The "Occupy Wall Street" movement is great. Reminds me of the 60s with civil rights and anti-war protests. I was hoping someday this generation would wake up and protest the greed and corruption of the banking system, world economics and self-serving government. Maybe some good songs will come out of it.

"I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind"

And as usual, people are carte blanche supporting something without first having gained the knowledge behind it.

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan

And as usual, people are carte blanche supporting something without first having gained the knowledge behind it. Occupy Wall Street is doing the right thing but for the WRONG reasons. If people understood the Federal Reserve they would understand that capitalism is not the enemy here, the Fed is.

capitalism is not the enemy here, the Fed is.

Half these kids don't even know what they're "protesting." I understand that people are angry and fed up, and I'm all for a peaceful demonstration, but what's the end game here?

As unreasonable as some kids among the protesters may be, at least it's a start.

The problem is that investors, banks and large corporations have gained so much power over the last decades, they undermine democracy. Directly (donations to election campaigns) and more important indirectly by uncontrolled manipulation of the financial system.

LeroyJ....your reference to "Ohio", coincidentally, on XM radio today I heard a live, acoustic Neil Young singing "Ohio". Blew this old hippie away.
"Call out the instigators,
'cause there's something in the air."....who remembers Thunderclap Newman?

Bloomberg is flat wrong, and he doubtless knows it but hopes you won't notice: New Yorkers have no right to be free of any disruption from the peaceful but disruptive free-speech actions of their fellow citizens, and how New Yorkers lawfully and peacefully assert their First Amendment rights is actually not up to him. There is a higher authority than Michael Bloomberg, or than the NYPD, or even than the guy in the white shirt who signaled to his colleagues to handcuff me earlier this week when I stood peacefully on a sidewalk, obeying what I had confirmed to be the law: and that higher authority is called the Constitution of the United States of America.

The chart Lilo posts demonstrates one of the flaws of the occupiers. Their emphases (see, "The 99 Percent Declaration") on taxation on the one hand and increased government spending on the other inevitably feeds the government beast that's currently collapsing in Europe. Thus, they can't gain allies on the other side of the chart.

Both big government and big business (and big education and big foundations) can be reformed without embracing the sort of spending policies that are already proven to be a failure in other countries.

Occupy a fucking job. I'm sick of these people already.

Come on snow!

Two brief notes on the alleged occupations of streets, Wall and otherwise.

1.

Things are starting to get the tiniest bit messy. Good.

Big cheers to those who know that's what it means and takes. And to the messy spread of it to other places, to other "issues" (read: capital, state, and - for old time's sake - church; jail, immigration, unpaid labor, policing, foreclosure, access to medicine) that have nothing to do with "Wall Street greed," as none of this has much to do with that in the first place.

Scorn and loathing to those wee katechons who restrain, who make nice, who tell you to sit down. Whose breath reeks of the word peace as if they've long been drinking from the toilet.

2. But a brief comment, one that applies not to those who got picked up on that bridge but to a whole lot of what has been said about this?

No one should not let oneself "get" arrested. There is nothing sexy, useful, or sacrificial about doing so. It is a waste of legal fees, time, and zip ties, and it renders protest recognizable in an old-fashioned, familiar, and therefore irrelevant way. (And not "old-fashioned" in the Barcelona 1936 way, for example, which would be quite another story.)

If one thinks that 700 people getting arrested makes a splash, try seeing what happens when 700 people don't get arrested, despite police efforts to the contrary. See what happens when a video is released of forty people un-arresting someone successfully. See how that will change the stakes in the way that a mass arrest never can.

But if you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store and use the cash to buy needed materials for those protesting. That is literally more useful. And hell, you may even get away with it.

Do not sit there and wait for it. Do not listen to others who tell you to do so. If you see someone people to do so, shout that person down.

[Case in point, someone like Naomi Wolf.



"please protesters, I can't say this enough: DO NOT MARCH. SIT DOWN or stand with linked arms. DO NOT MARCH. I have studied protests for the last fifty years -- the ones that ended in state violence (they always win) are short and the MARCH. the ones that brought down regimes are LONG and STOP TRAFFIC and involve SITTING DOWN OR STANDING STILL WITH LINKED ARMS. They take patience. "

Well... In response to her, adopting her preferred typographical choices for ease of comprehension:

DO NOT LISTEN TO LIBERALS as their historical moment has passed and CONDEMNED THEM TO IRRELEVANCE. Stop traffic, yes, but there are many things that stop traffic other than your own BODY. They are highly worth considering. Many of them may be found in or directly alongside those roads on which the traffic moves. It's what we who have "studied protests" typically call BARRICADES.

We know the Gandhi-ish examples she likely has in mind. Those bear no connection to the state of affairs in the US today. One shouldn't confuse recent instances of "protests without high death counts" and "peaceful protests": they are not the same thing. A single example refresher on said point ("Unlike previous protests, there was no large scale police crackdown. The parliament was partially burned during the protests.").

And if she thinks that what happened in Egypt, or the Arab Spring more broadly, was "peaceful" or related to "SITTING DOWN OR STANDING STILL", she has simply no sense of what went down, the risks people took, and the steps they took (i.e. sharing information, choosing not to just "stand still" or "sit down" and take it, not going back to work) that made those risks worth taking.



And in case our historical memory is as SHIT as Wolf's, let's recall that the "protests" that "brought down regimes" recently, or come anywhere near doing so, are ones that a) threaten to, or do, bring their economies to a halt, b) cease to draw a clear line between the political, the social, and the economic, c) defend themselves, d) do not sit down and wait for the very state violence you mention, e) recognize that insofar it is serious, it will end in state violence one way or the other, and f) leave behind that entire terrain of "march", "sit down", and "protest" and begin doing things closer to what the words "occupy", "assemble," "riot," "get very seriously organized," "barricade," and "halt" actually mean.

P.S. And remember, it's we're gonna run these streets tonight, not we're gonna stand very still with our arms linked on these streets tonight. It's the streets will run red. Not that the streets will sit down, red.]

Regardless of personal sympathies, I very much doubt anyone on this board belongs to the 1%.