#OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

[Bruce Dazzling]

[elfismiles]

#OccupyDealeyPlaza

Pic by Jen Sorensen
The Sixth Floor's Message to History: Just Hush Now
By Jim Schutze Thursday, Mar 15 2012

Someone with a lot of clout in this town thinks Dallas should clamp down on free speech at Dealey Plaza for the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination coming up next year. There's only one right way for free Americans to deal with that kind of thinking. Clamp down on Dallas.

In talking to assassination experts around the country for the past week or so, the phrase that pops up is "Occupy Dealey Plaza." I not only agree, I'd like to see what can be done to help make that happen.

So this column, in part, is an invitation. If anybody out there agrees with me, I will tell you how to get in touch. Let's do this thing.

Two weeks ago The Dallas Morning News published a story by Scott Parks quoting Nicola Longford, curator of the "Sixth Floor," the official Dallas assassination museum. She told Parks there should be no discussion of the shooting itself or the controversy, only a "moment of silence," which Longford apparently thinks should endure for an entire week.

That's a lot of silence. But maybe she thinks she can pull it off. The city has violated its own longstanding policies on access to Dealey Plaza by granting Longford a permit for a full week of exclusive control over the site of the assassination. The exclusivity of the permit, barring others from the plaza, is a first, according to people who have been involved in previous observances.

They have been told no one else can be given an equivalent permit that entire week, a fact confirmed for me last week by the city official in charge. Jill Beam of the city's special events office also confirmed she is directing all groups with questions about the 50th to call Longford, effectively making her the de facto commissar of all 50th-anniversary observances, even though she is the employee of a nonprofit that is not supposed to be a part of city government.

Longford does not come across as a commissar, more as a curator who has been put in a tough position, by whom we do not know. I can't help suspecting the same brilliant leadership that wants to build a highway in the flood zone along the Trinity River — aging affluent persons who may have tossed back too many toddies over the years.

Longford said: "This is something that Dallas has not embraced ever. We know the whole world is going to be watching in 2013."

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is supposed to be putting together some sort of JFK 50th "task force." I asked him if he thinks diverse groups should have free access to Dealey Plaza. He said in an email that any events must be "solemn" and "respectful."

"Rest assured," Rawlings said, "that Dealey Plaza, in particular, will be closely monitored to assure that that space will be in keeping with the above tone and message."

I believe I am going to take that, perhaps unfairly, as a no to my question about free public access. Rawlings doesn't come across as a commissar, either, but somewhere in this is some kind of very concerted push. Perhaps it is from the Commissar of Too Many Toddies — the one whose face we cannot see.

The words "solemn" and "respectful" do seem to crop up. In the recent Morning News story, Longford was quoted saying any event should be both solemn and respectful and should "put his death into context without reliving the details of what happened."

Yeah, but here's the problem. The context for Kennedy's death in Dallas was a violent public assassination. If he had come to Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, and died of a massive coronary, no one would remember that he died at Dealey Plaza. Or in Dallas.

They blew the top off his head and splattered his wife with brains and blood. That's the context, along with an enduring mystery and a great deal of honest skepticism in many people's minds about who did what and why. Saying that we should just be quiet and have a nice dignified event to make the city look good is not the sort of thing any historian would say, ever.

History simply is debate. No one knows what happened five minutes ago. All we can do is debate what happened. That's what history is for.

When I first wrote about this issue in the spring of 2011, I talked to Conover Hunt, one of the consultants who helped design The Sixth Floor before its opening in 1989. Hunt, who is in Virginia now, is a real historian and authority on historic places. Hunt gets what these places are for.

"Dealey Plaza doesn't really belong to Dallas," she told me. "It belongs to everyone. And not necessarily just the American people.

"There will always be in any of our tragic historic sites where major history was made," she said, "a sense of collective ownership. It's neutral ground.

"People will go there, they'll go to Gettysburg, they'll go to Mount Vernon, to the Washington Monument, to these battlefields, the good history and the bad, and they will ponder the meaning of life, the meaning of government, and they will talk about it.

"These places are like debate parks," she said, "where you can engage in the discussion and feel the power of history under your feet."

Scott Parks' story in the News was especially interesting in the interviews it offered with recognized presidential scholars and historians. They seemed to be of one mind — that the anti-Dallas epithets of the day, like "City of Hate" and "City that Killed Kennedy," have largely faded from memory and may even have a sort of funky anachronistic ring today. You know: Who cares about one little old city of hate, when now we have the entire state of South Carolina?

Privacy PolicyCancelContinue But beyond being stupid, the idea that Dallas has some right or prerogative to control free speech flies straight in the face of an over-arching global reality. Everyone alive on the planet today has grown up in an era of unconscionable official lies.

