Occupy Wall Street

[BengalBacker]

[quote name='Jamie_B' timestamp='1336050351' post='1128449']


Refuse to admit these people have legitimate complaints huh? All just a bunch of socialists/communists huh?
[/quote]

Yeah, that's exactly what I said.

[Jamie_B]

[quote name='BengalBacker' timestamp='1336065196' post='1128559']
Yeah, that's exactly what I said.


[/quote]

isnt it? hasnt it been?

[BengalBacker]

[quote name='Jamie_B' timestamp='1336065939' post='1128564']
isnt it? hasnt it been?
[/quote]

Actually I've said pretty much nothing, and this is a good example why. I'll bow out again now.

[Jamie_B]

[quote name='BengalBacker' timestamp='1336069568' post='1128583']
Actually I've said pretty much nothing, and this is a good example why. I'll bow out again now.
[/quote]

So you didnt throw up some video of a couple of guys at OWS spouting Communist/Socialist stuff at me a month or so ago? Guess I was confused about that.

[CincyInDC]

I guess this could go here... Eat the rich and invest in us, I say.

[quote][url="http://twitter.com/#%21/RBReich"][b]Robert Reich[/b] ‏ [s]@[/s][b]RBReich[/b] [/url]
Rom says unemp shld be 4%. I was Sec of Lab last time it was 4%. We got there by raising taxes on rich and investing in ed and infrstructre.
[/quote]

[Jamie_B]

Been listening to Reich alot lately, there is very little I disagree with him on.

[Jamie_B]

Some more Reich, the funny thing is alot of the stuff going on right now is the fault of Clinton, yet Republicans wont point that stuff out because it would mean they would have to look at the fix, and the fix is very much against their philosophies, which means they would have to admit to being wrong.


[url="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/8/former_labor_sec_robert_reich_on"]http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/8/former_labor_sec_robert_reich_on[/url]

[Jamie_B]

A good talk about why the Rich are not Job Creators.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bBx2Y5HhplI

[Jamie_B]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IzdMhdCca3Q

[BengalBacker]

Guess you were right Jamie. The Tea Party is a bunch of anarchists.

http://youtu.be/kUZfMlQg-bg

[Jamie_B]

Old news. Personally I have my suspicions that black bloc is false flag people but that's just me.

Either way Chris Hedges nails it

[url="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/"]http://www.truthdig....ccupy_20120206/[/url]

[quote]

[b] The Cancer in Occupy[/b]



[size=4][color=#000000][font=Verdana, Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc"]Black Bloc[/url] anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.[/font][/color]
[color=#000000][font=Verdana, Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the [url="http://www.heureka.clara.net/gaia/zapatistas.htm"]Zapatistas[/url]. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.[/font][/color]
[color=#000000][font=Verdana, Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. [url="http://www.johnzerzan.net/"]John Zerzan[/url], one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.[/font][/color]
[color=#000000][font=Verdana, Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In Zerzan’s now defunct magazine Green Anarchy (which survives as a [url="http://greenanarchy.webs.com/"]website[/url]) he published [url="http://www.reocities.com/kk_abacus/vb/wd7ezln.html"]an article[/url] by someone named “Venomous Butterfly” that excoriated the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN). The essay declared that “not only are those [the Zapatistas’] aims not anarchist; they are not even revolutionary.” It also denounced the indigenous movement for “nationalist language,” for asserting the right of people to “alter or modify their form of government” and for having the goals of “work, land, housing, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.” The movement, the article stated, was not worthy of support because it called for “nothing concrete that could not be provided by capitalism.”[/font][/color]
[color=#000000][font=Verdana, Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]“Of course,” the article went on, “the social struggles of exploited and oppressed people cannot be expected to conform to some abstract anarchist ideal. These struggles arise in particular situations, sparked by specific events. The question of revolutionary solidarity in these struggles is, therefore, the question of how to intervene in a way that is fitting with one’s aims, in a way that moves one’s revolutionary anarchist project forward.”[/font][/color]

[color=#000000][font=Verdana, Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][background=rgb(249, 249, 249)]Solidarity becomes the hijacking or destruction of competing movements, which is exactly what the Black Bloc contingents are attempting to do with the Occupy movement.[/background][/font][/color]

