Wired State

The NYT is Minimizing Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Beliefs in Occupy Wall Street

Joseph Berger of the the New York Times is trying to minimize the obvious anti-semitism and anti-Israeli sentiments on display in the Occupy Wall Street movement -- and trying to discredit the claim by attaching it to conservatives who have raised the issue.

I would agree that the OWS marches only show occasional antisemitic sentiments -- and anti-Israel sentiments that yes, I can distinguish from antisemitism (and yes, they are both visible). There is a larger ideological problem here of the sectarian left and the hatred of Israel which the Times seems to want to ignore.

The NYT makes it seem like only right-wingers are raising the clear anti-Israel viewerpoints and downright anti-semitism on display. The Times in general has been protective of OWS and not very critical for reasons that aren't entirely clear -- that so much prominence and credence has been given to freelancer Natasha Lennard s part of that disturbing bias the NYT is showing on these events. She is instigating the Occupation as much as "covering" it -- and actively helps in the planning and actions, including at the Brooklyn Bridge.

The conservative magazine Commentary has called out the anti-semitism outbursts in various occupations around the country, notably the one where this black female activist actually called for Jews to be run out of the country (!).  Glenn Beck picked up this story -- and of course, with his own hateful broadcasts about Soros, he doesn't have any credibililty on this subject. Even so, the incident did take place, and it'd disturbing how much OWS operatives and the Times are quick to dismiss it as an outlier.

Berger should read the leaked emails and see the views of people like Ryan, as I wrote here. The leaked emails show OWS not as they try to put a manipulated face forward, but as they are when they think no one was watching, when they were talking among themselves. And there, they articulate what I think of as the "Durban ideology" associated with the dreadful World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. The key points of Durban's antisemites were that "Israel is an apartheid state" (simply a new version of the "Zionism is racism" canard) and that racism is an inherent feature of capitalism and is only solved by overthrowing capitalism and installing socialism.

In the Times piece, we see the ideology of multiculturalism or what I think of as "the Soviet nationalities policy" -- Jews aren't people who should have a country or a movement to return to a land they claim; Jews aren't people who should stand up to Palestinian terrorists abetted by Arab anti-Israeli forces, but they should just have ethnicity and religion in the American sense -- interesting and fun customs.

"A sukkah, a makeshift hut, was erected to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot," says Berger.

This is what a professor of mine at St. Michael's used to call the "costumes and colourful objects" approach to culture -- it is kind of patronizing. Come to think of it, he was Jewish, and I believe he went to live in Israel in retirement, God bless him! He was so right -- costumes and colourful objects can be celebrated, but no nations, no countries, please. Says Berger, in denial of any "flashes" of anti-semitism he finds:

But the protests have also, on occasion, had a distinctly Jewish flavor: The encampment has coincided with the busy Jewish holiday season and has witnessed, in its midst or on its edges, a crowded Kol Nidre service on Yom Kippur, festive dancing with a scroll on Simchat Torah on Thursday night, and the sukkah.

It's strange, how he writes about this -- ascribing the mere fact that New York itself had a visible busy Jewish  holiday season anyway "on the edges" of Zuccotti park, and this is somehow to the Occupation's credit. Huh?

I'm sure they had a good time with the festive dancing with a scroll on Simchat Torah.

But do they think that there should be a two-state solution? Do they think all concessions should be made by the Israelis? Do they think that Israelis should give up settlements before Palestinians give up terrorist attacks? Do they think the occupation is "racist" and that Israel is a "racist" state?

In fact, some of them do as we know from the leaked emails, and in fact, even some of the Jews present in the occupation may be so critical of Israel that their fellow Jews who are more conservative may find them anti-Israel. Yes, we call get it that criticizing Israel is not necessarily anti-semitism. But the sheer obsession about Israel; the hateful notion that there is some deliberate state policy against "people of colour"  -- that *is* anti-semitism, too, although its practitioners will vehemently deny it. (And yes, the OWS activist actually called the Palestinians "people of colour"; and implied the Israelis are not.)

There's a problem here with Berger's politics in any event -- he wishes to ascribe things to OWS that just aren't there:

The protesters, clustered together in a kind of ad hoc Athenian democracy in the canyons of Lower Manhattan, firmly deny that their demonstrations against corporate greed and the political power of banks exhibit antagonism that singles out Jews.

Athenian democracy?! Is he on drugs?! He should look at the transcripts of the General Assemblies on line, and read my blog of yesterday about the Bluestockings discussion, where the communists and socialists and anarchists were all on parade with coercive and collectivist viewpoints.

“You’re going to get a few wackos,” said Aaron Moses Miller, 25, a slender, unemployed man from Ridgewood, Queens, who had been in the park for 16 days. “You can’t help it in a population of this size.”

Mr. Miller, who is Jewish, said that he had not seen the man holding the anti-Semitic signs, but said: “If I had seen him, I would have said something to him. My name is Aaron Moses Miller.”

Well, I have something to say this to Aaron Moses Miller myself: it's awfully funny that you're in OWS, you're 25 years old, and you have absolutely no social media footprint. Nothing in Google (except dead people with the same name). Who are you? In fact, is this really your name?

Now, Berger interviews Jeff Smith -- and we learn that there is a press team for OWS, even though they fall all over themselves explaining that they don't have leaders, they don't have demands, and everyone speaks for themselvse:

Jeff Smith, 41, part of the press team for Occupy Wall Street, assailed those who he said ascribed the views of one sign-holder to the entire movement.

“To put someone out there to say, ‘This is who the group is,’ is about as dishonest as you can be,” Mr. Smith, who is also Jewish, said. “It’s yellow journalism.”

No, Jeff. It's not "yellow journalism." It's reporting on the antisemitism that is present in hard-line sectarian leftist movements that are in and around OWS. The black woman screaming about running the Jews out of the US isn't an isolated case; she's symptomatic of Nation of Islam and other kinds of black sectarian groups that do in fact hate Jews and loathe Israel and rant about Israel-as-apartheid-state.

Israel does not have state policies of racism, whatever individual acts of discrimination occur -- it's wrong to claim that it does. This is an ideological problem, and one that Berger doesn't seem to want to dig too deeply into.

When I attended the Times Square operation by OWS, I saw one large sign that depicted Bernanke with a Jewish stereotype of a hooked nose devil -- it was a hate sign that was unmistakeable. I saw a few "Occupy Wall Street, not Gaza" type of signs which are mild compared to what you can see at International ANSWER actions, as we all know.

I don't believe the center of gravity of most people coming to these marches is anti-semitic or anti-Israel, but there is definitely a distinct leftist sectarian tilt, and that leftist sectarian ideology does run to demonizing Israel for sure. And that needs to be confronted, and confronting it is not only some conservative project, it should be a liberal task.

David Brooks of the Times, their token conservative columnist, was the only writer I've seen to call out a past article of Kalle Lasn, publisher of Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that sparked OWS, about why people won't admit they are Jewish.  This article is no longer one you can find at Adbuster's website -- either they scrubbed it or it is now just hard to find and the URLs you see directly linking to it here and there now lead you to a front page with new material, and you can't find this article.

So you have to go on discussion forums to find it here and here. From that article, you see that Lasn has a "hit list" of 50 neo-cons that he says are all Jews and all influencing US policy and all "Likudniks" that are keeping the US in thrall to a conservative Jewish leadership.

Lasn, 69, himself fled Estonia years ago and therefore comes from the part of the world still steeped in what I call "the Slavic-Jewish wars" -- also known as World War II.

BTW, study some of the Ad-busters articles, and you see that the goal is to smash consumerism and corporations, and install an eco-communal life. Again, I don't know what to call this brand of ideology except technocommunism -- the idea that this time, with technology, why, we can get communism right at last -- and save the planet.

Ultimately, when we keep examining each person speaking out or organizing in the OWS group, we will see that the OWS ideology contains within it a preference for Palestine, even with its terrorism, and an anomisity to Israel. Just like the hatred of banks and corporations, there is also an exasperation, if not anger with Obama and the US Administration for not pressuring Israel more to change. But those politics, while they have their liberal manifestations in lobbying groups in the US, do come out of the Durban ideology maintained by Cuba and other illiberal states that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic and therefore anti-Israel.

Those who care about liberal values and human rights should keep probing the true OWS attitude toward Israel and Jews and not be satisfied with a propagandistic distraction of a Jewish man dancing a traditional dance in the square, as if we can make room for the Fiddler on the Roof, but we can't make room for the Jewish state of Israel and its security.

 

 

 

"We're all comrades, right?" The Socialists and Communists in Occupy Wall Street

I continue to marvel at the assmunches on Google+ and elsewhere that deny that socialists and communists are at the core of the Occupy Wall Street experience. Hello! Of course they are!

Why do people deny what is obvious and true? Part of it is the old stealth-socialist tactics, of course -- deny, deny, deny. Pretend you are just "starting a national conversation" (I've been hearing them say that for decades).  Pretend you are just doing  "community organizing" and just "working on single issues". Old, old story, and now visible in the White House with the Radical-in-Chief, the Community-Organizer-in-Chief -- and look where that is getting us!

The premise of Schoen's survey is that Obama -- David Plouffe at the White House -- is doing the wrong thing trying to embrace the OWS gang because they are too far to the left and more extreme than most Americans are comfortable with. And he is absolutely right about that.

Most Americans, even if unhappy about "Wall Street" don't want to overthrow the government, seize other people's property in riots and revolution and install "people's soviets".

Yet these people do.

It defies the mind how the lefty blogs like Daily Kos can get away with fetishing one part of one answer "only 4 percent want radical redistribution of wealth" -- and miss the glaring, looming larger picture: *31 percent of those polled were willing to use violence to get their way".

That violence isn't being deployed to "have a national conversation" or tweak taxes on capital gains, people. That violence is designed to *radically redistribute wealth*. Like the answers to a dozen other questions that mean the same thing -- install the "progressive agenda"; put in a flat tax; overthrow congress; install direct democracy. All of these are ways and means to the same end -- radical redistribution. First, of course, they will help themselves -- all avante-gardes do!

Now, you don't have to listen to me about what OWS really is -- just listen to OWS operatives themselves!

If you don't want to hear it from me, hear it from Stephen Benavides. At first glance in the leaked emails, he seems like just a concerned labour guy from a trade union with a rather anodyne and feel-good proposal for the demands that prove so elusive for these fleabaggers, as some are calling them. Stephen Benavides is from United Steel Workers Local #9479  and North Texas Association of Public Employees. What could be more typical of a union worker in our country? "Progressive" but that's it, right? Nothing more than that, right?

Here's Stephen's agenda proposal in the leaked emails:

    * Engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy;
    * Exercising personal and collective responsibility;
    * Recognizing individuals’ inherent privilege and the influence it has on all interactions;
    * Empowering one another against all forms of oppression;
    * Redefining how labor is valued;
    * The sanctity of individual privacy;
    * The belief that education is human right; and
    * Endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source.

Most of this vaguely-worded stuff would be endorsable by just about anyone, left or right -- and that's the idea. But of course packed within each phrase is a canned Marxist-Leninist cant.

How do I know that? Because I look at where *else* Stephen Benavides is:

On his Facebook profile; marching on the communists' global holiday May 1st; and on Facebook pages -- Stephen is in the cult-like International Socialist Organization (ISO), the publisher of Workers' World who have flocked to these marches like flies on honey, trying to claim them as their own, and in part succeeding. Since college, when evidently he was recruited and became an enthusiastic member of the ISO, he has imbibed the comrades' line -- and now he spouts it and uses the stealth tactics.

ISO *is* a cult. Read what other socialists say about it:

All of this is par for the course in most "Marxist-Leninist" organizations. And the ISO certainly does romanticize the years of Leninism under Lenin in Russia, just as it condemns the years following Lenin's death and the eventual exile of Leon Trotsky. While the ISO might admit that "mistakes were made" by the Bolsheviks before Stalin's rise to power, they are all said to be purely the result of "objective conditions"; no basic problems with Leninist thought or practice are ever acknowledged. The ISO claims to maintain the "democratic centralist" mode of organization, in which internal debate is ostensibly unrestricted, but once the entire group votes on a particular question, all members are required to defend that position in public as the position of the group. In ISO practice, this means that dissidents must voice a "line" which they do not believe, lest they be denounced as "petit bourgeois dilettantes" by the line-enforcers. Those unable to follow the line either leave or are kicked out with due haste, hence the ISO's high membership turnover rate.

All a known quantity; all awful stuff -- the ISO has always justified the Stalin terror which is why no respectable socialist I ever knew would have anything to do with them. They have always been a sectarian outfit as well, with splits and turnover just as explained. But this is Stephen's ideological home, and he's a key organizer of OWS.

So take another look at his agenda then, through the lens of what you know ISO to be:

Now you realize "collective responsibility" is collectivism, forcing people into collectives.

Now you realize "direct and transparent participatory democracy" is just an overthrow of representative democracy by elections, and the installation by force of soviets, or organs of revolutionaries taking over the state. Transparent, sure -- transparent Bolshevism.

Redefining how labour is valued? Um, the labour theory of value a la Marx, or what, comrades? Free health care -- sure, we get that. And, surprise, surprise, open source.

Empower one another in all forms of oppression to do...what? Follow the hardcore agenda of ISO.

But this is a day at the beach compared to some of what else is there at the OWS.

I really had to goggle at this gal named Jodi Dean in Geneva, NY (Hobart College, active in the APSA, with a decidedly mixed rating noted for her bias) -- Geneva, NY is near where I grew up as a child, in Penn Yan, NY (for us, going to Geneva was going to the "big city" where they had a shopping mall LOL). It's funny to me to see this college where teachers who grew up on farms or vineyards went to in order to staff our country schools now sporting a wild-eyed communist like that of the sort that even would embarass the Soviet Union where I studied.

Jodi isn't just a fangirl of Zizek, the Soviet Who Got Left Behind after the collapse of the USSR. She pushes him even further. She's written 10 books! Mon Dieux! Count the silverware!

Because she wants to take people's stuff -- and use violence to right the wrongs that she thinks exist in society -- as seen from her bucolic Finger Lakes Region podunk college.

You can see it in the film where she is speaking about her new book, The Communist Horizon, which is a curious American Ostalgie:  ""Communism didn't end in 1989. Instead, the communist horizon is our horizon," she intones.

But let's go over to see her with a group of other lefties -- anarchists, socialists, communists, clueless hangers-on, in a meeting at the radical leftist New York bookstore Bluestockings, where there is a debate about OWS with some of the OWS operatives and the editor of an obscure lefty online magazine called Jacobin -- I guess they believe in the guillotine?

This is two hours of your life you'll  never get back, but I listened while I did some other chores and here are my notes. You can see the list of panelists at this link -- I'm not going to take the time to identify who said what -- what's important to look at are the ideas:

"engage with the state and ultimately take it over" -- says the young lads. For all the world, these nerdy short guys with the crinkly hair and heavy glasses look like 1950s beatniks. But they are in earnest about their anacho-socialist agenda.

"over half the population supports it" claims OWS -- yet that's simply not true. The Daily News poll shows 6 percent support it and 94 percent don't. I don't see any credible poll finding *half* supporting it -- and if they knew that supporting OWS mean supporting radical revolution -- they wouldn't. The poll that finds *New Yorkers* supporting it in the amount of 67 percent has to take into consideration that New Yorkers are far more liberal, and vote predominantly Democracy, than many other areas of the country.

A young man says OWS is a "Rorshach blot". I'll say. The liberal media is particularly adept at pretending to see a mass, mainstream movement in this collection of oddballs, goofs and hardcore socialist operatives.

"A huge percent describe themselves as anarchists," says OWS.

But...they have a debate. "Take over state or not?"  Well, gosh. Let's hope they just keep talking. We don't need these people taking over the state! Maybe they will get drunk, hungry, and lice-ridden like Guy Debord and friends in 1968 and...go home.

Now Jodi rises up -- and I'll identify her here because she's definitely the most ominous of the bunch -- and she rebels against the younger participants in OWS saying "I can only speak for myself." This was something I heard them say too. They've internalized this from the cadres who are trying to keep it pretend-fluid. But Jodi, with all the directness that provincial Upstate New York can bring to this task, says "it hurts understanding collectivism" when you say "I can only speak for myself."

