>I don't believe that Occupy Wall Street was organic vs. Obama astroturfed (and isn't that backed up by his saying he was standing between the protesters and "bankers"?).
That sounds exactly like someone saying they were trying to steer it away from their initial goals.
>See also predation on the women who were in the tents.
I remember hearing about that. Turns out it was exactly who you'd expect. (see pic.)
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/protester
I don't have a ton of evidence about all of this, it was long ago and there's been lots of time to gel a narrative one way or another. But when the 2008 meltdown was happening ~85% of voters wanted the banks to pay for their own bad loans, but both candidates (Obama & McCain) were strongly in favor of the bailout. This energy had to be redirected somewhere, so they quickly brought in leaders of either event that made it about partisan crap that would divide support rather than focus on what the vast majority of the population wanted. Both events started as critical of Finance, but Occupy devolved into blaming Rich White Men™️ , then dropped the Rich, courtesy of figures like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore.
The Tea Party similarly started as a criticism of the bailouts, but focused on the government corruption leading to it. This soon devolved into attacking any form of government intervention, like the minimum wage or anti-union laws.
In both cases they picked issues that were guaranteed to alienate the other side at no gain for themselves, when the entire point was to stop letting finance dictate our politics.