“The Black Bloc can say they are attacking cops, but what they are really doing is destroying the Occupy movement,” the writer and environmental activist [url="http://www.derrickjensen.org/"]Derrick Jensen[/url] told me when I reached him by phone in California. “If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield. Their attacks on cops are simply a means to an end, which is to destroy a movement that doesn’t fit their ideological standard.”
“I don’t have a problem with escalating tactics to some sort of militant resistance if it is appropriate morally, strategically and tactically,” Jensen continued. “This is true if one is going to pick up a sign, a rock or a gun. But you need to have thought it through. The Black Bloc spends more time attempting to destroy movements than they do attacking those in power. They hate the left more than they hate capitalists.”
“Their thinking is not only nonstrategic, but actively opposed to strategy,” said Jensen, author of several books, including “The Culture of Make Believe.” “They are unwilling to think critically about whether one is acting appropriately in the moment. I have no problem with someone violating boundaries [when] that violation is the smart, appropriate thing to do. I have a huge problem with people violating boundaries for the sake of violating boundaries. It is a lot easier to pick up a rock and throw it through the nearest window than it is to organize, or at least figure out which window you should throw a rock through if you are going to throw a rock. A lot of it is laziness.”
Groups of Black Bloc protesters, for example, smashed the windows of a locally owned coffee shop in November in Oakland and looted it. It was not, as Jensen points out, a strategic, moral or tactical act. It was done for its own sake. Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism are justified, in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” These acts, the movement argues, can never be organized. Organization, in the thinking of the movement, implies hierarchy, which must always be opposed. There can be no restraints on “feral” or “spontaneous” acts of insurrection. Whoever gets hurt gets hurt. Whatever gets destroyed gets destroyed.
There is a word for this—“criminal.”


The Black Bloc movement is infected with a deeply disturbing hypermasculinity. This hypermasculinity, I expect, is its primary appeal. It taps into the lust that lurks within us to destroy, not only things but human beings. It offers the godlike power that comes with mob violence. Marching as a uniformed mass, all dressed in black to become part of an anonymous bloc, faces covered, temporarily overcomes alienation, feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness and loneliness. It imparts to those in the mob a sense of comradeship. It permits an inchoate rage to be unleashed on any target. Pity, compassion and tenderness are banished for the intoxication of power. It is the same sickness that fuels the swarms of police who pepper-spray and beat peaceful demonstrators. It is the sickness of soldiers in war. It turns human beings into beasts.
“We run on,” Erich Maria Remarque wrote in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils: this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance.”
The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. It can use the Black Bloc’s confrontational tactics and destruction of property to justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement. Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we are finished. If we become isolated we can be crushed. The arrests last weekend in Oakland of more than 400 protesters, some of whom had thrown rocks, carried homemade shields and rolled barricades, are an indication of the scale of escalating repression and a failure to remain a unified, nonviolent opposition. Police pumped tear gas, flash-bang grenades and “less lethal” rounds into the crowds. Once protesters were in jail they were denied crucial medications, kept in overcrowded cells and pushed around. A march in New York called in solidarity with the Oakland protesters saw a few demonstrators imitate the Black Bloc tactics in Oakland, including throwing bottles at police and dumping garbage on the street. They chanted “Fuck the police” and “Racist, sexist, anti-gay / NYPD go away.”
This is a struggle to win the hearts and minds of the wider public and those within the structures of power (including the police) who are possessed of a conscience. It is not a war. Nonviolent movements, on some level, embrace police brutality. The continuing attempt by the state to crush peaceful protesters who call for simple acts of justice delegitimizes the power elite. It prompts a passive population to respond. It brings some within the structures of power to our side and creates internal divisions that will lead to paralysis within the network of authority. Martin Luther King kept holding marches in Birmingham because he knew Public Safety Commissioner [url="http://historylabs.hcpss.wikispaces.net/file/view/NY+Times+Obituary+Connor.pdf"]“Bull” Connor[/url]was a thug who would overreact.

