Day of Rage

[Jenne]

OGOD OGOD...What has been SEEN cannot be UNSEEN. 

[Doktor Howl]

OGOD OGOD...What has been SEEN cannot be UNSEEN. 

I don't see what the problem is.  We are a nation of Rugged Individualists^TM.  Or so I am told.

[Jenne]

I actually shivered.  I mean, I really actually physically just shivered.

[Cain]

Uh, yeah.  Nice job at exposing the alienation inherent in the system, or something.  I hope your "Day of Rage" isn't going to intefere with your attempts to attend the next Phish concert, you bunch of Trustafarian morons.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Uh, yeah.  Nice job at exposing the alienation inherent in the system, or something.  I hope your "Day of Rage" isn't going to intefere with your attempts to attend the next Phish concert, you bunch of Trustafarian morons.

[Triple Zero]

I like how they managed to get the one photo with the collar+tie guy (not even that expensive looking, afaict) looking somewhat embarrassed about the crazy idiots ... drumming ... and ... painting a plaster arm??

Fukcing hell imagine how AWESOME it would be to have a bunch of non-hippies show up in pressed office suits and big important watches walking up to the hippies, out-ridiculousing them (cause the counter-protesters would have a sense of humour) and then ... I dunno. It'd be hilarious.

Oh, I know what! You'd need to play it straight and then play it TO THE WALL.

First you're the group of business men trying to shoo away the hippies. Like you just want to get to work and they really should stop occupying the street like that and such. This is what they want, so now you got their attention and they'll start ummm well a few of them are bound to start preaching at you or something.

Then a slightly unlikely amount of moar business men arrive. Yell at eachother for a while. Mention Freedom of Speech at least as much as they do. Mention other Amendments, regardless if they are relevant.

Then you open the suitcases.

Clipboards click together and form signs:

TURN ON, TUNE IN, AND BAIL OUT

MAKE MONEY, NOT WAR

MARKETS WANT TO BE FREE

WHAT IF THEY GAVE A FUCK AND NO ONE CAME

THESE COLORS DO RUN THE WORLD

BONUS THE BOMB

POWER TO THE CEO

GIVE CAPITALISM A CHANCE

FIGHTING FOR PEACE IS LIKE ANY GOOD BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY

SAVE THE WAR

... etc

[Cramulus]

[Telarus]

[Cramulus]

heard a 3-minute article on the protests on NPR this morning

there were about 3 sentences covering what the protests were about.
then they talked about how people are getting busted for setting up tents and sleeping bags in a public park.
they interviewed the company that owns the park that's being used for the protest, they emphasized the "no tents" rule.
The police had no comment.
Then they got a quote from Mayor Bloomberg. He said (paraphrasing) "If we continue to vilify the banks, they won't give out loans, so companies won't expand, and unemployment will continue to rise."

I almost ripped my steering wheel off. That's seriously his response? "We have to be nice to the banks, they can eat us." and it's also "the banks aren't to blame for unemployment - they just respond to what we do! If unemployment goes up, it's the protestor's fault."

[Cain]

Hurt a bank's fee-fees = cause the next Great Depression

[Cain]

Also, banks are lending to businesses again?  Has anyone informed these businesses of that?

[Cramulus]

I'm actually hearing some rage from my new yorker friends for a change

They're worked up about these two girls who got maced at the protest the other day.

It wasn't like the protest had turned ugly and the cops had clamped down; this has been a nonviolent protest. The girls were behind a barricade, shouting. A cop walked up and maced them in the face.  Lots of people caught it on film. People feel that this was an unprovoked level of force for a nonviolent protest that's already like 4 blocks away from the thing they're protesting.

some good photos


an article that summarizes the incident




ETA: From one of the videos, it looks like about 30 seconds before the incident, some spag rushed the line. Four cops immediately grabbed him and pinned him to the ground. His friends on the other side of the barricade began freaking out and screaming. The cops and protesters seemed to separate and things calmed down briefly before this happened. But I also wouldn't be surprised if these chicks did something stupid like push or grab a cop.