Sigh.

She lays out her vision of OSW as the "opening of a collective space and a collective venture"

Exactly. What I've been saying all along. Bureaucratic-collectivist start-up -- a venture that even has its first round of funding (Should we call it series-C for communism?) from venture communists.

"As long as people speak in these individualist terms, that collective side of it gets lost," says Jodi. I'll say!

"post structuralist thought"

"the miracle of what's going on"

"The creation of a collectivity"

"Come to discuss the potential of communism as the contemporary name for left political and  economic aspiration. What possibilities does it 0pen up? What aspects of our current conjunction
suggest the continued force of communism as a universal and egalitarian ideal?"

"3 branches of government and parliamentary democracy are all to blame for our problems, they
prevent radical democracy democracy cannot achieve equality; Obama a "crazy deception"
denounces "self-organizing" of anarchism; raising chicken is "nice community things" that
don't change the system; pre-17th century -- stuck in small agrarian communities
no airplanes or vaccines

larger attack on state for 30 years -- neoliberalism
"centralized planning is wrong"
fetishizing of rights
the loss of communism as a shared vocabulary

not old-style authoritarian Bolshevik but not so loose they can't accomplish anything

"take over the state and change things"

"same process anarchists have used for years, and finally working"

"journal article on socialism, union marches, nonprofits, all far less threatening to state than occupation -- occupation as tactic -- came from ultra left communists writing "occupy everything" "demand nothing" comes from this tradition and it's working

Interesting -- the OWS say that "occupy everything" came from ultra-leftists at the University of California

But...disagreement on this take about the origins

"sit down strike invented by unionists decades ago, not just kids in UCLA"

"tactical victory piles up and in the end you have a revo -- but I just don't see it

"undermine neoliberal ideological hegemony"

"powers that be are everywhere and all our coded relations" -- Natasha Lennard -- ah, and a word on this gal. The OWS propagandists have made huge hay over the notion that "A New York Times reporter was even arrested" as part of their shtick about the "evil brutal police".

But she isn't a New York Times reporter, as in a full-time credentialed staff person. She's a freelancer who has never written anything for the Times except 3 articles on the occupation. Before that she was at Politico and Salon (surprise, surprise). Perhaps she was too far out for them. She likes to say "fuck" a lot and speaks in a British accent so that has most of the young men in the room staring at her mouth in awe. But she's spouting arrant anarchist bolshie clap-trap. I marvel that the Times could keep her on this assignment when she is so biased -- they don't have any reporters that can cover this without also *instigating it*?! Because *instigating it* is exactly what she is doing, and now I see if she got arrested, it wasn't by accident because she was a journalist covering it -- she is definitely not playing that role AT ALL -- it's because she went in the road and occupied the bridge as a political act.

Jodi again -- "Food, water, transportation are "common" not controlled by the market
"a set of spheres that are common" -- so that's how she gets to communism in our lives by declaring that certain goods that are public are somehow communalized.

people want jobs -- don't want a Foucaltian experience, someone comments sagely.

"How do you know what they want you aren't talking to them"

"Take the banker out of his fucking tower and string him up in the public square"

(Gosh, that's awful)

"Not just lefties but 99 percent"

"a directly antagonistic movement"

"capital can't do it any more, capital can't accommodate everyone, it's broken, coding people and telling them to fall in line; politics needs division" -- Jodi again, instructing the workers.

"some kind of common system"

"some ONE you're again not just some THING" -- introduce that class hatred and personalize it Jodi, go, go, go!

Appropriately, someone now raises the problem of the "leading vanguard". Given that Jodi is trying to play that role of educating and instructing the workers, it's inevitable. Can we have a social movement without hardened cadres who "know better" run it, as we've had for the last 50-100 years?

Guess not.

"The movement is better off pushing in a communist direction"

Sigh.

An older woman, a lefty, gets up and tries to say it simpler:

"we want to participate in decisions that affect our lives"

"what is the state"?

"what kind of relations constitute the state"
"separated, alienated we"

She seems to be saying that we shouldn't see the state as somehow unapproachable and unoccupiable, because anyone of us can demand to participate in it.

Not so Jodi.

Here's the money quote:

"Rich guy capitalist, you don't agree, so we have to take your stuff."

Paging Fred Wilson. You want this gal from an upstate college to come take your stuff?!

There's some discussion then as to whether college should be free. Should that be a demand?

"Free college is a reading room in a prison," says Jodi.

"what we really don't want is capitalism itself"

"I would love to see some sort of revolution," says somebody.

"How to scale that up," asks the business observer dude.

Some younger ones begin to question. Be in assemblies endlessly?

"you have to be managing everything all the time...all the risk is on you...I don't want to do that"

You see how totalitarianism happens when you hear a young man cry like that, whining that he has to make decisions and shoulder responsibilities. It's actually a good thing to "manage everything all the time" and have "all the risk on you". But he wants cradle-to-grave socialism, like I guess all "mass man" supposedly want - except not in this country.

How did he get this way? Short answer: Mom working, Dad unavailable, raised on the Internet.

And here the OWS operative tells you like it is. So you don't have to hear it from me:

"it's a small group of people who are doing it"

"the same guy who in every article is quoted"

"it's a small group making all the decisions"

"the GA just go along with whatever"

Exactly!

"if we do overthrow something and have to get organized.. then what?

"spokescouncil"

"anarchists brought "a charge" to the movement that the old left hasn't -- all the energy comes from
the anarchists; anarchists are incredibly condescending to old leftists for reasons that seem insipid or impatient"

"We're all comrades, right?"

"all about the practice, all about the site, all about the process"

"real-time

anarchist  gets up to talk and says frankly -- "I don't want to take over the state, but smash it utterly"

Critique of Wisconsin:

"trade union bureaucrats didn't call a general strike"

"but instead focused on getting Democrats elected"

Now, some soul-searching:

"what happens when the occupation ends"

"when tumult and shouting of ecstatic moment dies; who calls future mobilization"

young man who admires Frances Fox Piven (but don't tell Glenn Beck that!)

How to keep OWS going? He's confident he can do it with "a week's worth of recruiting at Brooklyn College"

Others groan at the word "recruitment".

"is outreach a better world," he says. "go to institutions where people are located"

"I will not reveal what I am," Ms. Transparency and Accountability says from the back of the room *chuckles*. But she's fairly coherent.

"stop philosophizing," she tells everyone.

"allow for productive disagreements so movement can reflect upon its actions"

"the idea that representative democracy is authoritarian -- no, it's not an authoritarian system,
cops coming in and arresting us is authoritarian" -- that from the helpful and smart older socialist who has at least some common sense

"not everything is friendly" -- says somebody about OWS. I'll say. A guy started rebelling at all this "people of colour" stuff by insisting that he, as a white man, was a person of colour too, and that they needed to end this obsession with skin colour and just come together. EVERYBODY groaned and booed him -- so hidebound are they in the politically-correct identity politics.

"We want the commons and we want to run things collectively...but we don't have people who want
that yet"

Um, no, kids, you don't.

"to manage a commons collectively"

"insurrection hard left and communists demands have not been made that alienate either group

"reorganizing society communally" (euphemism of the above)

NYT Natasha now rants about "New Labor/Clinton type of PR"

Someone asks -- look these are all socialist aims -- extremists -- an agenda
but...how to get the center involved?

Suggestion (from me): er, drop all this Marxist-Leninist bullshit, maybe?

"point was to get the center -- awakened consciousness"

"convince that system is broken"

"spokes on a wheel, not spokesperson"

"left is boring," says a young man. You got that right!

Jodi brings them back to the main point: "are there going to be more actions that are violent"

"has there been any?"

What's communism without violence!

There hasn't been any violence yet, but is it necessary? she asks rhetorically.

There are possible outcomes, she explains:

-- inviting cop violence
-- doing some kinds of violence -- provocation,

--destruction of property
-- keep non-violence and work with moveon.org
-- work with democratic party

"but...why divide? Can't the movement have all of it going on at once?"

"It might take actions against property so people don't get bored with it"

"more friendly toward differences"

"first nations critique -- on occupied line"

"tone at OWS less argumentative"

"don't believe in the premature reconciliation of differences" -- says an old socialist hack.

OWS participant explains:

lack of demands:

o allows more to come together
o prevents cooptation by Democrats

"opened up a new possibility in the world that we didn't see 2 years ago" says Jodi.

The greed -- the terrible greed -- of these people with their sectarian, hateful views. They can't wait to take power. They can't wait to smash stuff. They can't wait to take people's stuff.

Bolsheviks. And you don't need me to tell you this. Just listen to them talk themselves.

The Wrong Hands

Continuing on with my thesis that Second Life is being used to prototype radical antiglobalist movements and the Occupy Wall Street anarchist collective (or bureaucratic-collectivist start-up, my preferred term, to capture the cadre nature of the operation and its entrepreneurial "innovative" start-up qualities -- it even has $300,000 of first-round venture capital now lol):

Compare and contrast this site of The Wrong Hands with a logo with a radical revolutionary fist, and then compare OWS TV -- the same kind of radical revolutionary fist. At the same angle, a very similar drawing, and similar fists. Of course not exact; of course not quite the same colour. But damn similar:

The Wrong Hands logo in Second Life

Occupy Wall Street TV -- NY Logo Prototype

Kinda creepy, eh? When you look at it the first time and think about online life and how it occurs...and how it crosses over to real life...

Now, der, I totally get it that people making radical movements tend to chose clenched fists as their logo -- the clenched fist is an old socialist symbol, so online socialists tend to reach for this old meme (in fact, the woman who designed this logo for OWS TV is even chastised by one of the comrades that she ought not to use old 20th century memes that connote with these past movements but make something simple and generic).

And herr, the likelihood of this woman making the logo in upstate New York who comes down to Zuccotti occasionally, and Tux Winkler, the name of an SL avatar who lives in London or wherever he is in the UK, having anything to do with each other is slim -- maybe even impossible.

But...perhaps they *do* have some one or six degrees of separation somewhere, and that place could be the prototyping of Second Life or the Anonymous feeding troughs like 4chan and IRC channels and pastebins that Tux Winkler, believed to be a LulzSec operative in SL, do in fact share.

It's always worth probing the hypothesis. It doesn't disturb me that it might be "far-fetched" or "unlikely" or that to pose this question means people will screech about tinhats, and paranoia, and needing meds, and having to get out more. When you have memes tossed around and you find similar memes showing up, it's ok to ask questions. It's ok to compare logos and the ideologies they imply and connote.

In the same way, the appearance of pink-suited and pink-bereted security in The Pink Hands, the "radical feminist" offshoot of The Wrong Hands, in the virtual world of Second Life, and the appearance of pink-clad and pink-bereted security in meetings of Occupy Wall Street in different cities, maybe only tenuously related or may have some DNA link somewhere or some one degree of IRC separation. I put it out there to think about.

The pink-clad security folks in the OWS video I wrote about before are definitely not "Guardian Angels" and Hypatia and others are totally wrong. Guardian Angels come from a white, conservative Catholic Polish-American named Curtis Sliwa who wanted to maintain order against mainly black urban delinquents during a time when it seemed you could not ride the subway or buses without risking assault or robbery. As someone who was assaulted and robbed in that era as I tried to climb a bus at night in Jersey City (and had the bus driver drive away when he saw a gang of a dozen youths descend on the scene!), I totally get their motivation. Don't forget this was the era also of "I have five dollars for each of you" and Bernard Goetz. The Guardian Angels wore red and had crosses and berets with their own insignia and did not have politics anything like OWS or symbols like OWS. So it's a competely wrong hypothesis.

The pink berets that OWS is using as security came about because berets, ever since the famous Green Berets and the Vietnam War and the song about them, connote elite security power. We get that. So the pink berets are to connote power and security but with a kind of LGBT flavour and tilt, movement power, not state power. The OWS people in pink are not related at all to the Guardian Angels in colour, style, or ideology. The Guardian Angels are in New York City; the video I have here is from Atlanta. There aren't Guardian Angels in Atlanta. Meanwhile, the OWS talk themselves about those in pink who are keeping order and you can see it in their videos. They are part of the order-keepers in this group which they put in place because they suffered their own problems of theft and sexual assault with all the street people they attracted and their own loons.

The people who made The Pink Hands in SL may have nothing to do with the OWS security pink panthers. But...maybe they do. Again, maybe they are only separated by one person on a friendship list, or go and feed at the same IRC channel troughs or 4chan or ebaumsworld or whatever -- memes are memes for a reason, because they spread through social media. And tracing them and seeing where they show up and asking questions about how they get prototyped is perfectly legitimate, necessary, and hardly something to dismiss by cries of "tinfoil!". If you don't have people who see patterns in society; if you don't have people willing to ask questions about patterns people claim to see, you donot  have an open society and a society able to remedy its ills. So I ask the questions about what I see.

I've written a fair amount on The Wrong Hands in the nearly two years this saga has gone on, at my Second Life blog and you can read about it on the JLU site. What does it boil down to?

Some basic facts and theses:

1. The founder Jim Korpov (who went by many different variations of that name "Korpov" even "KorpovKorpov" and who speaks a kind of strange Google-translated Russian and puts Russian phrases on his profile or on the TWH group, is a hands-on, egregious, serial griefer. He and his band of e-thugs in various groups of b/tards or groups using my RL picture named Prokofy this or that, or various other groups pretending even to be fighting griefers, would endlessly trespass on my sims deliberately, heckling and harassing me and my tenants, spewing particles, putting around dead chickens, crashing the sims, etc. etc.

This is all well known, and it's why Korpov and his other little friends like Robble Rubble are permabanned, and many times over, on various alts.

2. The group itself of some 30 people was never disbanded, but the Lindens know full well that the founder, the founder's subsequent alts, and people like Rubble were all serial, systematic, conspiratorial (i.e. group-planning and intentional) griefers.

Why didn't the Lindens remove the group? Because they may need it to serve as a magnet to collect new alts and see what they do; because the Lindens are hippie libertarian techcommies and have trouble disbanding groups on principle. I've often pointed out that you can hold to the value of the right to association and assembly, but once a group begins to have 10 percent, 25 percent, 50 percent or more of its members involved in crime, why, it's a criminal conspiracy and you shut it down -- and the Lindens even arrive at that conclusion with these persistent "under the radar groups" pretending not to be griefers yet aiding and abetting griefers.

3. TWH were furious that the JLU had the goods on them, tracked them and abuse reported them, using inworld data and whatever they scraped from open sources on the Internet. They hated that because it would lead to their banning -- duh.

Now, I don't favour vigilantism or support the JLU. I think people should police their own land and fake police groups online aren't needed to police other people's land. The Lindens should maintain law and order without these "helpers".

4. Yet the TWH never were able to prove that the JLU actually violated their privacy or their civil rights. They yammer endlessly with these claims and nothing comes together. Their use cases are pathetic -- a JLU member IMing the sister of a griefer dying in real life of AIDS, Deadly Codec, isn't violation of privacy; it's on an open Facebook page for Christ's sake, and she IM'd him back. It doesn't matter if the JLU member -- GreenLantern Excelsior was insincere or trying to get data to play police detective online and "close the case" -- the fact is, no privacy was violated and no harm was done. Tux Winkler repeatedly cites the case of Kalel Venkman contacting Woodbury University administrators about the griefing of the Woodbury goons in Second Life as if this is some kind of crime or invasion or privacy or some "over the top" effort to get Jordan Belino, a notorious griefer in SL (Tizzers Foxchase) expelled from school.

But there wasn't anything wrong at all with someone seeking justice and going to seek remedy and contact Woodbury, when they had been harassed themselves and seen others harassed. Indeed, later Kalel was even harassed *at home in RL with a Halloween visit* . I myself wrote the dean twice because of the constant harassment I suffered and the crashing of sims, etc. The Lindens were either "in on it" or impotent and so the answer really lay in contacting the real authorities. It was more than fine to do so and it was *effective* to do so because I was able to get at least an abatement of griefing for a time by contacting the RL Woodbury University.

