OWS: You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows

At NYC's Zuccotti Park where Mayor Bloomberg has ordered city clean-up crews to dispel the smell and filth generated by the Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out there since September 17th. NYDN

The movement is getting traction with 82% of Americans aware of the encampment and 38% in favor of it.  NYDN Media were slow to pay attention to the unfocused ersatz hippie malcontents marching against the bank bailouts in the face of rising unemployment and other economic woes.  But Occupy Wall Street is now occupying bigger news holes.  Pew Research Center  Brian Stelter NYT

Predictably (and sadly) the media coverage is shaking out along ideological lines.  LAT media writer James Rainey:

Earlier this week OWS waved signs outside the homes of five NYC billionaires.  Inexplicably among the Wall Street tycoons, News Corp head Rupert Murdoch.  How about OWS packing a train to New Canaan, Connecticut where Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness high-powered chair, the lobbyist-driven GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, resides? 705 West Road.

Last summer GE (former parent company of NBC Universal) moved the company's X-ray business to China, inflaming CNN curmudgeon Jack Cafferty:  "It's the kind of news that makes you want to reach for something sharp and jab it in your eye. General Electric's Chief Executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is one of President Obama's advisers on… ready? U.S. job creation!"

Republican Immelt talks out of both sides of his mouth. CNN Money  GE is America's #1 tax dodger. Kathy Kristof CBS Money Watch  Immelt defends zero tax bill in 2010 CNN Money Immelt's 2010 political donations total nearly $44,000.  GE is a major defense contractor. Immelt's January 2011 Obama state dinner invite for China's president Hu Jintao, capping a week in which Immelt signed billions in deals with China. I'm not going to write any more here. I've written more than enough on Immelt, NBC et al. Click on the label Jeffrey Immelt.

Update: Thursday Rush Limbaugh went off on GE for getting a $1 bil DOE loan guarantee for an Oregon wind farm that the National Review's Robert Bryce bills "America's worst wind-energy project" -- worse "in some ways" than the now-bankrupt Solyndra half-bil Obama-orchestrated DOE deal.

Robert Bryce

Bryce: The deal was so lucrative for the project developers that last October, some of Obama’s top advisers, including energy-policy czar Carol Browner and economic adviser Larry Summers, wrote a memo saying that the project’s backers had “little skin in the game” while the government would be providing “a significant subsidy (65+ percent).” The memo goes on to say that, while the project backers would only provide equity equal to about 11 percent of the total cost of the wind project, they would receive an “estimated return on equity of 30 percent. . . .  First: Why, as Browner and Summers asked, is the federal government providing loan guarantees and subsidies for an energy project that could easily be financed by GE, which has a market capitalization of about $170 billion? Second: Why is the Obama administration providing subsidies to GE, which paid little or no federal income taxes last year even though it generated some $5.1 billion in profits from its U.S. operations? Third: How is it that GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, can be the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness while his company is paying little or no federal income taxes? That question is particularly germane as the president never seems to tire of bashing the oil and gas industry for what he claims are the industry’s excessive tax breaks. 

Related:  Wall Street office cleaners, security guards join protest.  Reuters
DNC head:  "Voters do not elect leaders to create jobs." (H/t Wayne J. Svantner)
NRO's Charles Cooke:  OWS protester demands free college tuition.
Occupy D.C. Protesting corporate greed, still needing a Starbucks break Emily Wax Wash Post