[Cramulus]

Colbert has some good commentary:

http://gawker.com/5842777/stephen-colbert-fails-to-see-point-of-occupy-wall-street-protest

[Cramulus]

And here's some indie journalism about real journalism

This woman counts the ways in which the New York Times coverage of the protests is off

here's the one sentence hook:

This rubbernecking style of journalism is particularly dangerous right now because it amounts to criticizing a burning house for the color of its curtains.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163626/correcting-new-york-timess-abysmal-occupy-wall-street-coverage

this quote from a protester seems to sum it up pretty well:

"Many times the communal nature of things will get the actual task done quickly, but all the competing views with no defined hierarchy just reminds me of Lord of The Flies," he said.

she concludes

While the left loses the valuable organizational mechanism of unions, the right has gained corporate masters like the Koch brothers to disseminate millions of dollars into astroturfing campaigns to organize and destroy on their behalf. While the left makes signs, the right has already deployed troupes to scream at town hall events.

These are the kinds of massive oppositional forces activists find themselves facing these days: an incredibly oppressive police state and a corporate cash monster bearing down on them from the right. Meanwhile, their union support army is either in retreat or preoccupied fighting other battles on other fronts in Wisconsin or Ohio, or one of the other forty-eight states where anti-union legislation was introduced this year courtesy of ALEC, a front group that serves as proxy for corporate interests.

Instead of bemoaning the fact that protesters haven't arrived in matching uniforms with a coherent PowerPoint presentation, these are the issues we should be addressing.

[Cain]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/salon/greenwald/~3/o22bAUizEYw/protests

It's unsurprising that establishment media outlets have been condescending, dismissive and scornful of the ongoing protests on Wall Street.  Any entity that declares itself an adversary of prevailing institutional power is going to be viewed with hostility by establishment-serving institutions and their loyalists.  That's just the nature of protests that take place outside approved channels, an inevitable by-product of disruptive dissent: those who are most vested in safeguarding and legitimizing establishment prerogatives (which, by definition, includes establishment media outlets) are going to be hostile to those challenges.  As the virtually universal disdain in these same circles for WikiLeaks (and, before that, for the Iraq War protests) demonstrated: the more effectively adversarial it is, the more establishment hostility it's going to provoke.

Nor is it surprising that much of the most vocal criticisms of the Wall Street protests has come from some self-identified progressives, who one might think would be instinctively sympathetic to the substantive message of the protesters.  In an excellent analysis entitled "Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street," Kevin Gosztola chronicles how many of the most scornful criticisms have come from Democratic partisans who -- like the politicians to whom they devote their fealty -- feign populist opposition to Wall Street for political gain.

Some of this anti-protest posturing is just the all-too-familiar New-Republic-ish eagerness to prove one's own Seriousness by castigating anyone to the left of, say, Dianne Feinstein or John Kerry; for such individuals, multi-term, pro-Iraq-War Democratic Senator-plutocrats define the outermost left-wing limit of respectability.  Also at play is the jingoistic notion that street protests are valid in Those Bad Countries but not in free, democratic America.

A siginificant aspect of this progressive disdain is grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates, and a corresponding desire to undermine anything that distracts from that goal.  Indeed, the loyalists of both parties have an interest in marginalizing anything that might serve as a vehicle for activism outside of fealty to one of the two parties (Fox News' firing of Glenn Beck was almost certainly motivated by his frequent deviation from the GOP party-line orthodoxy which Fox exists to foster).

The very idea that one can effectively battle Wall Street's corruption and control by working for the Democratic Party is absurd on its face: Wall Street's favorite candidate in 2008 was Barack Obama, whose administration -- led by a Wall Street White House Chief of Staff and Wall-Street-subservient Treasury Secretary and filled to the brim with Goldman Sachs officials -- is now working hard to protect bankers from meaningful accountability (and though he's behind Wall Street's own Mitt Romney in the Wall Street cash sweepstakes this year, Obama is still doing well); one of Wall Street's most faithful servants is Chuck Schumer, the money man of the Democratic Party; and the second-ranking Senate Democrat acknowledged -- when Democrats controlled the Congress -- that the owners of Congress are bankers.  There are individuals who impressively rail against the crony capitalism and corporatism that sustains Wall Street's power, but they're no match for the party apparatus that remains fully owned and controlled by it.

Nothing to argue with there.

I still maintain the protest was a failure, for the reasons I gave earlier.  But I definitely think it's a step up from what the Democratic Party are doing (not hard).

(I'd also argue Greenwald's use of jingoistic is misplaced, in this piece.  I would instead use condescending and paternalistic notion).