The reality here is that Woodbury administrators were remiss and negligent in remedying the egregious situation with their own professor and students, and in the end Linden Lab acted, and acted three times, removing the sims and banning the accounts, of the Woodbury professor and students. So to continue word-salading and lying about this state of affairs as if Kalel Venkman is wrong in complaining to RL university authorities about SL griefers is outrageous. He can and should do this; I can and should do this; anyone should and the failure to do so by others in fact makes them complicit.

The Lindens know this and even Woodbury's VP knows this by now (and their program is closed now; Tizzers is gone and Intlibber is removed from the picture -- the Woodbury administrators finally figured it out for themselves). To be sure, Edward Clift, the griefer professor, is still yammering about unfairness and violation of educational rights, but he's in on the conspiracy so that means nothing. Even the gullible Chronicle of Higher Education has given up covering this fake victimology.

There remain various aftermaths, like the vandalized Wiki entry on me, which makes it seem as if my entire career has been spent denouncing Woodbury griefers *chuckle* but someday I'll get around to remedying this. Wikipedia itself is an act of vandalism of truth and integrity, so it's hard to justify spending much time trying to remedy it until it passes through its sectarian stage.

Venkman is vindicated (as am I) in contacting Woodbury and raising the very legitimate and serious and documented concerns about Belino's griefing; Linden Lab only looks bad by failing to act and having to act repeatedly to get the job done three times due to their own staff's negligence and complicity. Venkman may have had more edge and vindictiveness to his action, I don't know -- if it is true that he sought the expulsion of Belino. What I sought was much simpler: an end to the griefing of me and my tenants by this individual and his pals. What the university did with his status was their business. But reporting to RL authorities when you are bullied and harassed and harmed online and suffer real damages is THE RIGHT THING TO DO and is NOT STALKING and NOT INVASION OF PRIVACY.

It is not that "you give up the right to privacy when you become a griefing suspect." It's that if you grief, and continue to grief, and create an atmosphere of lying about your griefing, you can expect that people can and will and should follow you into real life to report you to the authorities in any way they can to obtain their due and their legitimate remedies from your harassment. No one should have to suffer online harassment; if you harass others on line and pretend then that you can hide beyond your privacy rights, you will not get away with it.

5. Meanwhile, literally tens of thousands of posts were made on threads at Sluniverse.com about The Wrong Hands supposedly targeted by the JLU and suffering civil rights violations. But it was all bullshit. Tux Winkler claimed to have gotten Scotland Yard to chase after the JLU; this was laughable. Apparently Kalel suffered one day of suspension for the "spy prims" on CheerGirl's lawn -- we never hear from her at at all anymore now that Stroker Serpentine has left SL. No JLU has been permabanned; Tux Winkler and other TWH operatives are permabanned as are their alts.

6. To be sure, Zip Paz and some of the other old W-hat/btard whatever goons persist and continue their lying about what TWH really is, and endlessly play the victim on Rodvik's profile, but they are transparently fake, and anyone can see through them. They aren't "datamined" because nothing has happened to them and nothing is known about them. They are forced to keep their griefing at bay on alts or they will entirely lose their tenuous presence in SL. They've all tried in the most ridiculous and transparently manipulative ways to dislodge the JLU from SL -- they failed. Their various strange operations (like the guy Mystic Frequency who was supposed to be revealing to me that Tux Winkler is the LulzSec guy and they are all after him and scaring him in RL) seemed to have failed and died down, although they will be back when they feel the need to stir up trouble and confusion.

7. Meanwhile, Sluniverse showed itself, true to form, to be as bad as the thing it was fighting. The odious Joshua Nightshade used his servers and ability to get at people's IP addresses through their media viewing, and various social hacks, to find out the identity of one person who criticized him and questioned some of his claims about his own dealings with the JLU. Cummere Mayo, who claimed to have law-enforcement credentials and to have contacted RL law enforcers about the JLU was eventually revealed to be some overaged kid living in his parent's basement...or something. Tux Winkler made sinister threats against me of griefing -- and made good on them with alts or cutaways, and also made a thuggish threat against Linden Lab to crash all their servers if they didn't get attention to their fake "privacy" issue. Ugh!

Joshua was no different than the vigilantes he claimed needed fighting -- and of course there was the spectacle of Fred Rookstown, the old head of the griefer group Patriotic Nigras (!), hacking into the JLU stolen dbase, and then having fights with his TrollManual site and getting kicked off, and having other dramas and crises.

Joshua got into some pissing match with Cathiee, who was either an alt or friend of Cummere, and Cathiee got into some wrangle over her effort to have Joshua checked out through a personnel vetting agency. Why this would be a crime is beyond me -- Joshua's RL name Joshua Meadows is well known as he himself has linked it, including on my blog some years ago. His obsessive crazy stalking of me and others is well documented. If someone wants to run a check on him, they are surely entitled to, given the awful things he has done to a number of people. There is no law broken by running routine Internet searches and checks with various dbase services that look up people's criminal records, etc. So what? This is a tempest in a teapot of the sort we've gotten accustomed to with the whole gang at Sharia-Sluniverse, and their outrageously brutal means of stalking and hunting down people they think have wronged them and outing their real lives.

In the end, Sluniverse utterly discredited itself in its crusade against the JLU because it refused to validate the fact that griefers were stirring up the anti-JLU raid in the first place, and then used methods worse than the JLU uses to stalk and harass people.

Linden Lab hasn't done anything in terms of banning any JLU or making grave policy announcements or doing a thing. They promise to roll out, if anything, tools to better fight griefers, not policies to prevent people from taking notes on griefers and comparing them to better fight them, which the griefers pretend is "datamining" and not legitimate freedom of expression and journalism. That it is vigilantism at some junctures doesn't change any of that: there isn't a TOS offense called "making a fake police unit and tracking criminals on other people's lawns".

8. Robble Rubble lies when he writes this:

I could sit here all day naming names of people who had personal information recorded on them or were stalked in world that posed no threat to the JLU and some of whom had no idea the group even existed.

It is a basic fiction of Woodbury/b-tards/PNs/TWH etc that they are "not doing anything" and that they are "only in the group to use the sandbox" and are "just friends with people who grief sometimes but not griefers". They're all in on it. They all lie. Many get caught. Some don't. Some merely enable. It's ok to gather information on them inworld and report them to LL so that they can't harm and harass other people. End of story. There hasn't been a single valid case produced of any "civilian" or "innocent bystander" wrongfully reported. That I'm wrongfully reported in this dbase means nothing, as it is either a report on a griefer using my first name on an alt -- there have been 100s of those -- or some other mistake from long ago (2007) that means nothing and has no validation. The mistake is meaningless as an indication of the status of the data in JLU's dbase: it is largely true, and largely taken from accurate reports of griefers actually griefing. That is all.

9. Tove Stromfield lies up and down. I checked my facts for the last four years, asshole. These people have made multiple accounts to harass and harm me and my tenants and it is all documented and THAT IS WHY THEY ARE ALL PERMABANNED, DUH. You don't need me to prove this; the Lindens, with their server data, proved it themselves and the proof is in the permaban.

The notion of "keep calm" is what griefers trump up so that people legitimately upset by being harassed are somehow minimized, desensitized, spun, propagandized about, so that the griefer can distract from his crime. It's pretty transparently what it is: griefer manipulation.

Of course OWS is about totalitarianism. Every single one of these calls that involves taking over other people's property -- seizing corporations -- dismantling and disbanding democratic representative government and replacing it with "direct democracy" (i.e. executive power like the soviets); redistribution of wealth -- these are all totalitarian planks in the totalitarian system that pretends it is giving "land to the peasants and factories to the workers" but instead brings them Red Terror and hunger and death.

The Pink Hands are only in a game and only a bunch of people playing at "justice," but they also have utterly exposed themselves as totalitarianism by their countenance of griefers and their lies and by their acceptance of the same stalking tactics of Tux and Joshua and others that they claim to be fighting against in the JLU.

10. Cathiee's lecturing of the Pink Hands as if you can actually reform them, and her efforts to gain sympathy are stupid and pointless. These people are cynical nihilists; they are not sincere or truthful. You never reform them; you never change their sinister practices. You can only document, expose, condemn as transparently as possible so as not to become like them.

The Wrong Hands came first in 2010, then WikiLeaks cablegate occurred in November 2010. It doesn't matter if WikiLeaks was founded in 2006; their first round of leaking attracted little attention. Their "Collateral Murder" video got some attention, but it was really Cablegate that made them a worldwide top news story. There are plenty of examples of possible links between Second Life and online collectivist anarchists like Anonymous an LulzSec and Occupy Wall Street -- Barrett Browning himself said he got his start in SL and there are undoubtedly other connections.

 

 

Leaked E-mails Show How Fake it Is to Pretend OWS Isn't a Socialist Movement

Adrian Chen has a story about the hacking by a "right-wing rabble rouser" of Occupy Wall Street's email -- they've been WikiLeaked and you can see a big dump of their emails here. He focuses on the implications of collaborating with the FBI -- but gosh, nowadays, to be a fink, you don't have to dress up in believable hippie outfits and sit in the back of tedious antiwar meetings for hours and days on end, you can just hack and infiltrate a revolutionary group's mail and then all you have to do is press "forward" on your email and "send" to an FBI contact!

Chen is predictably annoyed that conservative blogger Breitbart has made hay of this from as is Matt Taibbi, who has been accused now by Breitbart of conspiring together with other leftwing journalists to incite the OWS "movement". Breitbart didn't even give a link to the emails, and then went off on this conspiracy tangent -- which misses the point. Leftwing journalists don't have to have secret, conspiratorial emails to plot things; the whole premise of the Wired State is that they are already networked and interactive and seamless and don't feel themselves as somehow separated by any membranes of conflict of interest or ethics. Taibbi is obviously a known quantity; another obvious form of this phenonmenon is Reuter's social media rep Anthony de Rosa who is actively agitating for OWS even as he pretends to cover it as a "journalist" as well. Look, we get it that new media is ecstatically participating in the, um, new People's social movements, guys, why lie about it?

BIGGER THAN LEFT OR RIGHT? NO, JUST BIGGER ON THE LEFT AND PRETENDING

But that's just what Taibbi does -- he pretends that OWS is "beyond politics" in an article titled "Why Occupy Wall Street is Bigger than Left or Right" -- the usual gambit of the left pretending that there are meta/trans/post politics but then stealthing in the leftwing agenda again. Again, stop pretending that you are "above" the liberal and conservative dichotomies or "beyond" communism or capitalism, guys, when you hate on the rich and propose collectivism solutions. Taibbi, living in Moscow all those years, should know better.

The real story visible in spades from the leaked emails is that far from being some sort of spontaneous new movement, far from being some new crisis among youth sparked by lack of jobs or school loan debts -- although those are part of the background noise -- the movement is  made up by seasoned, hardened political operatives, experienced, dedicated "community organizers" of the Obama type who have spent years and years honing their most decidedly Marxist-infused viewpoints, in the US and abroad, and who have very, very definite views and hardline agendas that they are merely tactically holding back now.

It's the old story of the Socialist Scholars' Conferences (which I attended in those days); the right gets in a frenzy about the Cloward-Pivens strategy and the Saul Alinsky tactics but indeed they are absolutely right as I witnessed myself: for years, the socialist groups in the US have been advocating the tactic of picking single issues, picking popular causes, and then working them aggressively as you gradually (or not so gradually) smuggle in your full-blown socialist agenda. This agenda might be from the old Students for a Democratic Society, or the Democratic Socialists of America or other socialist groups of the 1960s-1980s. Essentially, the Obama campaign is a national example of that tactic come to power, as you can read in Radical-in-Chief. OWS is merely another manifestation of this phenomenon which is a decades-old story -- just because the people have smart phones doesn't mean they have outgrown this stupid stealth-socialism that discredits the movement every time and paves the way for rightwing backlash.

OLD-STYLE SECTARIANISM

What also emerges from these emails is how immersed this small group (groupuscule?) is in the old sectarianism of the Stalinist left although many of the people in it are too young to have lived through Alcove One and Alcove Two -- the intolerance of dissent or or any liberalism that respects capitalism; the drive for radical politics and transformative world revolution;  the rigid identity politics, the insistence on unity ("Unite for Unity!"), the pretense that they are just listening or gathering viewpoints and will "democratically" decide things -- when in fact, they are merely practicing democratic centralism of the Brezhnev type, discussing things in an already pre-selected, pre-defined group of likeminded person who are "all on the same page" already with anti-capitalist, thirdworldist doctrines opposed to the liberal democratic project of America as it has been throughout history.

To be sure, a LaRouche operative who managed to infiltrate the group readily was repelled, and some people were available to call LaRouche properly out as a fascist and an extremist and his followers as inciters and practioners of violence. Good! But in the atmospherics of the General Assembly, will this person be formally expelled or drummed out or in the interests of democracy, or will she be kept around because of "radical inclusivity"?

A batch of emails like this may not be representative of everything about the political culture of these people, but a lot of patterns are visible. It's enough to see the sense of the group as plotting and planning something that they have to "put over" on others. For now, they can't have demands -- as a tactic -- even though the people doing this planning themselves have very, very stringent and defined worldviews, every one of them -- here is one of many examples:

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:20 PM, Jason Jones <surplus@notanalternative.net> wrote:
Only option now is brutal separation. The democrats are the enemy. Smash capitalism!

Another little telling example: A Russian graphic designer turns in a piece of graphic work in "do-ocracy" mode -- she just designs a clenched fist that looks a typical piece of socialist/communist graphic work from the Soviet Union or Cuba -- a clenched fist for the symbol of OWS TV (BTW, exactly like a similar graphic floating around Second Life for the The Wrong Hands faction of Anonymous, yet another eerie example of possible prototyping in virtuality first).

Yet her work is discounted by one of the cadres because they don't want to look like any past movement (and heaven forfend that any obvious communist/socialist sort of graphic work betray their hand!). They'd rather just have a graphic of a rectangle and a circle showing a camera lens -- indeed, they are supposed to be as generic and graphic as a public restroom sign!

The woman is put out that she put work into something and got rejected; some other people like her design and just want to run with it -- but the elder cadre prevails -- and by what process and authority, it isn't exactly clear. Another voice comes in to instruct and smooth and allign -- and you sense everywhere the unseen hand of the hidden agenda.

Cadres organizations are always the bane of these "spontaneous people's movements" -- shaping and influencing behind the scenes with their party discipline. With these particular people in Zuccotti, however, I don't see (yet) that they are from oldline Marxist sects like Worker's World or International ANSWER or even something newer like moveon.org (although some people in the emails note they are related to moveon.org).

FROM MARXIST PROFESSORS TO THIRD-WORLD JOURNEYS TO NGOS

Rather, the core group sleeping in the park visible in these emails reflect that journey of the modern leftist intellectual that is so typical -- the college campus with the Marxist professors; the stint teaching English or doing academic work in a third-world country (or actually being from Latin America and coming to study in the US); more teaching or work in a nonprofit with the same perspective; and...never the feet touching the ground. They live in a bubble of anti-Americanism unencumbered by any actual practical experience with America -- a job in a large corporation or even a small business; a house in a small town; something outside of Chomskian unreality. Their viewpoints and their realities are shaped first in the Marxist-infused college campus, then in the poverty-stricken Third World country, then back to the US again to work in a "movement" job organizing for "social justice" of one sort or another.

Among the leaders shown in the emails is Marina Sitrin, an academic who studies third world poverty, and who spent some years in Cuba, something you would have thought one of those rightwing blogs would have pounced on. Is she merely taking instruction from the comrades, is that how it all happens? No, she's an accomplished academic and writer -- in our day, in the Wired State, she doesn't have to be anything so crass or simplistic as an operative or agent of influence from a communist regime, because it's all interpenetrating -- she goes to Cuba because she already believes America is evil; she hates capitalism long before she hears a Cuban propaganda piece about it; she may even be critical of Cuban suppression of the arts or dissent, even as she (unconsciously) articulates a line that Cuba votes at the UN in her books.

