Forum Post: Common ground with Tea Party - Local instead of Federal?

I've just recently come to actively take part in activism regarding how our government has been failing to fix the problems caused by the wealthy in America. In the process, I've learned from some (specifically, Steven Kong, if you haven't met him, he's a rubber hits the road kind of guy) that Occupy and Tea Party folks have rather a lot more in common, and that the vocal bigoted portion of the Tea Party is actually quite small, but gets reported because it sells news.

More importantly - one of the tenants of the Tea Party appears to be that many of our problems would be better solved locally. I'm wondering if those of you in Occupy agree with this? If so, it seems to me that using Occupy techniques to focus on the local level could be very effective, and might also garner support from those in the Tea Party, making change more likely.

To support this, I suggest that the following areas could be solved on a local or state level:

1) Education: Federal education programs are notorious for not doing particularly well, and except for isolated areas, most cities and counties have both rich and poor, good and bad schools. The point being, using taxes or other means on the local level to make public education better makes a lot more sense than federal funds, simply because problems and solutions discussed locally are more manageable.

2) Business: While Wall St. is a national entity, corporations are not, they are state entities. Each state has its own rules (witness, for example, Delaware's rules about lending which lead most credit companies to be based there). Fighting corporate greed on a state level makes more sense then, because it is to the states that many companies are beholden, and if a state refuses to allow certain practices, that corporation will have to look elsewhere to base its thievery.

3) Health care: Although a new health care plan has been approved on the federal level, in truth, health issues differ from region to region, based on weather, native industries, and population ancestry. As such, therefore, it seems to me that at least some of the issues could be better handled on the state level.

Anyway, I wanted to find out a reaction to this idea, to see how those of you one here would respond.