Bankers Association plan to break up Occupy Wall Street

Chris Hayes breaks a report that lobbying firm Clark, Lytle, Geduldig, Cranford, former aides to John Boehner offer American Bankers Association a plan to break up Occupy Wall Street. Opposition research on activists “to expose the backers.” They will also target Sherrod Brown and other races in Ohio, Florida, and New Mexico. More here.

The American Bankers Association claims to have rejected the plan.

In effect, this sounds a privatized Stasi, going even beyond the blend of corporate and political power of The American Sentinel and similar blacklist databases. And, as Chris Hayes says, this is one memo that happened to be intercepted. God alone knows how many other such efforts are underway.

Let me add one point about which the people who indulge in this sort of thing are probably not thinking: the Occupy movement embraces such a broad swath of American society, and one that heretofore has not been politically engaged, that the reaction to this kind of heavy-handed attempt to silence dissent is likely to be exactly what they fear the most. Their clumsy efforts to frustrate reform so far have restored communism to an 11% approval rating (!) from approximately zero two decades ago. Suppressing dissent is the one thing that could rip the foundations out from American society.
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Added: Greg Sargent has more, including a link to an NYT story by Nicholas Confessore that the financiers are raising big money to re-elect Scott Brown and thereby block the election of Elizabeth Warren.