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As expected, the talking heads over at Fox and CNN are being just as dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement as they were supportive of the AstroTurf "tea party" movement and Liz Trotta gave us another example on Fox this Saturday, comparing the OWS list of demands to the Unabomber manifesto.

TROTTA: Well, the media's really in search of itself. I advise anybody who has a sense of humor left about this to go to OccupyWallStreet.com and what you will read is the ravings of what sounds like the Unabomber, and also the use of the word meta, a Greek degree of language, which I won't go into at the moment. But these people have plenty of words to say, but again, and I don't mean to sound, just repeat what everybody else has said, but it is unclear what they want. But it's certainly better going down there and carrying signs than going out and hitting the pavement for a job.

Now, what's interesting about this is that media seems, the liberal media is being accused of setting this up for Obama, so that he can use this as a, these people as a wedge against the Republicans in the election. I don't know if that's true or not, but the unions couldn't, the public service unions couldn't wait to get down there last week.

I'd say there's a fair amount of projection going on there given the fact that Fox and CNN did relentlessly promote the "tea party" in order to help get Republicans elected during the mid-term elections. So far the accusations made by Trotta here on how this movement was started are coming from one place in the media, and that's Fox.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Please donate to our #OWS Solidarity Pizzas #occupies because the 1%ers are very nervous.

Meanwhile this Saturday, the panel on Chris Hayes' new show on MSNBC discussed the equally dismissive coverage we saw from CNN's Erin Burnett of the protests as well. (Video below the fold)

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From Democracy Now -- Naomi Klein on Anti-Union Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style: "This is a Frontal Assault on Democracy, a Corporate Coup D’Etat":

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country following the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. “The Wisconsin protests are an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine,” Klein says.

AMY GOODMAN: Rallies for workers’ rights are spreading across the country. In Michigan, over a thousand people rallied at the State Capitol in Lansing to oppose a measure allowing the breaking of labor contracts by placing schools and districts under emergency management. In a scene reminiscent of Wisconsin, hundreds of demonstrators packed the Capitol Rotunda chanting slogans. Protests were also held against anti-union bills Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Florida and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, the state legislature has given final approval to a measure restricting the collective bargaining of public school teachers. The bill would limit teachers’ collective bargaining to salaries and benefits. It also ends teacher tenure, limits teacher contracts to one year, and removes seniority as a factor in determining layoffs.

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book 'The Shock Doctrine,' which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.

Well, Naomi Klein joins us today in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.

Read on...

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The Nation's Chris Hayes laid out very plainly why the protests in Wisconsin matter. This move by Gov. Scott Walker is one of a series of power grabs by Republicans with the intent of achieving some of their long time goals; destroying unions and the middle class and getting rid of our public education system.

And as Chris noted, it's a reminder of the fact that when our political institutions fail us, people mobilizing outside of those institutions through the process of peaceful protests as we've seen in Wisconsin have brought about some of the greatest moments of progressive transformation in the United States.

Chris' fellow contributor to The Nation, Naomi Klein discussed how what Walker doing is a classic example of the Shock Doctrine, where politicians create a crisis and then using that crisis as an excuse to push through horribly unpopular economic policies. And as Hayes and Klein both explained, what ends up happening in Wisconsin is not only going to have local implications, but national as well.

From Democracy Now Naomi Klein talks to Amy Goodman about the deficit hawks at the G20's plans to destroy what's left of the social safety nets for our society.

Naomi Klein: The Real Crime Scene Was Inside the G20 Summit:

AMY GOODMAN: As thousands protested in the streets of Toronto, inside the G20 summit world leaders agreed to a controversial goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013. Economists say such a move could usher in sizable tax increases and massive cuts in government programs, including benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, world leaders at the G8/G20 failed to come to an agreement on setting new global rules for big banks or imposing a new across-the-board global bank tax.

Journalist Naomi Klein joins us now from her home in Toronto. Her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She has an op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail today called "Sticking the Public with the Bill for the Bankers’ Crisis."

Naomi, welcome to Democracy Now! You were out on the streets throughout the weekend. Describe what Toronto looks like and what the G20 decisions—their significance are.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Toronto has pretty much returned to normal. They cleaned up the broken glass, and the leaders have gone home. And I was near the Convention Center last night and saw some sweeping up. And, you know, all weekend the media here has been in hysterics over the broken glass and the burning police cars and saying, you know, nothing like this has ever happened before in Canada, which, first of all, is just not true. We have some pretty intense hockey riots, where in one case sixteen police cars were burned. So it isn’t true that we’ve never seen property destruction like this.

