000 a hashtag, #OccupyWallStreet, and a date, 17 September. Its poster set a ballerina on Wall Street's Charging Bull above the question What is our one demand? In August a Tumblr called We are the 99 Percent began posting photos of ordinary people holding handwritten notes about their own hard times. A flyer from the period said it in three short sentences: We are here. We are growing. We are the 99%. ## Who made it and why On the right, local organizers moved first. By the weekend of 27 and 28 February they had staged more than 40 events and called a second round for tax day. National groups then joined openly. FreedomWorks was a lead organizer of the 12 September 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington, alongside the 9-12 Project, Americans for Prosperity and Tea Party Patriots. Fox News branded its April coverage FNC Tax Day Tea Parties; Media Matters for America, a progressive monitor, counted at least 20 segments and 73 promotions between 6 and 13 April. Glenn Beck promoted the September march. The fieldwork that matters most here came from Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, who went to the meetings. They counted some 850 to 1,000 local Tea Party groups gathering regularly and described the tie between the big national sponsors and the small local chapters as one of mutual convenience. On the left, a New York City General Assembly met at Bowling Green on 2 August 2011, drawing anti-cuts organizers and anarchist activists, with David Graeber and Marisa Holmes facilitating. Protesters took Zuccotti Park on 17 September. Lacking a permit for amplification, they used the human microphone, in which the crowd repeated a speaker phrase by phrase. On 29 September the Assembly adopted, by consensus, the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, a list of grievances against corporate power. In October, labor unions, MoveOn and the Working Families Party arrived with leaders, spokespeople and agendas of their own. ## What it got right or wrong The insult was the same on both sides, and on this record it was wrong both times. In April 2009 Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of the tax-day rallies: This initiative is funded by the high end; we call it AstroTurf, it's not really a grass-roots movement. In October 2011 the conservative site The Blaze headlined paid canvassing linked to allied groups as AstroTurf Jobs, and Truthout, writing from the left, warned that MoveOn and friends were trying to co-opt Occupy. Astroturf means a crowd, a page or a persona that is not what it says it is. Neither movement fits. Money, training and airtime from FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Fox were real and were given under those names. So were the union and MoveOn contributions to Occupy. A sponsor with its name on the banner is not a hidden hand. Whether the national funders wanted what the rank and file wanted is a fair argument. It is not the same as saying the crowds were rented. The symbols deserve the same even test. Calling a 2009 argument over spending a Tea Party lends it the glow of the Revolution without proving the comparison. Setting a dancer on the bull lends a feeling to a poster that never states its claim. Both are a transfer of prestige from picture to cause, done in the open. Both sides also named a culprit for the crash: Santelli pointed at the losers' mortgages and Washington; Occupy pointed at the 1% and the banks. Borrowers, lenders and regulators all appear in the history of the crisis, and picking the fair share of blame is the policy debate itself, not something this page settles. Crowd size was argued as hard as anything else. Nate Silver estimated about 311,000 people at 346 tax-day events in 2009, with other tallies above and below. FreedomWorks logged about 30,000 online registrations for the September march, and claims for the turnout ran from tens of thousands up to two million. Treat every one of those as a claim. ## What government did to each movement The sharpest facts in this file are not about the protesters. They are about what government did to each of them. From 2010 into 2013 the IRS sorted tax-exemption applications by name, pulling ones with Tea Party, Patriots or 9/12 for extra review. In May 2013 the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration called those criteria inappropriate and found they had run for more than 18 months. The same watch list held Progressives and Occupy entries; the inspector general found no evidence the first was used to pick cases from 2010 to 2012, and none of the 298 cases chosen by May 2012 carried Occupy in its name. Sorting citizens' associations for scrutiny by the words in their names is a burden on political association. The inspector general said it was wrong, and it was. Occupy met force rather than paperwork. On 25 October 2011 Oakland police cleared the city's camp, then used tear gas and beanbag rounds on people trying to return. Scott Olsen, a Marine who had served two tours in Iraq, suffered a fractured skull from a projectile that witnesses believed was a police canister; Oakland settled his suit for $4.5 million in 2014. In New York, police in riot gear cleared Zuccotti Park at about 1 a.m. on 15 November after the city and the owner, Brookfield Office Properties, called the site unsanitary and hazardous. About 70 people were arrested. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the hour was chosen to reduce the risk of confrontation. A court upheld the eviction the same day. The two cases are not identical. A permanent camp on private land raises questions of property and sanitation that a single day's rally does not, and a court ruled on that point. A tax agency's keyword list raises no such question. But the libertarian test reads both the same way: assembly and association are rights against the government, and every time the state screens, sorts or disperses a political crowd it carries the burden of showing why. In Oakland the city paid. At the IRS the government's own watchdog said the screening failed that test. ## Its legacy The Tea Party left durable local chapters that, Skocpol and Williamson report, kept meeting and kept watch on Republican candidates and officeholders. Occupy lost its New York camp after about two months; the sources trace its afterlife through encampment veterans who helped start the Fight for $15 wage campaign in 2012, and through the 1% as a frame later heard in the 2016 Sanders campaign and in Warren's financial-reform platform. Occupy's refusal to issue a single demand was described by participants as deliberate, and critics called it a weakness. That is an argument, not a finding. The method also crossed the aisle. Organizers who opposed the next president would later write a guide modeled on Tea Party tactics; that story is in the page on MAGA and the Resistance. The useful habit both cases teach is simple. When someone calls a crowd fake, ask whether the members, meetings and chapters exist. Here they did, on both sides. ## Sources - FRAME case study "The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street: two protest waves after the 2008 crash," for the chronology, quotations, counts and the IRS and eviction records. propagandaarchive.org - CNBC, Santelli segment, 19 February 2009; Ballotpedia transcript excerpts. CNBC - Media Matters for America, 15 April 2009, count of Fox segments and promotions. Media Matters - Roll Call, 15 April 2009, Pelosi on the tax-day protests. Roll Call - Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press); Scholars Strategy Network summary. - Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, statement to the House Oversight Committee, 18 July 2013, and letter to Rep. Sander Levin, 2013. TIGTA - Tea Party Patriots, mission statement. teapartypatriots.org - Mother Jones, October 2011, on the origins of Occupy and the 99 Percent Tumblr; NYU Special Collections, the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. - The Blaze, 9 October 2011; Truthout, on MoveOn and Occupy. - SFGate and NBC Bay Area, the Olsen settlement; PBS NewsHour and CNN, 15 November 2011, the Zuccotti clearance and court ruling. - Annenberg School (2021) and Time (2021), Occupy ten years on. Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/case-studies/tea-party-and-occupy/