Charles Eshelman/FilmMagic
Even though R.E.M. have gone their separate ways, the members remain political, voicing their support for the much-maligned Occupy Wall Street. Spinner sat down with bassist Mike Mills last week (the whole interview will be posted soon) to discuss the band's breakup while expressing his continued faith in the Occupier's main objectives.
"I just marched with Occupy Wall Street yesterday (Nov.7)," he told Spinner from a dimly lit office at Warner Brothers Records in New York. "I think that, like the Democratic Party, [OWS is] a fractious, fractured, fragile coalition of people with different agendas. But the primary points of Occupy Wall Street are corruption in government, corporate control of politics and the growing income disparity between rich and poor. The middle class is ceasing to exist in America and without a middle class you can't have a true democracy. You'll either have an oligarchy of rich people and then you'll have [a lot] of poor people. The income disparity is getting worse every year and the republicans are about nothing except continuing that and making it even more so. I think that is dangerous for democracy and I think it's bad for our country."
Mills also had harsh words about conservative pundits, including a Fox News mainstay: "You listen to Hannity and all those idiots talking about 'Well, they just want freebies!' No, they don't want freebies. They want a country that takes care of its less fortunate people and they want a country where all this great opportunity is available to more than just the top 1%.
"I was down there in Zucotti Park and there are a lot of people there that will scare the Sean Hannitys of the world because they don't understand them. But that's not the point. It's