Or take Justin Wedes, a graduate of the University of Michigan, the kind of guy who might have been a student of Peter Ludlow's in linguistics, a lover of geeky online open source stuff who gets a degree in physics and along the way picks up the usual campus Marxism (without ever calling it that or even perceiving of himself as a socialist -- he is for "progressive" causes, you see). He goes to teach English in Venezuela; does that mean he has become a Chavez follower? Oh, likely not; the heavy ideological indoctrination of people like this doesn't work in such a crass way, it happens on the Internet and even merely reading Wikipedia. It's all part of the continuum of lefty goodness -- Democracy Now, In These Times, The Nation, Daily Kos -- my semester in Venezuela, my job teaching inner city youth....Never would you ever have to step out of the warm bath of Chomskyism and face a challenge to your beliefs.

While in the New York public city school system, Justin also champions the "progressive" causes, like "deny waiver" to Catherine Black, Bloomberg's business executive friend who was believed to be all wrong for the schools (and maybe she was) -- but mainly because she didn't come from the appropriate "progressive" background. Justin put his all into this single-issue movement, but was that all he cared about? No, of course not -- again, here's a person with defined, full-blown, articulated leftwing views that permeate everything he thinks and does and have for years, although he is young. Probably no one has ever debated him, ever, in his life, nor has he searched for any alternative to the book list of Chomsky and Zinn and Foner prescribed by his Marxist professors. Justin claims "we are not coordinating anything" in a disingenuous interview with the New York Times, although his entire online footprint and biography let us know his set of views. Justin is not merely "a former Brooklyn high school teacher". He's a man of the left whose short life has been devoted to these ideals already for several years giving voice to neighbourhood sages wailing about the evil man keeping every down -- or punking corporations with culture jamming to yes, make a socialist point (evil, evil corporations! boo hiss!) or fomenting students to do a walk-out in support of the demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin.

I don't know why he dropped out of teaching -- perhaps it was too constrictive. He got a grant for helping kids after school become digitally proficient; he worked on tutoring and alternative education in the "edu punk" vein we know from Second Life. All of his "community organizing" jobs, paid or volunteer, are all different fronts or manifestation of the same "progressive" agenda -- which amounts to getting in our tribe, inserting collectivist principles, open sourcing and stripping away property and taking as much as possible from the state -- Shakedown Street, -- and hating on evil Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh! Hate, hate! and I'll have a mocha soy latte with that to go, please...

IF YOU'RE WHITE, STEP BACK...AND HAVE A CUBAN IDEOLOGICAL SANDWICH

As you read their emails, you see the paralysis of the identity politics. There aren't enough people of colour. Should you have a special working group just of people of colour? Or put people of colour in each working group? OWS is solving that by this outrageous notion of making white straight males step back and forcing to the head of the line the females, people of colour, and LGBT who have been oppressed and therefore need this sort of affirmative action in this new "democracy". It's old-style Soviet friendship of nations and nationalities policy...

And here's the typical Cuban/Duban WCAR/Marxist analysis of racism -- it doesn't exist in and of itself, with the remedies against it in law and human rights, but it exists merely as a kind of byproduct of racism.

So OWS has to express its goofy (and cunningly collectivist) calls to hate on the 1 percent and champion the 99 percent by saying that school loans or home foreclosures disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics -- again, as if Goldman Sachs or Fannie Mae employs a deliberately racist approach as a function of their evil capitalism, and hence these outcomes.

Of course, that the NINJA loans were made by black brokers themselves to fellow blacks; that the small-town banks giving out the loans to poor people were in a climate of liberal political correctness and that is indeed part of the reason for the recession, too, seems not only obscured by these people obsessing on the "banksters"; it is even denied. The Wall Street Journal has got the narrative about this right, however, and I've never heard the left honestly tackle it. Giving out lots of housing and school loans to an aspiring black and Hispanic and poor white lower class to bring them into the middle class was part of a redistributive justice scheme even from the Clinton era; it was supposed to be the American dream and the manifestation of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That evil banksters could bundle this toxicity and pass it around to each other like a hot potato is only the other half of the equation, and yet OWS makes it seem as if it is the only story.

Another page out of the Cuban Marxist doctrine so visible in Durban is the notion expressed in another email that the occupation of Palestine is "racist" and that Israel is a "racist state". Israel is racist against Palestinians, who are "people of colour." Well, that's hilarious, but at least a different rant than the usual nonsense we hear from these types, that they aren't antisemites, because Semites are Arabic peoples, and both Israelis and Palestinians are Semitic peoples, therefore one can't be antisemitic, see.

This sort of hateful anti-Israel position from Ryan Green, who can't concede any problem with Hamas. Ryan Green is reading "Palestine Peace, Not Apartheid" and surprise, surprise, Norman Finkelstein; he's part of the whole Palestinian liberation scene, participating in the Siegebusters' Ball. This is not a man who studied literature and then found he couldn't get a job and had a heavy student loan; this is a "a world music singer and theatre performer turned activist" -- but that means a man who has spent years in and around cadre organizations and causes and sectarian groups hating on Israel and promoting the Palestinian radical cause -- this is a man with a full-blown set of ideas and agenda. Moderation and listening to get input from a wide variety of social classes ("the 99 percent") and maintaining diversity are not going to be his center of gravity -- he is the most vocal in these emails trying to turn the group to an anti-Israel obsession.

'I WOULD LIKE TO SEE MY SOCIALIST  SISTERS AND BROTHERS HAVE A LITTLE FUN WITH THIS'

Then there are people like Gabriel Johnson. "I am a Democrat," she says, showing the group an invitation to an event with Pelosi:

So this is the first email I've gotten from any official national Democratic group supporting us. I am a Democrat, but I would like to see my socialist (and anarchist, Marxist, etc.) sisters and brothers have a little fun with this. (Oh, D-Trip, you don't know what you've gotten yourselves into, do you…)

Have a little fun? What kind of fun, Gabriel? Gabriel is in PowerShift, a lefty environmental organizing site:

In November 2007, the Coalition convened the first national youth climate summit at Power Shift 2007. More than 6,000 young people from all 50 states gathered at the University of Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, DC for a weekend of training, action and inspiration. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Congressman Ed Markey recognized the growing movement, addressing the 6,000 young people gathered at U-MD. It was here that Van Jones, founder of Green For All and future White House Advisor, and other environmental justice leaders captivated a generation with a vision of creating millions of green jobs for our country and restoring economic and environmental justice. Exactly one year before the 2008 elections, young people returned to their campuses and communities ready to rally for a clean energy economy in the upcoming elections.

Ah, Van Jones. Now there's a product of the cadre organizations, and of course, he didn't last long in the White House, branded as a communist (or at least a socialist). He would never call himself those things, he avoids those negative labels. Instead, he is a "progressive," and now agitates at moveon.org.

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY

Then there's Jason Ahmadi.

Jason Ahmadi is 25, and originally from California. He is currently based in Chimayo New Mexico, helping organize for Think Outside the Bomb's (TOTB)

Ban all nuclear weapons -- single issue cause -- but full-blown agenda underneath, not even lurking out of sight, but fairly obvious, without even having to find his reading list. Stay nonviolent, Jason, don't push over those police gates!

Jason is on the national committee of War Resisters League, an old antiwar organization that in fact I've long admired, particularly for their willingness to take up defense of victims of communism among pacifists and war-resisters. But that was an old generation. Today, the experience of Jason is one, like the others I've mentioned, a long spiral of university, nonprofits, and third-world countries, in which no positive experience in their own country has ever been found -- no job in a corporation, no start-up of a business, no purchase of a home, no middle class dream in suburbia...

When you have a group like WRL, with its very specific socialist leaders (like David McReynolds, a man I have also long admired, who I saw at OWS and recently heard speak at his book party in the West Village -- who once ran on the ballot as a Green Party candidate, and I voted for him) -- you can't say this is a movement without some political agenda. You can't say it is new, or modern, or post-political, or beyond liberal and conservative. That would be an outright lie. It would not be the kind of lie that these people in these groups even would tell you.

So why Matt Taibbi has to tell this lie, or why even some wire service copy writers have to tell this lie, is beyond me, except that they have a vested interest in making the movement seem more mainstream or grassroots or "authentic" than it in fact is.

You see, this pose, this tactic of pretending its a brand-new thing and a new-media new-democracy sort of thing just isn't credible when you read these emails. Example, from Ashley Anderson

I have heard a lot of talk about the "lack of a demand" at #OWS. I like all the demands thus far, and I defend them fiercely to the fearful lefty critics. But they're right to point out that an ultimatum is implied with an "occupation." Otherwise, it's a demonstration, right?

I'm not sure why having one demand / many reasons to rise up are mutually exclusive.
This occupation could pick a winnable demand and use the spotlight moment to continue pushing for all the great things it is talking about. There will be more occupations, more demands, and more victories if the tale of Occupy Wall Street can create something solid. We won't get it all in one sitting, but we will get it all if we make a habit of drawing a line in the sand. I always thought that the "one demand" was the most brilliant part of the strategy.

Ashley is a director of PeacefulUprising.org  He's not somebody studying, oh, sociology who suddenly appeared out of the woodwork, because he ran up too big a student loan or befcause he is somebody who lost his job. He has a job, like many of the OWS, or had one, in a nonprofit funded by some progressive and trendy foundation.  He's in a "community organization" (i.e., a nonprofit with a "progressive" perspective that purports to be from "the people") that has a decided agenda, definite goals, a very clearcut perspective. He is not just now tumbling to the idea that there is gosh, too much greed. He has been active in the cause of opposing capitalism and the free-market American society and everything it stands for, for years. He's a person strategizing here how to take that pressed-down-and-running-over very definitive "progressive" and decidedly leftwing agenda and package it for the masses; package it for the mainstream TV; package it for the people in fact might actually be materializing off the street because they can't find a job.

But again, let's not pretend that Ashley, like Marina or Justin or Ryan are somehow "beyond" politics or left or right or blue or red or liberal or conservative. That's bullshit. They most definitely are situated very decidedly on the political spectrum of the extreme left, and the pretense about it gets to be sinister after awhile.

I don't mind if you have a leftwing socialist set of ideals you are promoting. I just want you to be open and honest about it and not con the public.

That's why, again, it's fake to pretend these people come from nowhere, or the streets, or the campuses, without any prefabrication. They don't; they are indeed products of very specific political tendencies.

Don't let the goofy, even cultic environmentalist prescriptions of this group distract from their collectist notion, which tells you all you need to know And for added emphasis, they write "Corporations are not people!"

There's lots more in that vein -- I just don't have time to go through them all now. CUNY professors. New School professors. Other university professors all of a type. All of the leftwing academic sort without any shading or nuance. Like J.A. Myerson. Product of the NYC school system -- check! Free speech fundamentalist -- check. Graduate of Bard -- check. And socialist -- check!

So knock it off, Matt Taibbi, Paul Berman and others trying to pretend this is something glorious, new, post-political, and not predictable.

'CORPORATIONS HAVE NEVER FELT THE WIND BLOW ON THEIR FACES'

This is a downright obsession with OWS. They hate Citizens United; they loath the idea that corporations can spend on campaigns after this ruling -- which ironically was brought to court by a leftwing group for whom Hillary was an object of derision and loathing on Youtube because they were to the left of the Clintons. The "community organizations' outraged at the "corporations as people" concept aren't at all disturbed, as I've noted, at unions or nonprofits or law firms being corporate persons -- that's fine, because, because they are, well, more peopley. Corporations may give products and jobs to people, but they aren't people! They are made up of people just like any other human institution (duh) but...they are souless and uncaring! And that's because... they make a profit. They are for profits, not people, you see! And that's what it's about. Seething hatred of capitalism -- socialism, but dressed up in cyber-clothing and scented with fairly-traded organic coffee.

CAN THIS HARDLINE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT BECOME MORE MAINSTREAM?

Well, it's trying it's damnedest -- the entire Madison-Avenue ad campaign from Ad Busters, with the added organizational menace of Anonymous -- has gone into trying to make the socialist sow's ear into a silk purse that any discontented person can pick up.

Here's a typical "discussion" around a "demand" (yes, they do have demands, they're just tactically holding them back). Here's a demand to overthrow capitalism and socialize private property (if you think it's about something other than what I just said, I'd love you to justify it LOL) -- and see how they package it as "People Power":

We Demand that The People Take Control back from Global Corporations

This demand puts the responsibility for change where it belongs, on The People.  We need millions of people on the street to change the system in any meaningful way, and it directly calls for the people to act.  It lets the people decide later how to define the movement.  Principles, policies, demands, and techniques can all be decided as we grow.  It does not threaten anyone except the biggest corporations and the politicians that serve them.

 The part about the global corporations may be more controversial, but I believe that the biggest threat to democracy is the global super class, those corporations and their billionaires, bigger than many countries, extracting wealth from all of the countries simultaneously.  These corporations are the same ones that our allies in Spain, Greece, France, Egypt, and all over the world are fighting.  The word global can be adjusted later to include more corporations if the people so decide.

Please, read the demand again on its own, and see if there is anything in it that you disagree with.  Then ask yourself if we could all agree that it would be the right call to action for our movement.

Thank you for your patience and impatience, John McGloin

Each time I hear a rant or a chant about "The People," I can't help thinking of that scene in Dr. Zhivago where Dr. Zhivago's father, the wealthy landowner, driven out of his mansion, cries from the door of his hovel in exile, "But I'm a member of the People, too!" Indeed. I have never forgotten it.

LATINO POWER

Here's a fellow who does likely have a burden of student loans, although his master's in public health could in theory get him a job in any number of places from the UN to Bellevue Hospital -- especially because he has well-connected professional parents with very good jobs who can help him find one himself:

Alexandre has, since his youth, been deeply inspired by his parents to adopt a “Glocal” (Think Global-Act Local) philosophy. His mother works as Chief of the Montreal Protocol unit in the United Nations Development Programme, and his father is a Federal University professor in Rio de Janeiro working with Social-Environmental Entrepreneurship projects.

He is Latino (Brazilian?), a member in good standing of the Wired State in its global multilateral and indicative of the increasing visibility of Hispanics in public life and that demographic bulge of the fastest growing segment of the US population under 18 or 21 that we're going to be hearing a lot more from -- and are already hearing from, if you look at the Hispanic role in OWS (and this gets overshadowed by the fixation on "white faces" and "people of colour" as in "black").

Alexandre Machado De Sant'Anna Carvalho, NYU student, is unhappy at the Ad-Buster's one-note cause. He's chafing already under the superficiality of that cynical and calculated ad campaign -- and who can blame him! Read this, and tell me this man is "beyond politics" and "neither left nor right"!

As someone who is deeply involved in this movement, who was arrested two times because of it, slept on the park repeatedly, and gave all hours of every single day to this grand effort, as well as witnessed many fellow brothers and sisters being harrassed, falling sick, pepper sprayed, and other abuses, i can't be silent anymore regarding the discussion of a "One Line Demand". I deeply respect Adbusters for sparking this with a great idea to occupy wall street. Nonetheless, i believe no one is the proprietor of this movement and in absolute should speak as the spokesperson for the masses. The recent publication at occupywallst.org of a list of demands, even though a plurality of demands, was a violation of solidarity. Simply because it was done for the people instead of with the people. I know that the intention wasn't to speak on behalf of all, but the newspapers quickly grasped it as the voice of the movement, which pardon my insistence, it is NOT.

 

Myself and many others who are living it on the ground and across the virtual sphere feel that a "One Line Demand" is jeopardizing the amazing work we have done so far and is stopping us from imagining better alternatives - or rather, this one line plague is blinding people to the possibility of a better world that is happening right before their eyes at Liberty Square.

