We, a working group of people currently occupying Liberty Park and many other locations throughout the US, are growing increasingly concerned about divide and conquer attempts being made to co-opt the movement. In the following message, we are issuing our first proposed statement. If you agree with the statement, please post it to your website and/or spread it throughout your social networks, both online and offline at occupations throughout the country. – AmpedStatus

Dominant Social Theme: Occupy Wall Street is another controlled protest ... or is it?

Free-Market Analysis: In scanning David DeGraw's AmpedStatus web-log of the growing protest movement Occupy Wall Street, we came across a statement from the "We Will NOT Be Co-Opted" Working Group. It's surely worth commenting on, and we reproduce it below, as it seems to show considerable awareness of trends and accusations swirling around the movement.

As we have established in previous articles, Adbusters magazine, a publication funded by the very elite groups that Occupy Wall Street is supposedly protesting against, provided considerable exposure for the nascent movement, giving rise in libertarian circles to the suspicion that the movement was co-opted.

This was buttressed by Webster Tarpley's observation last week that while Occupy Wall Street was putatively organized around direct democracy, there was an "inner core" making decisions and meeting secretly.

This core group, he intimated, was much older than most protestors and might be composed of those who had infiltrated the group from the beginning and included governmental Intel and military operatives. To date, no Occupy Wall Street spokesperson has addressed the specific allegations.

We've pointed out with others that the protest models itself to some degree on the Arab Spring protests. which were aided and abetted by the US State Dept., US Intel agencies and a US-founded "youth group," AYM. Are these forces even partially behind Occupy Wall Street?

The "We Will NOT be Co-opted" working group is certainly a sign that at least some protestors are very aware of the co-option possibilities. DeGraw carried the statement in full at AmpedStatus. We posted some of it at the beginning of this article. Here's the rest:

This is not an official statement from the #OWS 99% Movement. As a decentralized leaderless movement, in our opinion, there is no one group, organization, website or individual who can speak for the movement as a whole.

We appreciate, respect and encourage endorsements from individuals and organizations. We invite them. However, just because an individual or organization endorses our movement, does not mean that they in any way have a leadership role in deciding the future direction of this movement. We will not be co-opted by hierarchical organizations. No matter how wonderful their cause may be.

There are many people, organizations and media outlets within both the Democratic and Republican parties who are trying to label us as the Democrat's version of the Tea Party. In this working groups opinion, not only is this incorrect, but in labeling us this way, you are, whether you realize it or not, undermining the very essence of this movement with your obsolete divide and conquer groupthink propaganda. Just as the mainstream media and both political parties aided and abetted the co-option of the Tea Party by the Republican Party, there is an attempt being made to do the same to us within the Democratic Party.

We the People, We the 99%, are not the pawns of either wing of the two-party oligarchy.

We emphatically reject the attempted leadership of any political party, organization or individual. If there are elected officials or organizations who endorse our movement, we welcome them. However, they must do so knowing this: Your voice will be just as loud as any other voice. We are led by no one. You cannot co-opt We The People. Respect us.