[background=rgb(249, 249, 249)]The Black Bloc’s thought-terminating cliché of “diversity of tactics” in the end opens the way for hundreds or thousands of peaceful marchers to be discredited by a handful of hooligans. The state could not be happier. It is a safe bet that among Black Bloc groups in cities such as Oakland are[/background][i]agents provocateurs[/i][background=rgb(249, 249, 249)] spurring them on to more mayhem. But with or without police infiltration the Black Bloc is serving the interests of the 1 percent. These anarchists represent no one but themselves. Those in Oakland, although most are white and many are not from the city, arrogantly dismiss Oakland’s African-American leaders, who, along with other local community organizers, should be determining the forms of resistance.[/background]

The explosive rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement came when a few women, trapped behind orange mesh netting, were pepper-sprayed by NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. The violence and cruelty of the state were exposed. And the Occupy movement, through its steadfast refusal to respond to police provocation, resonated across the country. Losing this moral authority, this ability to show through nonviolent protest the corruption and decadence of the corporate state, would be crippling to the movement. It would reduce us to the moral degradation of our oppressors. And that is what our oppressors want.
The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects. Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant. They hear only their own voices. They heed only their own thoughts. They believe only their own clichés. And this makes them not only deeply intolerant but stupid.
“Once you are hostile to organization and strategic thinking the only thing that remains is lifestyle purity,” Jensen said. “ ‘Lifestylism’ has supplanted organization in terms of a lot of mainstream environmental thinking. Instead of opposing the corporate state, [lifestylism maintains] we should use less toilet paper and should compost. This attitude is ineffective. Once you give up on organizing or are hostile to it, all you are left with is this hyperpurity that becomes rigid dogma. You attack people who, for example, use a telephone. This is true with vegans and questions of diet. It is true with anti-car activists toward those who drive cars. It is the same with the anarchists. When I called the police after I received death threats I became to Black Bloc anarchists ‘a pig lover.’ ”
“If you live on Ogoni land and you see that [url="http://www.cleanthenigerdelta.org/index.php/whowaskensarowiwa"]Ken Saro-Wiwa[/url] is murdered for acts of nonviolent resistance,” Jensen said, “if you see that the land is still being trashed, then you might think about escalating. I don’t have a problem with that. But we have to go through the process of trying to work with the system and getting screwed. It is only then that we get to move beyond it. We can’t short-circuit the process. There is a maturation process we have to go through, as individuals and as a movement. We can’t say, ‘Hey, I’m going to throw a flowerpot at a cop because it is fun.’ ”[/size]



[/quote]

[Jamie_B]

Oh and the TP is anarchy by way of policy, these people are nothing like that.

[T-Dub]

Got a friend that lived across the street from the LA Courthouse, home to OccupyLA. By week 2, they had split into different camps arguing over whether or not weed should be allowed under whatever bylaws they were trying to draw up. This led to 2 competing "councils" or whatever they call it, both claiming to be the legitimate one & trying to shout down one another. Crime in the area skyrocketed as various drifters and opportunists began to recognize a soft target, & the LAPD started sending the homeless there to sleep. The never-ending drum circle annoyed everyone in the neighborhood, along with hours of angry diatribes against everything, or nothing in particular if you prefer, conducted through loudspeakers, as more and more people showed up to champion their own pet causes. They basically alienated everyone in the area, who were left wondering why these folks didn't take it to the financial district. A street full of people that were otherwise largely sympathetic with the basic premise of the whole thing were hanging out their windows cheering when the LAPD finally showed up in riot gear to clear them all away.

[Homer_Rice]

[quote name='T-Dub' timestamp='1337914004' post='1132499']
Got a friend that lived across the street from the LA Courthouse, home to OccupyLA. By week 2, they had split into different camps arguing over whether or not weed should be allowed under whatever bylaws they were trying to draw up. This led to 2 competing "councils" or whatever they call it, both claiming to be the legitimate one & trying to shout down one another. Crime in the area skyrocketed as various drifters and opportunists began to recognize a soft target, & the LAPD started sending the homeless there to sleep. The never-ending drum circle annoyed everyone in the neighborhood, along with hours of angry diatribes against everything, or nothing in particular if you prefer, conducted through loudspeakers, as more and more people showed up to champion their own pet causes. They basically alienated everyone in the area, who were left wondering why these folks didn't take it to the financial district. A street full of people that were otherwise largely sympathetic with the basic premise of the whole thing were hanging out their windows cheering when the LAPD finally showed up in riot gear to clear them all away.
[/quote]

[url="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/16/ows-rip/"]OWS RIP[/url]

[BengalBacker]

[quote name='Homer_Rice' timestamp='1337962103' post='1132586']
[url="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/16/ows-rip/"]OWS RIP[/url]
[/quote]

Seemed inevitable to me from the start.