 

Let me explain. A social movement is different than a protest, in the same way that a demand is different than a purpose. A demand/protest is by its very nature willing to work within the framework of the given, while a social movement is more: it is an agitation, a flux forward in response to dire oppression whose roots in society run much deeper. Protests are tangible and specific, usually built around a specific legislation on the table; when the vote is cast, for better or worse it dissipates in thin air, with business as usual returning. This is a reformist approach. The question that must be asked is if the crisis of our times will ever be solved with a specific and tangible "one line demand". Even if the one line "demand" is as bold as "Overthrow Capitalism" or "End Corporate Personhood". Not only that, demands pressupose that someone else has power and you have none, which is not the case in Liberty Square. And yes, the wording matters here, because we seem to be in pursuit of a language of rupture and not of conformism.  

 

A movement is characterized by stubborn people that won't stop until society transforms. Usually it rallies around principles of solidarity and people embody their vision of a better society. Movements keep pressure over time, and in order to be successful at recycling the dominant pathological memes and changing social practices, they must grow and have a broad base of support. Liberty Square is slowly reaching that beautiful moment, with labor unions finally joining in and demonstrating solidarity; we are doing the same supporting their struggles. At this moment, insisting on a misguided "one line demand" discussion is dangerous: every successful movement must have a broad base of support, not a narrow one, and one line demands or even a short list of demands is narrowing. It is close-ended instead of open-ended. It restricts instead of liberating.

 

At liberty Square, we have queer groups, labor unions, environmentalists, human rights activists, artists, homeless people, animals (yes, we love them), undocumented immigrants, foodies, mentally ill patients, and a bunch of other groups that are lending their voice and support to our common struggle, which is a human struggle against oppression in all its forms. Somehow, through the participatory democratic process that is being exercised at the General Assembly, these voices feel that they can be heard and their strength thus amplified, and that is why they are showing up. By all means, not because of a list of demands or worse, a "one line demand". I invite people to experience the thrill of the square and see it for themselves.

 

A movement requires patience and diligence, not the absurdity of rushing demands just to please the anxiety of mainstream media. Because we have their pathological attention span for now are we settling for this? Please don't trust that thought. Let's aim for something better for ourselves. I guarantee that they will come back to cover our work as we continue to grow stronger. If not, well, then i invite people to remember the poet's words: "the revolution will not be televised" (Thanks Gil Scott-Heron). Let's listen to the poet. 

 

Speaking of revolution, these happen when a movement breaks off the cozy order of the status quo due to strength of numbers. A revolution, such as the first American revolution, was the realization that true emancipation can never happen through the present dominant institutions, because they are the very ones that generate or replicate the hierarchies of injustice. Same applies for us: in the end, if we really want to change the world for our grandchildren, revolution is what we have to push for, not reformist games. Specially in days where capital flows beyond borders...

 

OccupyEverywhere. The General Assemblies that are popping up all over America and the world are a clear sign of a beautiful new possibility: local participatory democracy that can self-legislate and operate; cooperate; and ultimately thrive. When and if coordinated, we can push for the stars. At Liberty Square, we already won. We liberated a space, a territoriality, and are building alternatives together. All of this done without fancy documents or tailored "one line demands". Our actions speak louder than our words, and the whole world is watching precisely because it feels that what we are doing is different than politics or business as usual.

 

The general assembly is channeling a plurality of voices and uniting struggles in solidarity. We need much more a set of values and principles of solidarity (which we already have a draft of this living document at nycga.net) where these oppressed voices can rally around in the audacious task of dreaming a better society. And as they join us and we join them, we fight together for the goals that appear on the square and reivent political agency as a way of life. The General Assemblies are the convergence channel of anti-oppression voices, can't we realize that?

 

Humanization, Emancipation, Solidarity.

Against one-line demands, sure. But...positing a world of "dire oppression" and imagining there is a horrible world of hierachies -- a world that he, as the son of a university professor and a UN bureaucrat in one of the best schools in the world couldn't possibly be experiencing himself -- and yet, one in which he believes like a religion

And...Uh-oh. Political agency as a way of life! Permanent revolution, brute executive power, no parliament, no judiciary...Truly, the "democratic centralism" of the "People's" general assemblies are Politburos and soviets -- they are not a parliament. Because the people in them were not voted for and don't represent anything. "The tyranny of who shows up" as I have called it for years.

BEWARE DEMOCRATIC PARTY COOPTATION!

Follow this discussion about concern that moveon.org (too associated with the Democratic Party and electoral politics for the taste of many of these radicals) has coopted the movement, and once again see OWS activist display their hands:

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:43 PM, Charles Lenchner <clenchner@gmail.com> wrote:
Folks might be surprised at the level of liberal/radical fraternization that has been taking place since the Bloombergville stuff. The idea that liberals were ignorant, then snarky, then busy taking over is pure fantasy. I know some folks at Rebuild the Dream. They have no intention of taking over OWS.

That said, y'all know Max Berger? He did the 'briefcase brigades' with 'the other 98%' group, left his old job to work on economic issues from a grassroots, youth perspective, and was then hired by RTD. You want to paint him as some outsider liberal poaching off this movement? Just crazy. And a LOT of the folks under attack as 'coopters' would fall into a similar category. Is labor backed, former ACORN chapter New York Communities for Change 'liberal'? Is the Transport Workers Union 'liberal'?

That said, I'm not liberal. But some of my best friends are. And I've dated some. My sister married one. Heck, I'm pretty sure I've voted for a few in my day! So times really are a-changin'. Perhaps it is time to let bygones be bygones and let them integrate with folks like us. I lot of what I hear said about 'em is just plain ignorant. 

What we really need to worry about is the People's Front of Judea.

 

Charles

Well, no. What we really need to worry about is not silly Monty Python stuff but the actuality of "progressive" politicos pretending they represent "the new post-political". Charles is in in Organizing 2.0 and that barely-concealed Marxist-Leninist outfit Working Families.

Come on people, Stanley Aronowitz, that flower of Schachmanitism, isn't exactly a Blue Dog Democrat, yanno? Why are we having this fiction?!

Again, with people like this in the core of the activists, why are we pretending that this is "neither left or right"? Fake!

Say, if you don't want the conservative press to call out OWS as merely another front group for ACORN, then you will have to become more liberal and mainstream. Oh, and if you don't want the outcome predicted by George Will, cited by this blogger, too -- the inevitable rightwing backlash after the extremism of the left runs its course.

 

 

 

 

 

Dude, Where's My Anti-War Movement?

I went to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Occupy Time Square action this evening, hoping that this cadre-organized left-wing start-up (it's not a movement, although it has gathered many hangers-on) would really turn to an antiwar message as promised -- they said they were going go protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I saw about...three antiwar signs the entire time I was there (about 4-7 pm) -- which is about how many People of Colour I saw as well.This was a largely white-people's crowd, with the #firstworldproblem of their banks not doing what they wanted them to do.

Most of the people looked like middleaged fading hippies and progressives, remembering the 1960s. Very white, not even Hispanic (the union march with the transit workers and nurses last week had many more black and Hispanic workers). Quite a few in this crowd of protesters were likely Jewish, as it's New York. And you wished they cared more about the antisemitic undertones and groups with hateful messages on hand.

ANTISEMITIC STEREOTYPES

A particularly ugly poster -- Ben Bernanke, in a stereotypical antisemitic cartoon -- the hooked nose, squinting eyes, and horned devil's head with a protest about the greed of Wall Street (he's the head of the Federal Reserve, and I guess this is part of the "banks got bailed out, we got sold out" message -- ugh).

"Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine," says another sign. A couple more Free Palestine type signs among the kaffiyeh-wearing set -- and this comes from Internationational ANSWER, the discredited sectarian anti-war group that I remember back from the first march against the war in Iraq, when I wanted to make sure not to get into step beside their hateful signs, obsessing about Israel.

MARXIST SECTARIANS' REUNION

Like other OWS event, this march might have been the sectarians' old-home week. The Worker's World newspaper-hustlers were out in full force, I haven't seen so many since the 1980s anti-missile marches. There's the PSLWEB.org people who have the largest signs and most aggressive and lustily chanting people. Like the International ANSWER gang, they have this very tightly-wound notion that racism comes from capitalism, i.e. there wouldn't be racism if there were no capitalism. This was the Cuban ideological contribution to the Durban World Conference Against Racism, and I've always found it fundamentally wrong -- it implies that racism can't be dealt with except by violent world revolution, and that socialist or communist countries (like the Soviet Union) can't be racist -- when...of course they were and are.

Many people are out there earnestly telling you that OWS is not Marxist or socialist, that they are beyond parties or labels or sects and just unemployed or unhappy people. Yet these sectarian Marxist groups that show up in force let you know that the socialist cadres are working overtime -- the PSLweb.org people are avowed Marxist-Leninists. So is the International People's League of...something...I have to go look at the folded-up flyer in my pocket.

One thing that's funny about these sects is that some of them clearly were out of the loop and weren't part of the ingroup around Adbusters and Anonymous cadres who got this bureaucratic start-up going (bureaucratic in the sense of a limited group of people who call the shots undemocratically without seeking democratic representation or legitimacy). You can tell because their flyers and newspapers are addressing the OWS people as if they were others, not theirs, outside of their ranks. International ANSWER acts as if they invented it and organized all the events all over the country; some of the others are playing catch-up (notably  moveon.org, which was busy telling people to click on stuff while the OWS were actually already sneakers-on-the-ground.)

CHE GUEVARA, CALL YOUR OFFICE

A Che Guevera flag waving relentlessly -- always part of the scenery for OWS.

Some Native Americans -- with signs calling to DECOLONIZE WALL STREET (no sense in having all those whiteys occupy it, they may have concluded, give it back to the red man).

Prosecute CEOs. (Why? For what?) Prosecute the banksters.

Oh, and my favourite: here's a girl with Airways plaid kicks, black spandex tight pants, multi-coloured leg warmers, a short leather jacket, a cotton shirt, pink sunglasses and an i-phone -- her look probably took at least $300 to put together -- those sneakers and warmers aren't cheap. Her sign? "STOP CONSUMERISM!"

WHERE'S THE ANTI-WAR?

But as I said, I was there hunting for the anti-war movement. Where was it? The calls for this march had said they were going to emphasize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here we had 10 years of horrible war in Afghanistan, thousands of our soldiers killed and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians -- in Iraq, we're told 100,000 civilians have been killed, and as I always point out, most of them are massacred by terrorists (and in Afghanistan, most are killed by the Taliban). If the point is that this wouldn't be happening if our troops weren't there (not a point I necessarily find valid, but worth debating, always), then...where's that antiwar movement at?Why isn't there one? Why isn't *this* movement somehow more explicit in its connection between "banksters" and "war"?

International ANSWER, which has remained sectarian, stupid, and not influential all these years precisely because it is an impossibly hoary Marxist-Leninist concoction, has scared away what might be a more mainstream movement, but so have the Democrats' vacuous Support Our Troops pablum, which has displaced what might be a more robust and strenuous antiwar cause.

When I arrived at about 4, there were hundreds already inside the pens created to keep the streets free from being overrun by demonstrators. In the three hours I watched, I truly saw only 3 antiwar signs, after the Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine fellow moved past. These were strategically deployed right in front of the TV vans and camers, and they said STOP THE DRONES (with a papier mache mock-up of a drone plane) and another one that seemed to be saying fund human needs, not war -- but it wasn't clear, because the circle with HUMAN NEEDS and WAR seemed to be equally partitioned in the drawing. A third said SMASH WAR. Well, nothing like violence to fight violence, I always say!

(A note on the drones issue: If you're going to be against an unjust war, you might accept that drones, with their pinpointed targets of specific Al Qaeda operatives and Taliban leaders, might be a better option that sending in massives of troops. Of course they kill civilians, and of course it's not ultimately moral. But if you have an array of bad options, including killing lots of people through massive troops deployments, or killing less troops and less civilians with drones, it seems obvious that drones are more rational.)

There were a lot less signs here today than at the two past events I went to in recent weeks because:

o people sitting in Zuccotti Park all day have time on their hands and can craft signs. In fact, as I noted before, the sign-making department of their ideal city-under-a-sidewalk is among the sacred spaces free of people there -- but the signsters may have been tired out after occupying Chase Bank or didn't make it uptown

o unions have printing shops and people and funds to get standard signs printed up and distributed -- but the unions didn't come to this demonstration in Times Square -- I saw one union hat in the entire bunch of several thousand

o but if you have a lot of middle-aged WBAI listeners and Democracy Now! watchers and those sectarian old-home folks, they tend not to produce any signs at all. It was funny, a few people I saw walking along told each other that they were there to participate, but they "didn't want to do anything too like in your face like carry a sign or get arrested." And those are the kind of people that any movement has to reach and this one won't reach because of their propensity for making trouble deliberately as a Leninist tactic.

The chants were the same as at other affairs:

o All Day, All Week Occupy Wall Street

o Whose Streets, Our Streets

o Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out

o This is What Democracy Looks Like

Well, no, I always fell like adding: this is what a bureaucratic leftwing start-up with ad skills and social media savvy looks like; it's not what democracy looks like.

ANTI-LOBBIESTS

If I had to pick one sign in Times Square that was the most frequent, it would be variations on this theme: "I don't have a voice because I'm not a monied lobby". Of course, marching in highly-visible Time Square with dozens of prime-time mainstream television cameras trained on you could hardly be called being silenced, but there it is, people feel that they exist in lives of quiet desperation as evil lobbyists run off to Washington and buy votes. That they could join any one of a zillion PACS of all flavours, including moveon.org and go and influence politicians like the moneybags seems to evade them.

The idea that these unknown -- but evil -- lobbiests are buying votes and buying politicians is of course an attractive notion to get people's blood boiling, but I see a lot of the left with plenty of money to lobby with, too, from where I sit, so I can't quite get as exercised as the "progressives" about the Koch Brothers. There's a kind of learned helplessness in this throwing up of one's hands and deciding that everything is bought, everything is crooked and therefore...therefore...what? Some graduate student in a socialist committee should run things? That's the part I'm not getting.

ZOMBIES

I saw several dozen young people dressed up in various zombie outfits -- some with really excellent makeup jobs with really realistic rotting skin and drooling -- roamed through the crowd. They were unsettling rather than humorous or Halloween-like. Those pale faces and realistic blood like the joker look that sometimes Obama's face is turned into or other figures that somebody doesn't like.

And...what's the connection between Zombies and Wall Street? Ghost payrolls? Um...killing people with their greed? It wasn't clear.

I went into the second pen and walked around seeing what was what. One of the problems with a "movement" attempting to pretend it doesn't have leaders (of course it has them, they're just behind the scenes) is that...nobody is really organizing the meeting, so that people stand around a lot and do nothing and don't even have any conversations. There are no speakers with bullhorns, even.

So without speakers or leaders, pPeople tend to wave their signs at each other, or any cameras, and it being social-media-saturation-time, they take lots of photos of each other. I helpfully took a picture of four kids, one of whom had a black t-shirt on that said "This is What a Socialist Looks Like". I contemplated saying something to object to socialism, but it was getting too noisy to talk -- that idiotic People's Mike wasn't in force, fortunately, because these weren't the hard-core cadres from Zuccotti, but there was a group of people playing drums and dancing, including the one black man who was present that day -- and nearby was a visiting Indian man with a button.

NO BUTTONS -- BUT LOTS OF GRADUATE THESES!

I realized that what was also really missing from this bunch was buttons. I have been in numerous marches and pickets and demonstrations in my life -- we always had buttons. Where are the buttons? There aren't any.

Instead, there are lots and lots of these signs that looked like graduate theses. It's funny -- they are about one DNA strand away from being the kind of weird nutty signs of crazies in the park or subway about the end of the world and such -- and in fact, there were a few like that in the park when I was there last week.

Although Twitter has supposed to have taught young people how to tweet in 140 spaces, perhaps when they demonstrate, they have to let it all hang out more, as they tend to long signs with lots of sentences. Not only will they talk about repealing Glass-Steagall, something the average person probably has to stop and look up on the Internet, they make 10 point or 20 point programs in increasingly tiny print.

I caught up with one such earnest fellow who looked like a Union Square hipster who had a sign that said something like this:

o Repeal Citizens United

o Corporations are not people

o Federal funding of elections

o Prosecute CEOS

-- and about 6 other things I can't recall now, but seemed to involve nationalizing banks and overthrowing capitalism.