But my feeling, when I went by the Convention Center after all the leaders had gone home, was that this was the real crime scene, not those shattered storefronts, but what actually happened at the summit on Sunday night, when the world leaders issued their final communiqué. And what that communiqué said was that there wouldn’t even be a measly tax on banks to help pay for the global crisis that they created and also prevent future crises. There wouldn’t be a financial transaction tax, which could create a fund for social programs and for action on climate change. There wouldn’t be a real action to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel companies that have also created so many social and environmental costs around the world, as we see with the BP disaster.

But what there would be was very decisive action on deficit reductions. These leaders announced that they would halve their deficits by 2013, which is shocking and brutal cut. You know, I don’t believe—maybe some of the leaders intend on keeping—making good on this promise, but, on the other hand, they can hide behind this promise as the excuse to do what a lot of them want to do anyway, and say, you know, "We have no choice; we made this commitment." But so, just to put this in perspective, if the US were to cut its deficit, its projected 2010 deficit, in half by 2013, that would be a cut of $780 billion, you know, if there were no tax increases in that period.

So, you know, that’s why I wrote the piece that came out this morning in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail, that what actually happened at the summit is that the global elites just stuck the bill for their drunken binge with the world’s poor, with the people who are most vulnerable, because that is really who’s going to pay, when they balance their budgets on the backs of healthcare programs, pension programs, unemployment programs. And also, the other thing that they did at this G8 summit, that preceded the G20 summit, is admit that they were not meeting their commitments to doubling aid to Africa, once again, because of the debt that was created by saving the banks. Read on...

From Democracy Now--Howard Zinn (1922-2010): A Tribute to the Legendary Historian with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove:

We pay tribute to the late historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn, who died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of eighty-seven. Howard Zinn’s classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. It has sold over a million copies and was recently made into a television special called The People Speak. We remember Howard Zinn in his own words, and we speak with those who knew him best: Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove.

Guests:

Noam Chomsky, author and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, where he taught for over half a century. He is author of dozens of books. His most recent is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

Naomi Klein, journalist and author. Her latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, poet and activist. She was a student of Howard Zinn’s at Spelman College in the early 1960s.

Anthony Arnove, co-author, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of A People’s History of the United States and co-director, with Zinn, of Let the People Speak

Full transcript at Democracy Now.

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What is it with these Republicans who constantly pretend they want to clean up a system, but when it comes to the specifics, they really just want to keep the status quo. While discussing what needs to be done to fix Wall Street, David Frum expresses his concern for throttling "the creativity of the system". As Naomi Klein and Eliot Spitzer point out to him, it was exactly that "creativity" that got us into the mess we're in now.

FRUM: The fix is here. There's a -- let's do -- there are technical fixes, the kinds of things I've said about the way banks hold their securities.

And then, be careful about doing too much, because you can throttle something that I think is precious to everybody, which is the creativity of the system.

SPITZER: Well, let me respond. I got it. Not to make this partisan, but...

(LAUGHTER)

... statutes don't work. Enforcement does.

We have had for 15 or 20 years an absence of enforcement, except with a few nodes of activism, which gets beaten down over time.

What we need is adherence to very simple principles of ethics and transparency in the marketplace. And then, it would work.

ZAKARIA: On that note, we are going to take a break and come back, and discuss all of this and more. We will be right back.

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From Democracy Now--Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again:

Journalist and author Naomi Klein spoke in New York last night and addressed the crisis in Haiti: “We have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy—which is part natural, part unnatural—must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interest of our corporations. This is not conspiracy theory. They have done it again and again.”

As Klein noted, it took The Heritage Foundation 13 days to come out with their "free market solutions" for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They didn't even wait 24 hours after this disaster in Haiti.

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November 19, 2009 MSNBC

Naomi Klein and Ryan Grimm explain to Dylan Ratigan why we need to audit the Federal Reserve.

May 08, 2009 HBO Bill Maher

Rachel Maddow talks to Naomi Klein about the bank bailouts, the results of the stress tests and how bailing out these banks is a massive transfer of wealth from the public sector into private hands. They talk about how the crisis has not been solved but instead the burden has been moved to those that can least afford it.

We need to re-regulate these industries and I agree completely with Klein and Maddow when they say the regulation should have come hand in hand with the bailout money. The Obama administration had a chance to channel the public anger over these bailouts to get reform passed and by not using that anger in same the way FDR did, they've wasted an opportunity to really fix the system that got us into the mess we are now. And as Naomi Klein notes that anger is going to get channeled somewhere and unfortunately not always towards the ones that deserve it.

Instead we see these tea bag parties, people lashing out at immigrants or anyone else they can blame their own economic woes on, and many who don't feel that one party is any better than the other one. If the Democrats don't get some real reform passed even if it is a day late and a few trillion dollars short they're going to be facing a lot of that anger at the polls come next election and rightfully so. They're saying that they're going to get it done and that we'll see some reforms come through this summer. I will take them at their word for now that they're going to do it but if they don't, I'm sure myself and everyone else who contributes at this site will be calling them out for it.