[Jamie_B]

[quote name='BengalBacker' timestamp='1337990595' post='1132674']
Seemed inevitable to me from the start.
[/quote]

Ok without the drop in bombings you've been doing about this stuff. I'd love to know why.

I mean I have my thoughts, but I want to hear yours.

[T-Dub]

[quote]the American left has yet to find a vocabulary and a political stance that works in the 21st century.[/quote]

Replace "American Left" with "pretty much everyone". Sadly, the only group that seems coherent would be the religious right, and I find them repellent. Beyond that I don't have much faith in the traditional left-right model to begin with.

[BengalBacker]

[quote name='Jamie_B' timestamp='1338001103' post='1132690']
Ok without the drop in bombings you've been doing about this stuff. I'd love to know why.

I mean I have my thoughts, but I want to hear yours.
[/quote]

In a nutshell, protests like this draw the fringe and extremists. They do stupid shit that makes everyone look bad. Plus this one had no defined goal, direction or cohesiveness. The message seemed to be, rich people suck. That's been true as long as there have been rich people.

[MichaelWeston]

[quote name='BengalBacker' timestamp='1338004284' post='1132695']
In a nutshell, protests like this draw the fringe and extremists. They do stupid shit that makes everyone look bad. Plus this one had no defined goal, direction or cohesiveness. The message seemed to be, rich people suck. That's been true as long as there have been rich people.
[/quote]

I think that they were protesting the acceptance of the idea that rich people don't suck.

[Jamie_B]

[quote name='BengalBacker' timestamp='1338004284' post='1132695']
In a nutshell, protests like this draw the fringe and extremists. They do stupid shit that makes everyone look bad. Plus this one had no defined goal, direction or cohesiveness. The message seemed to be, rich people suck. That's been true as long as there have been rich people.
[/quote]

Couple things,

The protest isnt about rich people sucking, its about them buying our government and using it to maintain a level of unfairness that really prevents the upword mobility that the american dream is supposed to be about.

As Hedges suggests, and I agree, the characters like black bloc very likely have agent provocateurs in them. Let's be honest here, is it really a stretch of the imagination to think that the same people who spent billions lobbying to prevent regulations and continue to fight them, would spend a little more to make OWS seem less than legitimate? Is it a stretch when the [url="http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/financial-giants-put-new-york-city-cops-on-their-payroll/"]police force has been put on their payroll[/url], in the name of privatization because a certain segment of our society thinks its a good idea to shrink the size of government!

No I think the 1%, and I use the term to mean the corrupt among them because not all are, couldnt co-opt the movement like they did the tea party so they used other means to bring it down.

Sadly the issues they are angry about are very real and delegitimizing them because were "afraid of socialism" (as if the majority of these people want that) because the propaganda campaign waged by the Glenn Beck's of the world all in the name of "liberty" (as if) are going to ensure that we dont address these problems and what will be inevitable is they will happen again, and they will happen even bigger and hurt even more people next time, and many of those people would have been the ones that supported the 1% because they were "job creators" (which is a lie). Those people are not fighting for liberty, they are being used like sheep led to the slaughter....their own slaughter.

[Jamie_B]

Also if you dont think we havent fixed these issues yet, just take a look at what happened at JP Morgan recently.

[Jamie_B]

[img]http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lspzkpclc21qf1n39o1_500.jpg[/img]

[|OneHeartBeat|]

Hopefully, liberal extremism will never take hold in this country.

[Homer_Rice]

[quote name='OneHeartBeat' timestamp='1338431860' post='1133235']
Hopefully, liberal extremism will never take hold in this country.
[/quote]
And if we're really lucky slavery will make a comeback...

[MichaelWeston]

[quote name='OneHeartBeat' timestamp='1338431860' post='1133235']
Hopefully, liberal extremism will never take hold in this country.
[/quote]

How would you define liberal extremism?