DEBATING OWS: CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, TOO.

I asked the young man that if he opposed the concept of corporate persons being able to give to political campaigns, if he'd also be for removing the concept of unions and nonprofits as corporate entities, as they are people, too. After all, unions, nonprofits, law-firms -- these are big contributors to the Obama campaign -- and they are all corporate entities, not individuals. Was he really for no entities being able to give campaign funds, and have the entire election federally funded (presumably by some...tax...or...something).

He seemed to think about it for a minute but immediately countered that Citizens United was giving unequal outcomes as it wasn't fair, as corporations were more powerful.

But, I continued, they weren't able to prevail in the last election, arguably before Citizens United went into effect, but they had lots of other ways of bundling and giving as individuals -- and the reality is, unions, the Trial Attorneys of America, and even corporations of course gave to the Democratic Party. I continued to debate him, and some hefty middleaged lefty came up and began telling me to shut up, to "let him talk".

I pointed out that as the young hipster was occuping a park and Times Square and carrying a large sign, it was perfectly fine to challenge him -- he had the louder voice. He kept objecting.

"What, are you saying we can't talk back to the occupiers?" I challenged him.

Put that way, gosh, they sound like those evil people in Palestine and Afghanistan, eh? Occupiers...

A girl came up and started ranting at me that the Republicans had taken over Congress. I replied that Obama was in the White House, the Democrats still had a lot of power, and, well, those Republicans got elected, and which means Obama wasn't persuasive. She was furious at me.

I asked the young man if he had health care -- he did. He acknowledged that he was well off, but that he had to come down and help other people -- he wasn't living in the park but joined the group a week and a half ago, he said.

I pointed out that I hadn't elected the people occupying the square, and that it wasn't democratic in that regard, it was just hijacking power if it actually considered occupying squares, banks, streets, buildings, etc. and if it grew. This was coercive.

A middle-aged Russian woman came up and began huffily telling me that *she* would vote for them and they were all great people. I said that they weren't so hot if they were in fact going to undo elections, and it looked like stop people from even being able to contribute to campaigns, as if they got their way, elections would be federally funded.

I began to speak to her in Russian, and pointed out the similarities between the Bolsheviks, and how they swept to power by closing the parliament and taking over in the streets, and how there were some similarities here.

"Have you forgotten your roots?" I asked her. She seemed not only shocked that I was speaking to her in Russian, but shocked that anyone would challenge what was supposed to be The People's Movement.

There is a fond fantasy -- and I even share it at times -- that "movements" like this will spark conversations, debates, "the re-evaluation of values," as the Communists used to say. That there will be some genuine questioning and searching. But this young man kept repeating the slogans on his sign, and this hefty lefty who had marched up the minute I questioned The People kept telling me to shut up. Eventually, I drifted away  -- you can't reason with people who so viscerally and hysterically hate corporations and the rich and Wall Street as some kind of package, that you can't get them to see that here and there, might be good corporations or that the corporations as an entity wasn't necessarily any evil, but in fact a good in society.

POLICE CONFUSION

Now a word on the police. They did not seem to be terribly organized. I'm not sure why, as there was plenty of warning of this event, and they of course had all the police gates set up and plenty of officers on hand. The crowd got large and it became hard to move fairly quickly, but the pen concept didn't work as planned.

For one, there was no portals along the police fences to come in and out of the large pens -- there were three or four of them staged along 43-46th Streets, in areas that are sometimes closed off for pedestrians to mill around in Times Square anyway. So if you hadn't managed to get into the pens in the first rush in the first half hour or so, but you wanted to be in the demonstration and had come with your sign, you were forced to arrange yourself along the police barriers and wave your sign at your fellow sign-wavers.I was there fairly early, before the crowd got to its peak, and I couldn't get into the pen unless I walked about four blocks through a crushing crowd and shouting policemen, and then managed to enter way at the top of the third or fourth pen.

The problem with this pen concept as deployed is that once you also had tourists trying to get through to the Hard Rock Cafe or their Broadway show, and gawkers just trying to take pictures of "this historical moment" plus shoppers at Sephora and the other stores, the sidewalks rapidly filled up, and the police began shouting at everyone to move along.

It would have been a good idea to open up even one police gate per pen and let the sign-wavers into and out of the pen, particularly those coming later, but anyone trying to move the gates were pushed along, and only very skinny young kids were sliding through. So the whole mess pushed and shoved aimlessly.

At one point the police kept sweeping us along with their arms shouting "Go South! Go South" as they pushed us...northwards. Then as people tried to cross the street to get away from the dangerously burgeoning crowd on the sidewalk, one policeman shouted us to "Come this way, come this way" even as parodoxically another shouted to us "No, go that way, go that way" -- ensuring that two streams of people collided crossing the street and made more of a mess.

This is the sort of thing that people invoked at the Brooklyn Bridge, and one can see how it happens -- two officers with different vantage points trying to move crowds and people not listening (and in this particular crowd, there were quite a few foreign tourists who may not have understood English very well). Of course, with Brooklyn Bridge, even if some people didn't hear, and even if police gave contradictory advice, the real story of what was happening is that the cadres had linked arms and shouted "take the bridge, take the bridge" and headed into the street.

There comes a time in these marches -- and I've seen it before -- when you see the people who are the hardliners and extremists trying to whip up the crowd, or the seasoned cadres trying to turn the movement more radical, swing into action. And somehow, the police are not matched to that kind of stealth organizing.

One man began walking through the crowd methodically and intoning like some 1950s news announcer that people all over the globe were marching in revolution, the revolution was here! This caused people to swell up with shouting and cheering.

A group of young women and men appeared like pop-ups with Global Revolution is Here signs and all began chanting, "What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? Now".

OWS operatives appeared out of the subways with armloads of newspapers -- agitprop is here! -- but it was stale -- Oct. 8's edition, nothing new, alas, probably they hadn't managed to deploy another $20,000 on the print job?

Now several young men were shimmying up streetlight poles and shouting hoarsely "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" over and over again. The graduate-thesis-sign-bearers were starting to get drowned out by these types. But by now, the STOP THE DRONES guy was in place with his very camera-worthy display, and you could almost believe there was an antiwar movement -- unless you had wandered through this crowd for two hours and seen only two other signs and seen most people chanting at best "We are the 99 percent" -- surely one of the most witless cries of a protest group in American history. It was originally intended, no doubt, to cunningly combine woe-is-me self-pity with eat-the-rich class hatred -- yet it results in  a crazy monkey-math proposition. Wait, I found myself thinking. Doesn't the 99 percent contain some people exploiting workers, not paying for health insurance, behaving greedily on Wall Street?

Some of the tourists by now were pretty mad at having their way blocked, and were swearing at the demonstrators. Others -- these would be Germans -- would fawningly clap for the demonstrators, even waving to them from the top of tour buses -- and cluck that the poor Americans were trapped in pens like prisons.

Well, no. They're in pens so that they don't block the sidewalks and the streets? And that's ok?

Except, naturally, as in every other occasion by the OWS operatives, they did block the streets -- in part due to that problem I noted where the pens had no ingress and egress.

POLICE ON THE MOVE

I decided to walk all the way around the block away from Times Square to see if I could get closer to the STOP THE DRONES people to see if any of them were saying anything. I saw four police on horseback letting tourists pet the horses who hadn't deployed near the demonstrations yet.

As I stood just across from the Recruitment Center, I saw the police move in their main troops. They brought some officers in riot helmets in vans and began to sort of march them around the square. I saw this tall, willowy black policewoman seem to falter in her step, adjusting her riot helmet, and frown. I looked into the face of this black police officer, whose policing had probably consisted before then of handing out DWI tickets or responding to domestic violence calls, and I wondered if she was really up for this knocking of heads.

Another group of officers in caps but with billy clubs were brought in, and I saw them ordered to march toward the demonstrators, but then they all seemed to straggle and stop as the person who had given the order then summoned them all back. They huddled for a bit, and then set of again, stopping short of the police barriers. Again, that sense of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time, and this, with those idiot marchers crying THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING over every little thing. The officers with the COMMUNITY blue aprons on had ceased telling people to stop congregating along the police barriers, so there was now a big crowd, like at a parade.

I watched as first a big brawny man in a too-short t-shirt not reaching his pants was arrested and perp-walked in front of the cameras, then woman in her 30s with long black hair. It was strange, as there seemed to be orderly crowds inside the pens, a huge empty block just above 42nd Street, and nothing to get arrested *for*. Except...those cadres climbing up on streetlight posts, those people pushing back the police gates -- they were disobeying direct orders of police. And for that they were getting arrested. Understandably.

The International People's League of...something had taken over one of the pens by the Recruitment Center and were hollering and passing out leaflets. Police were shouting to people to move along, go home, and I tried to see if  the subway was now going to be "occupied". I had to go meet my daughter for dinner so I walked away -- and I saw a lot of other people had the same idea. It was sort of funny to suddenly see all the little street cafes and sushi bars in the theater district fill up with people with cardboard signs tucked under the arms....

ORDINARY PEOPLE?

Press reports and of course "movement" reports of these events always accentuate that "ordinary people" are coming to them and "even bringing their kids". That's just fake. I saw at the most, out of several thousand people, perhaps 3 or 4 couples with strollers. I saw one family where the lefty parents had handed out signs saying PLAY FAIR to their five-year-old and three-year-old. Honestly, people bringing kids to a situation like this -- where there is crowding and people deliberately provoking to get arrested -- it's just insane.

As I walked away, I heard ambulances coming to the scene -- and it turns out a policeman was hurt.

This picture summed up the scene -- the people playing to the cameras, the news ticker dutifully reporting their "global" movement. How eerie it was, gazing up at those huge icons of capitalism, the ads for beverages and jeans and makeup and smart phones that many in the crowd were wearing or using, an ad for their hated Fox News with a red rubber bouncing ball, bright lights and neon, and then below, everybody taking pictures of everybody else on their phones or cameras.

Is the movement growing? Are there more and more people "taking to the streets"? I don't think so, now having seen three OWS events. They each seem to have only a few thousands -- but lots more gawking and taking pictures. The lack of demands might be annoying to some, but I know that for these cadres, it's just a tactic -- one guy demonstratively in front of the TV vans had a sign saying NO DEMANDS NO SOUND BITES!!! -- although the entire "We are the 99 percent" *is* a sound bite extraordinaire.

Some people have come with their own causes they are trying to get heard above the din of the "We are the 99 percent" mindlessness. There are a few signs against fracking in upstate New York or stopping the use of coal; there was one sign against the misleadingly-dubbed "Let Women Die" bill in Congress.

 "We are Not Anonymous!" said one man's sign, but I saw about a half dozen of the Guy Fawkes Anonymous signs -- again, most pushed up on people's heads.

So are these ordinary, everyday people? Oh, I don't think so. I think it is a cadre-run operation that has spread to some cohorts of young people and scenesters but it seems that the rank and file are mainly made up of old DSA members and WBAI listeners and such who want to relive their youth and their hopes for a real movement to appear. I've been in marches with half a million people in New York and in Moscow, so I know what "democracy looks like". It doesn't look like an International ANSWER cadre ranting Marxist-Leninist slogans.

Could this movement in time acquire more "ordinary people"? It's not clear if it has the social strength or self-awareness to jettison or repel the Marxist sectarians, especially as Marxism is embedded in their very 99 percent shtick as a kind of time bomb -- 99 percent, i.e. supposedly including very wealthy, too, and supposedly only asking for taxation, and yet ready to holler for overthrowing capitalism and demanding global revolution at the drop of a Guy Fawkes' mask.

Say, Could It Be About Choice, And Not About "Letting Women Die"?

I've been hearing for months about the "Let Women Die" bill, reading it always from left-wing and "progressive" blogs that have grown more and more hysterical and exaggerated -- the entire "War on Women" concept is one I have to question precisely because the agitprop around it is so thick and the hateful invective so strong. Come on, you lefties, you have a president in the White House, the Democrats are in the majority in the SENATE at least [correction!], what are you afraid of? Oh, you are afraid you won't hang on to power? Why would that be?

Every time somebody winds up the pitch in defense of Planned Parenthood's funding, and claims it will be slashed and women will sicken and die, I  wrinkle my forehead. Wait. Planned Parenthood would provide free gynecological services? Really? They do free pap smears and check-ups and mammograms and stuff? Wow, I never heard of that. Where do I sign up for that free neighbourhood medical care for all women!

...And I conclude that it's bullshit. If they technically provide those generic services "for women's health" free of charge or at a very low cost, it's not their center of gravity (see their name).  I've never, ever seen it advertised (say, in the Village Voice) or heard of it being available for people like me without health care. So claiming that women, especially poor women of colour, are going to be suffering or will even die without needed medical care because this...birth control agency...didn't provide to them always struck me as fake. Make your case, if you must, but don't lie about it.

Now I see this entire discussion has gotten even more shrill and disgusting.

Jezebel -- which I thought was trendy but still fairly mainstream -- has picked up this hateful cudgel that I thought would have been more of the gawker.com or alter.net variety (but Jezebel and Gawker are really faces of the same property).

So I decided to step up and answer (on my Prokofy account).

It's important to remember that this is a bill, not a law, but don't let that stop you from having a good hearty hate fest.

I'd like you to identify for me, Jezebel, a use case where:

1. A woman would somehow not be going to an abortion clinic, but would be going to a hospital for an abortion.

2. A woman who had somehow failed to get to an abortion clinic, say, in the first trimester, and now had to go a hospital becauase of a life-threatening emergency.

3. A woman who had *only* a Catholic hospital to chose from, in this dire moment when she suddenly needed an abortion, having failed to go to an abortion clinic in time before.

4. A woman who actually had a *life-threatening emergency requiring an abortion* (truly, a medical rarity) AND had to go to a Catholic hospital because...there simply was no other hospital for 50 miles.

Now, once you take off your hate and snark glasses and try to think about this rationally, surely you'll agree that the cases of women who absolutely have to have an urgent abortion or they will die, and absolutely have to go to a Catholic hospital (or some other religious hospital that refused abortions on religious grounds) would be either a highly unlikely theoretical instance, or a very, very tiny minority of pregnant women. If you can cite any such cases that have ever happened, please do. You're not likely to be able to do so.

That would be hard for you to admit, though, wouldn't it, because then you couldn't get to have this malicious glee and this exaggerated notion that there is actually some "let women die" bill.

There is no bill calling to "let women die" or "killing citizens" -- because the circumstances when this set of circumstances might actually occur are so rare and so finite and small as to utterly beg the question of your spinning of it. There appears to be another thing -- bill that enables Catholic hospitals that do not wish to perform abortions not to be forced to do so by the state.

You *are* against state intrusion and not having the state force people to do things, right? That notion of separation of church and state is one you uphold, correct?

So...Surely it should be about choice? Choice for the Catholic hospital, too, you know? Again, it's not as if there aren't plenty of abortion clinics and secular hospitals, even in remote and rural areas.

And if there really is that use case out there -- that pregnant woman who now finds her life in danger -- medical rarity though it may be -- and who can't go anywhere but to a Catholic hospital, likely some non-Catholic doctor will be found -- and even Catholic physicians, were the mother's life truly at stake (and that's a theoretical that doesn't occur anywhere near as often as you imagine) might make a decision you would favour.

Hospitals in American don't refuse emergency care to people; they provide it at very high cost to themselves, in fact. Yet there is an issue here that private hospitals and physicians should continue to have the right they already had, which was to refuse to perform abortions. (Edit comment)

Second Life Pink Hands Prototype OWS Security

Pink Beret security for the Occupy Atlanta mob. Film by Breitbart TV.

Pink beret using sign for "quiet" in Occupy Atlanta meeting.

I frequently comment on the great prototyping power of Second Life, the online virtual world .

Both tech and mainstream media tend to dismiss this online community these days as a place of failed business models and cybersexers but they should look at the bigger picture (or fine print?) Much has been prototyped there not only by the developers and various interest groups that use it but by the notorious Anonymous/LulzSec and related hacker groups.

