"Occupy Wall Street", and their buddies "We are the 99" and "Days of Rage", dislike Wall Street because they dislike wealth. The Tea Party dislikes Wall Street because the wealth comes from implied government guarantees and regulatory barriers to competition. They could agree on cutting the Washington / New York interconnections.
But that's not actually in the interests the smart money actually funding the "Occupy Wall Street" types. The last Congress gave us "finance reform" that left us Too Big Too Fail and a bunch more regulatory levers. The pols got more scope for favors and campaign donations, the bankers got more regulatory barriers to competitive entry.
The chief author of that "reform"? Progressive Barney Frank.
The Tea Party is the GOP's reckoning for failing their principles. The Democrats has yet to come.
I think you misunderstand the left position. The left does not dislike wealth or the wealthy. Karl Marx himself acknowledges the importance of capitalism generating wealth like no system before it. The left has an issue with the unjust creation of wealth. In the case of financial capital, the right and the left have a great deal in common - both right and left agree these financial methods by which people became wealthy during the housing bubble at the cost of others was unjust. The left would go a step further and say that there are some forms of productive capital that result in the unjust creation of wealth, such as businesses that are heavily reliant on manual labor for ultra low wages.
For this reason, I think #OccupyWallStreet as a movement against unjust investment of financial capital really does have the capacity to unite elements of the left and right.
Marx recognizes the _material_ productivity of capitalism, while claiming that its _human_ consequences are so destructive of spirit and values that the material productivity is besides the point. That's what the "alienation of labor" is all about. Any form of bourgeois wealth, no matter how benign it may seem, necessarily dehumanizes and is thus unjust. And that's before we get into its perpetuation of a system that will lead necessarily to more openly malelovent wealth. His vision of "productive capital" occurs in a set of social arrangements lacking any feature which we might recognize as economic wealth.
The viability of those economic arrangements is hard to assess, as he himself couldn't actually specify them. (They would emerge, he claimed, upon destruction of the bourgeois framework that limits our imagination of other possibilities.) But whatever his merits as an economist (he cribbed heavily from Adam Smith) or a social theorist (cribbed from Rousseau), he was a lousy historian and completely missed the inevitable distortion of high-sounding ideals in service of the accumulation of power.
#OccupyWallStreet likely aren't Marxist, if only because they don't strike me as the sort to buckle down to "The German Ideology" never mind "Das Kapital". (And I don't conflate them with "the left", which comprises great variety, some of it considerably more thoughtful.) But phrases like "unjust creation of wealth" show an uncomfortable similarity to the Marxist technique. Such phrases are written to be undeniable -- geez, who is in favor of unjust creation of anything? But the power lies in adopting the vocabulary beneath them, the definitions of justice which turn out to reflect a particular agenda that is considerably more controversial than our common disgust at the unjust. It turns out that these organizational procedures create considerable power for those determining the language by which "just" and "unjust" shall be determined. The organized, having accepted the adoption of language as an organizational tool necessary for the correction of "injustice", lose the use of language for independent analysis -- and perhaps so deeply they don't even notice the loss. At that point, it becomes impossible for the organized to challenge the determinations of justice made by those controlling the organizational language.
The Tea Party types are necessarily unsophisticated. But they've noticed that they've gone along with a lot of fine-sounding language, only to find themselves with the short end of the stick. It's hardly to be wondered that they prefer to keep it simple, or that they find the #OccupyWallStreet types all too recognizable.
Just to note that you can have "left" leaning views without having any relationship to the ideas of Marx. The co-operative movement arguably demonstrates that you can have very succesful businesses that have a social component:
If your argument hinges on mind-reading your opponent's view into something simplistically stupid ("they dislike wealth"), it's probably not a very good argument.
But that's not actually in the interests the smart money actually funding the "Occupy Wall Street" types. The last Congress gave us "finance reform" that left us Too Big Too Fail and a bunch more regulatory levers. The pols got more scope for favors and campaign donations, the bankers got more regulatory barriers to competitive entry.
The chief author of that "reform"? Progressive Barney Frank.
The Tea Party is the GOP's reckoning for failing their principles. The Democrats has yet to come.