I'm not sure if I agree with that assessment but I do think that they have the same enemy.
The collusion between big business and big government is the root of the problem that they both rail against.
The Tea Party focuses on the government part and Occupy focused on the business part. They'd be a lot more effective if they focused on their common ground.
Many people in both movements correctly identified that they aligned on some issues -- particularly top-heavy bank bailouts. But, in fact, they generally were and are not on the "same side"; even ignoring for the moment any truth their might be the notion that one or the other movement is largely a front for right- or left-wing establishment interests (which opponents of both have made, more of the TPP being a front for right-wing establishment entities, but sometimes also of Occupy being a front for left-wing establishment entities), its pretty clear that there is a significant ideological divide and that TPP is right-libertarian in its overall ideology and agenda while Occupy, while decidedly less focussed, is more left-wing (spanning, really, from left-libertarian to more traditional democratic socialist).
One can imagine that if the US had a parliamentary system that, at their height of influence, the two movements could have each won seats and ended up in the same coalition because of alignment on issues with transitorily pre-eminent saliency, but the alignment was on a very narrow set of issues that were a very small subset of the issues that members of each movement cared about (and, especially in the TPP case, a very small subset of the issues that the organization as such cared about), and even then the alignment was mostly an alignment about opposition to particular policies rather than on what substantive policies should be in place.
They really aren't on the same side and were mostly orthogonal to each other. Of course, both movements share some common grievances against the government, but the concrete ideas of both groups are just about 100% incompatible.
As a glaring example, consider the Citizen's United case; Occupy supporters would almost unanimously point to the Citizen's United ruling as extremely damaging to American democracy, Tea Party supporters on the other hand overwhelmingly side with the government regarding the treatment of money as speech.
Pick pretty much any issue and you'll find that the two movements bitterly disagree, just about the only thing they can agree on is that the government is corrupt and the country is moving in the wrong direction, but that's a universal platitude that everyone will nod their head at.
> As a glaring example, consider the Citizen's United case; Occupy supporters would almost unanimously point to the Citizen's United ruling as extremely damaging to American democracy, Tea Party supporters on the other hand overwhelmingly side with the government regarding the treatment of money as speech.
Side with the court -- the government (specifically, the Federal Election Commission) was the losing party in Citizen's United, so siding with the government would be the position you ascribe to Occupy, to wit, seeing the ruing as damaging to American democracy.
I think the racism of the Tea Party and the hooliganism of the Occupy movement were deliberately overplayed in the media to keep the two groups from seeing each other as allies.