WikiLeaks was prefigured by The Wrong Hands -- long before the WikiLeaks cables broke in real life, there was a break-in of the virtual Justice League United (JLU) database that contained reports on griefers in SL (people who crash servers, harass and heckle others, etc.)

The Wrong Hands had another round of activity this summer as they tried to keep tracking the JLU, and then got themselves permabanned for using unlawful methods to track others that they themselves were complaining -- a kind of Spy vs. Spy.

For tens of thousands of posts on the popular forum Sluniverse.com, The Wrong Hands has been trying to keep hacking into the dbase and publicizing documents that they think will somehow rally the masses to great indignation about the vigilante JLU -- but so far they've failed to come up with any smoking guns that prove the material wasn't in the public domain already or wasn't in fact legitimate journalistic reporting on the actual malicious actions of the griefers.

So to advance their cause, The Wrong Hands designed a pink uniformed brigade with berets that will be the new order-keepers in SL, to wrest that role away from the hated spandex-clad superheroes of the JLU. Weeks ago, they prototyped their designs, and an assortment of furries, vampires, blingtards and BDSM queens have been parading around in the outfits.

Last week the Herald anniversary party-goers all donned the outfit.

And now, you can see what OWS is doing to "manage security". They now have people in pink outfits with pink berets who are "maintaining order".

Pink Hands sign posted by SL avatar Elysium Hynes Oct. 2.

Which came first? From my observation, the prototyping in SL, by the same people who are active in Anonymous and its offshoots in SL, are the ones who made this uniform -- and Anonymous in real life is now exporting it there.

I see the first The Pink Hands pink uniform and beret screenshot posted September 24 -- there are references to it even earlier.

The first scenes of people in the pink shirts and pink berets maintaining order in the Occupy meetings came this week, although I see references to them in the General Assembly transcripts as well.

But more research is needed to check date stamps and such. One thing's for certain, these pink berets in the OWS mobs bear some careful watching as they are the shock troopers of this new totalitarian movement.

Pixleen Mistral (Mark McCahill), avid Anonymous supporter, sporting the Pink Hands beret at the 8th anniversary of the Alphaville Herald. Nearby is the lavender pwnie created by Linden Lab CEO which just happens to mimic The Pink Hands colours -- a fact the Herald gloats about -- and of course mimics the Bronies, whose founder was yet another incarnation of the banned Tizzers Foxchase, supporter of the b/tards/PNs etc in SL.

 

Should the Feds Get to See Jacob Appelbaum's E-mail?

I'm a huge critic of Jacob Appelbaum, whom I've documented as an open-source cultist and thuggish heckler of critics on Twitter. He's also a liar, claiming that US soldiers deliberately killed children in Iraq when they could not have possibly known that there were children in a vehicle of a driver who stopped to help wounded, armed persons whom were shot at by the US soldiers from a helicopter. The entire incident -- tendentiously released by WikiLeaks -- had enough problematic features to it and a need for investigation and more caution without tarting it up and lying about it. That they can and do lie and do so shamelessly taints everything about WikiLeaks.

I don't care for Tor or the cult around it, and it means nothing to me that the "government supports it" or "the government funds part of it". There are all kinds of goofs in government; it isn't some conservative establishment -- in some agencies, it's a war between "progressives" and liberals and conservatives over policy, inch by inch, paper by paper, grant by grant. I'm for fighting that war. Jacob's dining out on this credential doesn't mean he is somehow blessed or exempt from punishment if he commits a crime against the United States.

And he is suspected of aiding and abetting Julian Assange and others in the activist anarchist collective WikiLeaks which did indeed incite and benefit from the theft of classified US government documents as everyone knows. The question is whether they were actually involved in the stealing or only took advantage of Bradley Manning. Hopefully this will come out at trial.

Now, given my views of him, do I think the government should get to seize Jacob's email?

No, not unless they have a warrant. Yes, he's one of those arrogant e-thugs who goes around thuggishly abetting anti-American forces and hates government (except when it gives him a grant or a resume-booster), and yes he's objectively harming US diplomacy with this activity. But if the government went snooping in the email of every e-thug, they wouldn't have time to track the real criminals.  Jacob is ultimately most likely to be what the Soviets called "an agent of influence" and not an actual subversive.

But we don't know, and if the US has a warrant for "probable cause," they should read his email to see if he actively helped steal government documents. That's ok to do. That's not only what a police state does; that's what a liberal democratic society protecting the rule of law, its citizens, its foreign interests, does when somebody steals its cables. Jacob is not a journalist; he's a technologist who helps people hide their tracks, and hides his own awfully well, too.

Julia Angwin at the Wall Street Journal, who is a very good technology reporter, author of a critical book about MySpace, certainly no wide-eyed fangirl about Silicon Valley and its ilk, seems to take the view in this piece that the government shouldn't get Jacob's email in a secret court order anyway because that would be government overreach.

The government tried to get Twitter to cooperate and failed -- and we heard nothing about it. Then they *did* get a *secret* court order and went to a company named Sonic that had information, and Sonic lost a court battle to resist them:

The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Sonic said it fought the government's order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was "rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do," said Sonic's chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government's request included the email addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years

The rest of this article is behind a paywall and no, I'm not linking to John Perry Barlow's copybotted copy of it from Twitter -- another e-thug.

The question seems to be: should the court order not be secret? But then, if it isn't secret, how could you effectively fight people who have stolen a quarter of a million of diplomatic cables? I think it's ok to debate these issues. The law for electronic documents uses the term "reasonable grounds" instead of "probable cause". So perhaps it *is* unlawful and unconstitutional regarding unreasonable search and seizure -- but this should be debated.

Here's the problem. Do we want our world ruled by e-thugs like Jacob Appelbaum, unaccountable to anyone? No one wants police-state activity but the feds do now have a warrant. Not cooperating with that warrant sets up the proposition of anarchy or at least selective civil disobedience from the very powerful social media platforms and Internet services of Silicon Valley. Is this what we're going to see more of -- their defiance of democratic government rule?

Some people loathe the thought of losing privacy to the feds more than the thought of the privacy they already lost to Facebook or Twitter. They think those platform providers might be more trustworthy at the end of the day, especially if they defy requests from the G-men to peruse IP addresses and content of email.

I'm not sure this is a good bargain, having Mark Zuckerberg run our government and society just because he is big and all-powerful -- and I'm definitely sure I don't want Jacob Appelbaum to do it. So what this comes down to is a power struggle, and not a pretty one, and one without pretty choices.

The government's argument was persuasive. They said IP addresses are akin to phone numbers, not exact locators. In fact, to hear snotty geeks on forums tell it, IP addresses aren't akin to phone numbers but could be only a vague geographic location, plus they dynamically change, plus different people share them. Der, we get all that. Even so, they are one identifier. And the government asks for phone records all the time when a crime is suspected, so getting coy about IP addresses seems really edge-casing it and Fisking it for sure.

Geeks endlessly argue (and they do on the WSJ as well) as to whether these addresses are fixed or dynamic or are in a range. (Um, they're often in a range, but they can be fixed and not dynamic, too, so both are true -- anyone running a blog sees that basic truth.)

I do have to wonder why the WSJ titles this piece "Secret Orders Target Email" when...a court order was obtained even if secret. In terrorist-related cases, court orders can be secret too. It's simply not the case that every single secret court order is evil, given what we face. And the terrorism of e-thugs taking down government and corporate sites and causing millions of dollars of damages is real harm, like real-world terrorism against people and buildings, even if a lesser crime. So why is the WSJ denouncing it? It's part of that conservative fear of "Big Government," I guess -- they want to make sure the government -- especially the Obama Administration! -- doesn't get to stock up on secret powers to do secret stuff. Understood. All to the good.

Probably this could be fixed by revising the law to tighten up the language and make the act not secret unless some really persuasive "clear and present danger" of compelling nature could be cited, and certainly the person searched should get a notification of it.

What I would like to ensure is that this debate isn't, "Waaaaa, Jakie's civil rights are violated and gummint is evil" -- I want it to be a debate about this: what do you do when Jacob, e-thug extraordinaire, whose life work consists of hiding things online deliberately to evade governments, who has lied outrageously about US government intents, and has aided and abetted WikiLeaks, claims that the government shouldn't read his email and has no case about his involvement in a crime?" I do think that does have to be the debate and not abstract civil rights invocations as if no crime took place. A crime *did* take place -- and half the people whining about rights here don't think it did -- that is the key problem. The government has to make its case -- and in this case, it has blundered around.

Yes, that means they will hide their tracks better. If you look at the war between the feds and Anonymous, the feds have taken some dozen prisoners, but they're losing. And I personally do not want them to lose, because what Anonymous represents is a far more horrible fate for all of us. It's sad that more people aren't conscious of this.

It may never be possible to tie Assange or Appelbaum to the theft of government documents. That doesn't mean that a moral condemnation of them can't be made -- it surely can and should.

One good thing comes out of this, in terms of Twit fights and forums battles: the geekiest geek of them all has filed, with his lawyers, a motion to vacate a court order based on the grounds that IP addresses *are* locators. So for everymore, one can site that to shush these people saying it isn't, eh?

Of course, with all this hub-ub, the tracks *are* long ago destroyed and "we may never know".

 PS

Boingboing has naturally taken Appelbaum's site, and reported this "awesomeness":

Security researcher Christopher Soghoian tweets, "Not only did Sonic.net fight the court order from DOJ, but it has now adopted a 2 week data retention policy for IP logs. Awesome."

So, welcome to the Wired State, it's pretty much being ushered in. No democratic, elected government will be able to control it.

 

What's in The People's Library at Occupy Wall Street?

Map of Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Square

From the first reports of the bunch of people "occupying Wall Street," I was intrigued by accounts of their formation of a library.

What was in this People's Library? I wondered. Was it all Marxist Workers' World tracts and Chomsky screeds? (Worker's World was stacked around covering up some of the book titles.) 

They were seeking donations -- would they take, oh, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" I wondered?

When I got to the teeming square, I had to ask people earnestly cooking or giving interviews to the media -- who almost seemed to outnumber the protestors -- where the Library was. 'I think it's up there, somewhere," a middle-aged woman told me who was taking names for volunteer groups. I couldn't seem to find it in the welter of people and wires with laptops -- and asked again. "Isn't it up there?" a woman vaguely pointed.

The People's Library is a stretch of book stall such as you might find in Union Square, perhaps several dozen feet along a wall, inside a sunken plaza below the sidewalk level. This arrangement means that the hovering librarians -- there were at least 4 or 5 while I was there -- had constantly to warn photographers trying to get a purchase position to film the march, or protesters in the street, to stop kicking over their books -- some of which were propped up on the top of the wall.

There was a plastic pouch to donate money and yards of plastic sheeting -- it has been raining a lot lately.

I asked a young man if he could tell me about the library and he pointed to the Internet site, then turned me over to a young white woman with buzz-cut dark hair who looked to be about 19 or 20 in a white tee-shirt with the slogan about Corporate Greed, whose name was Briar.

"You talk to her," he said to Briar, signalling I might be a "live one".

She cautioned to me that she did not represent anything, that what she was saying was only her own point of view, that she was just helping out.

Asked about the content of the library, she explained that it was "related to the questions addressed by the movement."

I asked what "the movement" was.

She paused and looked to her fellow librarians -- it turned out they were all students from an anthropology course -- as they stopped to think, too.  Clearly, they had thought about this, and either felt they couldn't define it or it shouldn't be defined so it could "remain fluid" (as movement people always claim they are remaining before they solidify into that sectarian strait-jacket that first animated them.)

I tried another tack. "Can you donate just anything? Can you donate, oh, I dunno, books by the Koch brothers?"

"We do not censor," Briar explained. "We have even actual librarians here." It's based basically on enthusiasm, she assured me.

"They want there to be books," she said. "Information belongs to everyone. People should have access to information."

Well, information doesn't belong to *everyone* -- who was really cooking up this occupation and financing it, for example, wasn't exactly explicit and remains opaque even from the airy references in the Occupy Wall Street Journal -- being handed out to the crowd fresh off (the hopefully union) presses -- both to Ad-Busters and Anonymous. (Ugh on both of those; both are manipulative of public consciousness with little or no accountability for themselves.)

"Information needs to be shared," said Briar.

I asked Briar if she subscribed to the slogan "Information wants to be free." She had never heard of it. Well, she couldn't have been more than 20, and fortunately, the geeky opensourceniks -- on evidence from the hacker youths and tangle of laptops and in the lists of working groups -- hadn't reached everyone with their cult.

I explained the saying came from Richard Stallman and his followers in the free software movement (remember, these sectarians don't identify "open source" as coterminous) and she pondered the saying for a bit, turning it over in her mind -- but I felt she found it rather strange and anthropomorphic...or something...and seemed to prefer the "Information needs to be shared" as the better slogan -- and I tend to agree.

She explained that her father was head of a university IT department and she grew up interested in open source, making books available on line, making research more accessible.

I asked her who her political grandfathers were. This term -- "political grandfathers" -- is itself a kind of throwback to Trotskyist discussions of the 1960s or 1980s, but it's a useful question to ask. For example, my political grandfathers include C.S. Lewis and E.P. Thompson -- as different as they are -- or Aryeh Neier and Victor Navasky -- as much as I might disagree with them -- and the Soviet human rights advocates Andrei Sakharov and Ludmila Alexeyeva (grandmothers are ok to have, too).

Briar thought about this, but didn't really understand what I was getting at. I tried different other questions. What had she read? What groups had she heard of? Had she ever heard of DSA?

"DSA?" she asked, quizzically.

"The Democratic Socialists of America," I said.

"No, I don't know what the Democratic. Socialists. of America are," she said tensely and patiently as if humouring me.

"They're not so active any more, " I explained.

"I'm anti-authoritarian," Briar said firmly -- and again cautioned that she wasn't attempting to represent anybody.

Sigh. What are they afraid of? Will one of the cadres from the cadre-run organizations come over and reprimand her?

"It's just the Internet," I reassured her. "It's just my little blog." I gave her my name and this blog's name.

"I don't want to be misrepresented on your blog," she said worriedly.

I don't think I've misrepresented her here. She's an earnest young woman who believes in her mission, while not perhaps terribly informed -- but that's a relative concept and clearly she's bright and educated and goes to university. She told me she doesn't actually live in the square but lives uptown and comes downtown to help.

And now -- for the titles, as many as I could manage to write down -- I will look up the complete references in due course.

Neoliberalism by Harvey

Hard Times by Studs Terkel

Tin House -- Class in America (this is a magazine)

Conquest of Mind by Eknath and Easwaran

Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Ayn Rand reader

*Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

The (*) represents what I saw as "staff's picks" -- the books arranged on the top of the wall. I asked another one of the People's Librarians if indeed these *were* staff's picks, or reader's choices, and she said they were, to some extent, but they also were books that had been put out to dry after it rained.

We both roared with laughter.

*The First Two Novels by Lisa Scottoline.

This was a legal thriller, and one middle-aged Hispanic woman taking a copy thanked the librarians for having novels, as well, and told her friend that she liked the way they provided fun reading as well. I imagine the nights get long and boring in Zuccotti Square and it might be hard to sleep in the cold, with 300 other people restless nearby and the laptops needing to recharge -- then these books might be really appreciated.

*The Road to Tahrir Square

*Unorthodox Marxism by Michael Albert

*Progress and Poverty by Henry George

*The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

*Asylum Denied

*The Turning by Tim Winton

Votescam

*Rebels in Paradise (on the LA art scene)

*No Exit by J.P. Sartres

*In Defense of Affirmative Action

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

Vanity Fair by Thackeray

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (I moved this up to "reader's picks" and told Briar that I had this at home, in the original and in another translation, and that Bazarov, the nihilist, would be right at home here on the square.)

I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can

The Plums by Jane Evanovitch (novels)

*Mars the Living Planet

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

Collision Course by Joseph McCartin (about air traffic controllers' strike)

*No Impact Man: Adventures of a Guilty Liberal

*Racism:  A Short History by George Frederickson

*The Autobiography of Mother Jones (this, a well-worn paperback that kept falling from the wall as photographers kicked the books, and several of us kept restoring it to its place)

*The Central Park Five

*Race and Social Analysis

*Homothug (claiming to be a conspiracy theory about Guiliani being a closet gay)

By now, the crowd was larger and someone else -- a reporter? -- was asking the woman who had laughingly told me that the "staff's picks" were really books drying out in the rain -- what were the most popular books and most requested?

