[vkou]

> No, not even close. It was the first serious, spontaneous, "modern era?"; let's say, 21st Century grassroots reaction to the crimes of our ruling class, and was, as I noted, brutally suppressed (really, you think Koch brothers were paying all those people to rally, and to pick up their trash after they were finished???).

No, it was not. Occupy Wall Street was.

Unlike Occupy, the Tea Party was very easy to turn to serve the needs of the ruling class - just play up the 'no new taxes' and 'small government' bits, and downplay the 'find the people who broke the economy, and punish them' outrage.

The result was that outrage over 2008 turned into another spoke in the GOP tentpole.