How can anyone be shocked that many young people think the 9-11 assault on the Twin Towers was an inside job, when everyone knows that Shock and Awe and the decimation of Iraq produced not a single WMD?

Young people would be idiots to believe what government tells them and fools not to question and debate every single thing they see and hear in the monopoly media. We should all be repelled and infuriated by what Dallas City Hall is trying to do, not simply with regard to the Kennedy assassination but for what it means to speech and freedom.

And I'm happy to say, based on the chats I have had so far, that people are already reacting appropriately. John Judge, an assassination historian in Washington, said to me last week: "A moment of silence that denies talking about his death on that day and certainly not talking about the historical truth behind it and the controversy is no longer a moment of silence. It's a perpetuation of silence."

Judge said it doesn't matter that we can't see exactly who is behind this push. We can see exactly what they want.

"We know the underlying theme. There is going to be a humungous crowd, and they want to catch it and capture the message and control it."

Judge was one of a few I spoke to who are already thinking in terms of what to do. "Maybe we have to do 'Occupy the Grassy Knoll 2013,'" he said.

What a terrific idea. In fact it would be the perfect marriage of physical occupation — the seizing of a place — with concepts of truth and freedom. And what a grand stage it could be, especially with all those cameras hovering.

I spoke to Robert Groden, the assassination author whom the city has arrested and jailed for expressing views and selling books in Dealey Plaza. His take on the assassination conflicts with Sixth Floor official dogma, which is, "We didn't do it; show's over; return to your homes."

Groden promised me he will be out there on November 22, 2013, and if the city wants to clap him in irons again and haul him off to a dungeon in front of Japanese news crews, he says he will be more than happy to play his part.

Judge had what I thought were very creative thoughts. Especially if the city goes really Super-Stalin and rings the place with cops, he thought perhaps it might be fun for counter-protesters to re-enact one of the theories about how the conspirators may have escaped.

"They could reverse the route," he said. "They could go down to the Trinity River bottoms, enter the storm sewer system, crawl uphill to Dealey Plaza and pop up out of the manhole covers."

Oh, wouldn't that be spectacular?

Look, I'm serious about organizing something, but only if anybody else wants to do it. My role would be only to put you together. Some sort of steering committee? Or not. The thing has to grow organically.

Do it without me. Just do it. Meaning them no disrespect, this cause should expand to include more than the community of people interested in JFK. Everybody with a speech issue should be welcome, even though I know that includes the birthers.

Everybody. Come on down. Send me an email at jim.schutze@dallasobserver.com. Don't use that little contact dealie on the web page. That may be a placebo. Send me a real email. If you want to anonymize, do so. We'll get it all figured out.

Dealey Plaza is already Ground Zero for the debate about the JFK assassination. Maybe it can grow to become Ground Zero for free speech in this country. What greater purpose could this homely rag of ground ever serve? Somehow those of us who do remember where we were that day must imagine that JFK looks down and is on our side.

If this actually does come off, then from the bottom of my heart I must also thank you, the Too Many Toddies of Dallas. You may have been of greater service to your country than you ever dreamed.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2012-03-1 ... -hush-now/

See also:
Bob Groden sues Dallas over his arrest in Dealey Plaza
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=28726

[MinM]

#OccupyDealeyPlaza

Pic by Jen Sorensen
The Sixth Floor's Message to History: Just Hush Now
By Jim Schutze Thursday, Mar 15 2012

Let's Throw a Surprise Party for the 50th Anniversary of the JFK Assassination
By Jim Schutze Thu., Mar. 15 2012 at 10:12 AM

On June 13, 2010, Dallas police arrested and jailed Robert Groden, author of best-selling books on the Kennedy assassination and a consultant to the Oliver Stone movie, JFK. The police accused Groden of violating a city law against selling books in Dealey Plaza, where the assassination happened almost a half-century ago.

It turned out there was no such law. Police appeared to be acting on a complaint from the city's semi-official assassination museum, called The Sixth Floor, in the old School Book Depository Building next to Dealey Plaza.

The deeper I delved, the less Groden's arrest had to do with park regulation -- How does selling books hurt anybody, anyway? -- and the more it looked like a jack-boot operation to enforce official dogma on the assassination.

Oh, come on, right? How can anybody have "official dogma" about something that happened 50 years ago?

But look at what's still happening on this front. As I report in my column
in this week's newspaper, Dallas officials already are moving aggressively -- more than a year and a half ahead of the event -- to shut down, stifle, control and smother free expression of ideas in Dealey Plaza during the 50th anniversary of the assassination on the week of Nov. 22, 2013.