"Chomsky and Howard Zinn," she answered promptly.

These two have infected enormous swathes of young people's minds because they are countercultural bibles that have now become practically mainstream on university reading lists -- people imbibe them uncritically and think they represent the secrets of the universe.

I didn't see books by these propagandists in the stall, but that's presumably because they were taken out.

I never did really get the "system" for how to handle the books. It seemed hard for the librarians to just say "Take it but bring it back."

I asked Briar if you could take them, but only read them here in the square. She deflected the question with a statement that the books "belonged to everyone."

I was supposed to be mastering the New Utopia's line, see.

Each book was marked with a magic-marker on the top: OWSL (Occupy Wall Street Library)

Finally, somewhat reassured that I was harmless, Briar divulged to me a wrinkled, much-thumbed two-page policy paper from the People's Library.

Like libraries the world over, it was painfully bureaucratic but after studying it for awhile I could surmise that cataloguing was a big problem, and aspirations ran as far as having inter-library loan, presumably with other People's Libraries. (And I hope to get enough time and energy to start one myself.)

What came across primarily is that this People's Library -- whatever its haphazard actual contents -- was a kind of symbolic collection of knowledge that the Librarians wanted to hold sacred and protect -- they didn't want the books thrown around or covering each others' titles (signs warned that you should keep the spines in view and not cover up titles for other browsers), they wanted the stall to be protected in the event of rain or huge crowds.

I wondered why you'd want to catalogue something that was running to the fluid and chaotic. While I stood there, a young lesbian couple approached and asked nervously if they could take the Margaret Atwood. "Of course," I said, in People's Library fashion. "Just bring it back..." I began to explain. "...Hopefully," as I saw them wander away from the march.

It struck me that if you had a system like The Strand in the form of an ap, you would just scan the ISBN thing with a smartphone and it would automatically make a list. Someone will probably make such a thing, as painfully writing the titles down is too hard -- as I've tried to do here, capturing probably not even 10 percent of the titles (but giving a good idea of the sample of what is there).

There was also a batch of kids' books which I didn't even get to look at.

As the marchers began to arrive, Briar instructed that we should form a "wall of people" to protect the collection. I quickly turned my back to the stall along with others to make the human wall, and fell into conversation with one of the marchers. She was one of those insufferable America-hating Australians who whined in self-entitled self-inflicted misery that "they" (the police) had "forced them" to walk on the sidewalk and wasn't it horrible and cruel.

I kept my own counsel because I could see that she wasn't really someone you could reason with. But I had to wonder: why do you get to block traffic? You were asked to stay on the sidewalk and not block buses and cars. Why can't you do that? It's not like there's that many of you. These were state workers -- teachers, nurses, clerks, transit workers. Why do they get to hold up other people from getting home from work -- and prevent their fellow transit workers from doing their jobs?

All in all, I felt a little bit better about this clearly cadre-inspired sectarian Occupy Wall Street "movement" because still and all, there were people in it who seemed to care about books. To be sure, they were mainly "progressive" and sectarian books and even outright conspiracy theories -- and nothing at all that represented any kind of treasures of Western civilization, even with Ivanhoe. And I don't think if you tried to insert, oh, Glenn Beck's works into this mix that the People's knowledge workers might not throw them in the trash.

Even so, I felt that the spirit that these anthropology students were trying to embody was one that involved passing knowledge from the ages down to the next generations.

I asked one librarian if they had E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. She had not heard of it, or him, although it used to be a classic.

I tried to think what I would donate or what this library needed -- Paul Hollander's The End of Commitment which I'm reading now might be a good start, given all the shrill Marxist eat-the-rich signs.

But to be honest, I was kind of drawing a blank, feeling as if I was in the teeth of a big storm -- raging about were the vast winds of the ages that blow away people and ideas, never to bring them back. I longed for the days of pamphlets -- pamphlets people really read and studied, before the Internet (Thompson wrote a lot of them, and short books like Protest and Survive.)

"Do young people really read the books," I asked Briar anxiously. Most of the people at the stalls were middle-aged or elderly, as it happened at that moment, other than one young black man taking down the Racism book.

"Oh, yes," she assured me.

"But don't you all just read your smartphones and your ipads?" I asked? The news of Steve Jobs death had not yet circulated.

"Oh, no," she continued to assure me.

"I mean, really sit, with the book in your hands, and engage with the book?" I continued to pester her.

"Oh, yes."

I stayed another few hours following the crowds and the signs, before it began to get a little too crowded and angry with people pushing.

I went home to celebrate my son's birthday, as we discussed the news of Steve Jobs' passing, and drank tea out of our  beloved "Prof. Thompson cups" saved for special family occasions -- the fine Yorkshire porcelain cups that Edward gave me for a wedding present in 1988.

 

 

Occupying Themselves

From Occupy Wall Street Journal

I spent about five hours observing the march last Wednesday related to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, most of the time hanging out at Zuccotti Park, which is the privately-owned park open 24 hours to the public that the organizers have taken over. That doesn't make me an expert, but it merely means I pried a little bit more than most of the journalists crawling over the area,who tended to focus on the camera-worthy scenes of people shouting slogans or ranting about evil capitalism.

The liberal, libertarian-- and even conservative -- press is extremely giddy about the appearance of this movement. They're relieved that finally there is something that looks and smells like a movement that isn't the Tea Party. It's been hard for the liberal media in particular, touting as they have all these years the authenticity of people power and grassroots activism, covering it in places like Egypt or Tunisia, and then seeing that for the last few years here, it's taken a form they don't like here, associated with Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman. A magazine like the New Yorker is then reduced to trying to portray the Tea Party as all funded by the Koch brothers-- as if organizations like moveon.org and other lefty outlets aren't the mirror images already funded for years by the Soros and MacArthur Foundations and other progressive institutions.

Movements -- as I know from taking part in my first protest march at the age of 14 with Unitarian Universalists in Rochester, NY against the Vietnam war, and from participating in peace marches with the Mobilization for Survival in the 1980s -- can start out very radical and then spread and accommodate more mainstream concerns and people. Even so, there are worlds of political and cultural differences between the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, Charles Manson -- and the Universalists of Rochester, NY. By the 1970s, the beat and hippie movements of the 1950s and 1960s were commercialized into a lot of head shops selling beads and rolling papers, record stores, and jeans outlets, and the roach clip became  a recipe holder. What will happen to OWS?

Liberal media has been quite fascinated with the utopian outlines of "a city on a hill" incipient in the layout of the Zuccotti Square occupation (it really isn't an occupation of Wall Street per se). Why, these people aren't just dirty hippies and druggies, they organized themselves into a place that has a kitchen, a medical station, a volunteer sign-up table where people divide into task groups, a press area, a library, and a General Assembly -- named for just that very organ that was meeting at that same time in the UN (see map above).

I had to chuckle at the press area -- here we're supposed to be overthrowing our corporate overlords, eh? Sticking it to the man? But the most sacred place on the plaza -- kept scrupolously free of other movement people and gawkers even during the height of marches -- the place more sacred than the sacred drumming circle area -- is the area marked MEDIA for the mainstream media to set up their cameras. Hah! No mere blogging mortals need sit down -- move along, this is for the *real* news cameras! Manning the sacred mass media space are some geeky kids running laptops and cameras in a tangle of wires, streaming their own version of events and winnowing the impressions of the mainstream with the "alternative."

I'll do a separate post just on the library, which was fascinating, but as to the other aspects of this makeship utopianist town:

Piles and piles of soggy sleeping bags and inadequate plastic (it had been pouring rain) -- that makes up most of the view.

The kitchen was staffed by those earnest types you see at RenFaires and flea markets -- chaotic but clean with lots of organic bean sprouts and cut veggies -- there was an enormous bin labelled "Grey Water" (water that is from washing dishes which can be used for washing other things) with a makeshift filter created out of tree branches and leaves. Dinner was served to a contingent of mainly older men who looked like Bowery bums -- it consisted of greasy green beans on paper plates.

The group there of 300 or 500 or so is diverse, in the fake way that movements like this always try to advertise themselvse as diverse. Yes, there are Rastifarians, dreadlocks done up in huge knitted caps; yes there are Trustifarians, well dressed and thumbing expensive smart-phones and carrying latte cups, yes there are a lot of fresh-faced high school and college kids from upstates wearing clean white t-shirts denouncing corporate greed; yes, there are People of Colour and People of Paleness working shoulder to shoulder. Yes, there were 87-year-old ladies with their walkers and a sign saying "I'm mad as hell."

The third sacred space (Media and Library) was the area cleared away -- again, despite the crush of people -- for cardboard, hand-made signs. These were arrayed on the pavement so they could be studied, and many people were crouching down and reading them reverently -- a few would take them to march around with, but it wasn't clear you were supposed to take them as they seemed to be a kind of a reification of ephemera.

Diverse, yet every 15 minutes or so, someone would start up a chant, "Mike check" and everyone around the crowd would echo "Mike Check, Mike Check". This is the People's Mike, and one of the creepiest things about OWS, one that they briskly try to sell as their creative answer to the city ordnance banning them from using megaphones or loudspeakers -- you could most certainly have these at a picket or march -- we had them just the week before picketing Fashion Week and protesting the use of child labour in Uzbekistan's cotton industry -- but you can't have them permanently in a park like this, which, after all, is not intended for 300 people to sleep in it and take it over. (The OWS pride themselves as being "leaderless," but any cursory view of the scene lets you know that only a few people step up and run "People's Mike" -- it's not like anyone does.)

"The People's Mike," whatever its charms in terms of overcoming the problem of getting speakers heard over the reverberating din in a canyon of skyscrapers in Wall Street, still has an insidious effect. It means that any speaker can count on everyone there to mindlessly repeat his slogans -- and hear them twice, if not three times.

After awhile, chanting like this takes over the body and mind, and it becomes the norm -- other people take up the chants and the ideas, and your job as a good movement person is merely to repeat *exactly what they say*. One young man was showing the "signals" that the crowd could use to show that either they couldn't hear, or they disagreed, or they were 50-50, or they were in agreement. But it wasn't set up with a mike (obviously) or a "speaker's corner" box like Hyde Park that different people were welcome to come and occupy. Ralph didn't have a conch here, that I could see.

Oh, I'm quite aware that in the General Assembly, most likely anyone can take a turn to speak. But in the hours I was there, it worked differently -- a few highly efficient and seasoned movement cadres would appear and shout something, and everyone in the crowd would dutifully and mindlessly repeat what they said. The effect of this might be empowering and exhilarating to the young people gaining a sense of cameraderie from it -- to anyone else, it was sinister.

One young black woman from the National Guild of Lawyers (a leftwing group that provides free legal aid and monitors  marches) who said she was a law student, and that what she was giving was not legal advice -- the same woman who talked to the press about the allegations of police kettling on the Brooklyn Bridge -- was shouting out instructions for how to behave during the coming onslaught of people, which she estimated to be about 6,000. I was curious that she didn't tell people to go limp if arrested (passive resistance, remember that?), and didn't tell people to sit down and link arms in a "sit in" to become less threatening -- the standard MO of many 1960s and 1980s marches -- but instead, told them to defy police searches and say they refuse to cooperate. Perhaps this is good practical legal advice, but I have to wonder about the movement: what kind of march is it where you don't get rid of your pot before setting out so that the police don't have an excuse to bust you?

She was wrong about the 6,000 -- I would say at the peak of the march when the tail was arriving toward 7 pm it was about 5,000 at the most, with a good 30 percent consisting of media, gawkers, and Japanese tourists.

Let's look at the signs people were carrying, both in the park and in the march. People were mainly reduced to milling around showing their signs to each other, as there weren't any pin-striped bankers in sight anywhere. Most of the people heading to the subway after work were the kind of young and middle-aged men and women of the lower middle class or working class that work in capitalism's back office -- the real offices of those fat cats the OWS are concerned about are located uptown (they didn't suffer in the 9/11 terrorist attack, either). The only symbol of The Man that could be found was a lone black security guard in front of the office of the One Liberty Plaza building, surrounded by police gates.

The police were relaxed and casual and friendly. "How are you doing this evening, ladies," a cop said to two fashionably dressed women protestors who looked like they own stock or at least are near somebody who owns stock, before telling them to kindly move along  and keep the sidewalks clear. There were several butch-hair cut middle-aged kindly matrons from the NYPD Community Service listening politely to marchers, who ranged from an elderly woman who decided this was occasion to denounce Hiroshima (at least someone was taking an international perspective in this largely Amero-centric self-preoccupied bunch) to everal other middle-aged teachers' union folks reminding the police that they were marching for their pensions, too.

There were no billy clubs or pepper spray because....the marchers were keeping to the terms of their parade permit and not blocking the street...and the OWS were maintaining corridors of order in the park. To be sure, once the crowd started pushing up against police gates, police pushed them back. The roiling in the crowd increased, and that was my cue to leave (you can always tell when the crowd is turning south and if you don't want to be caught up in it, you need to leave). About 1,000 people started marching off route (you know, parade permits have routes you clear with police? And that's ok, because that's a legitimate restriction of the First Amendment) and they headed down to occupy more of the "real" Wall Street -- and that's when the billy clubs began flying, as people blocked the street.

Don't want to be beaten by the agents of evil imperialism or sprayed by people whose pensions you're fighting for? Don't block the street or sidewalk.

Here are some of the signs I witnessed:

"US Boat to Gaza" -- this, on the jacket of a young man wrapped up in a kaffiyeh to let us know his support of the Palestinian cause. You don't have to look far to find this element in the movement.

"Average CEO Salarary $9.6 million"

"Marx Was Right: End Capitalism"

"Let us Develop a Kind of Dangerous Unselfishness" (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

"We Made You Rich With Our Blood Sweat and Tears"

"Lost My Job, Found My Occupation"

"Corporations Are Not People" (this, from the lefty critique of the Supreme Court decision ruling that corporations can give to political campaigns, too -- you know, like those unions and non-profits that were populating this march -- a union or an NGO is a corporate entity that can donate to campaigns -- why are they more peopley than companies that provide people jobs?)

"Beware of Dogma" (It's too bad this fellow didn't head on over to the "Marx Was Right" guy and show him his sign!)

"America's Nurses"

"Stop CUNY Tuition Hikes" (Did you know that CUNY charges...about $3,500 for a full load of a year's courses -- not even -- and that you can get a lot of this in stipends and loans that even after a year, you have no pressure to pay back?).

"Socialism Means Freedom and Justice for All"

"Fight Racism"

"Bring Troops Home" (the only antiwarish sort of placard in a sea of socialist stuff)

"Stop Wage Theft"

"Wall Street Should Buy Stocks, Not Politicians"

"Show Me the Money"

"Capitalism Profits on the Backs of the Working People"

"No to Imperialist Globalization"

"Parasite Capitalism Destroys, Holistic Socialism Heals"

"Shut Down Capitalism" -- this, from the Socialist Contingent, which you had to wonder, was only a "contingent," since the entire march was rivulated with anti-capitalist and pro-Marxist signs.

"I'll Believe Corporations are People When Georgia Executes One"

"Stop Robbing from the Middle Class"

"Workers Rights are Human Rights"

"Occupy Wall Street"

"Shut Down Capitalism"

"We Will Not be Watchdogs and Servants of Capitalism"

"Let's Be Realists. Let's Do the Impossible" (Che -- this from a contingent of Filipino socialist party members).

Ok, you get the idea!

The crowd chants were not that original:

o "We Are the 99 Percent" -- the Ad-Busters created meme

o "The People United Will Never Be Defeated" (not so frequent)

o " This is What Democracy Looks Like" -- well, no, it's what 5,000 people, largely city-funded  union workers and 300 people occupying a park look like, but of course, sects are part of democracy, too! Indeed, they are the life-blood of democracy!

Mike check, mike check...