So what's their beef? It appears to have to do with any suggestion by assassination theorists that the JFK killing case has not already been closed. Slammed shut, in fact. The overwhelming message of The Sixth Floor Museum exhibit is, "Case closed, show's over, return to your homes." And somebody doesn't want anyone getting off message when the news crews are here...

The director of The Sixth Floor Museum told me the reason why events have to be tamped down on the 50th is that the whole world will be watching. I see it differently. If the whole world is watching, that's exactly when we need to get down to Dealey Plaza and demonstrate that not everybody in Dallas thinks like a jack-boot.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairp ... rty_fo.php

http://www.blackopforum.info/discussion/119/gary-mack

...the late Roger Feinman was disbarred trying to defend Robert Groden against Random House with a judge who had clerked for Earl Warren

viewtopic.php?p=439436#p439436

[Bruce Dazzling]

From the OWS FB page:

Let's Sue President Obama and The United States Government!!!

Why? Because of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which conveniently allows the government to indefinitely detain anyone who protests against a government. If you're not familiar with this it's not your fault because the Government doesn't want you to know about this, but call in to 772 597 9914 at 4pm eastern time on March 26th to learn all about it as well as how you can actually help The Occupy Movement sue President Obama and the United States Government with a series of actions beginning March 29th.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Funny how much Lisa Fithian resembles Milton Friedman: "When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I create crisis,'" Fithian says. "Because crisis is the leading edge where change is possible."

Via: http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03 ... sobedience

Meet Professor Occupy
Lisa Fithian is the streetwise radical who's teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart.

In her makeshift classroom in lower Manhattan, Lisa Fithian turns to a group of several dozen students, squares her shoulders, and issues a challenge: "Does someone want to be a cop and come get me?" A tall redhead abruptly breaks out and lunges at her, but Fithian, a petite, den-motherish 50-year-old, head fakes and bolts away. Cheers erupt from her pupils, Occupy Wall Street protesters intent on shutting down the New York Stock Exchange the following morning. Another pretend cop moves in, and this time she drops to the ground, flopping like a rag doll as the officer struggles to drag her away. Fithian stands to deliver her lesson. "Of the two choices, running away or going limp, what does running away communicate?" she asks.

"Guilt," several people say.

She smiles and nods. "Guilt."

When it comes to civil disobedience, there's often a right and wrong way to break the law, and one of Fithian's jobs is to teach the right way to hundreds of newly minted Occupy activists. Call her Professor Occupy. With somewhere between 80 and 100 arrests under her belt (she's lost count) over nearly four decades of rabble-rousing, Fithian may be the nation's best-known protest consultant. Unions and activist groups pay her $300 a day to run demonstrations and teach their members tactics for taking over the streets. But for much of the past six months Fithian has been dispensing free wisdom to the young radicals who took over parks from New York City to Los Angeles last fall, everything from proper tear gas attire to long-term protest strategies. "When there is some conflict, or things aren't going the way that we want them to go, or people don't have a good long-term plan," says 27-year-old Jason Ahmadi, an early arrival at Zuccotti Park, "I have heard others and myself say, 'Dammit, where is Lisa Fithian?'"

Fithian, who lives in Austin, Texas, but spends most of her time on the road, dresses like Mark Zuckerberg and swears like Tony Soprano. She grew up in Hawthorne, New York, a Big Apple bedroom community where she developed a reputation for trouble—police might knock on her door to inquire about, say, a suspicious fire in a neighbor's front yard. In middle school, she once got busted for bringing a knife to class. But she was smart and earnest, and as a high school sophomore she founded The Free Thinker, an underground newspaper that tackled subjects like littering in the cafeteria. Her classmates voted her "Most likely to do things for the school." They also voted her "Most likely to do things to the school."

In 1983, after graduating from Skidmore College, Fithian spent a year following Abbie Hoffman, founder of the anti-war Youth International Party (a.k.a. the Yippies), tending his garden and "picking his brain." Three years later, a coalition of activists outraged by the CIA's covert wars in Central America hired her to organize a blockade of the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters that ended with 600 arrests. She hit the streets with fellow protesters—including the black-clad anarchist kids she calls "the smashy smashies"—to disrupt the World Trade Organization's 1999 meeting in Seattle. And in 2005, she teamed up with fellow radicals and former Black Panthers to launch Common Ground Relief, a group that rebuilt houses while clashing with police in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward of post-Katrina New Orleans. "When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I create crisis,'" Fithian told me. "Because crisis is the leading edge where change is possible."

Fithian's résumé has made her a target for people hoping to discredit the nascent Occupy movement. In a single week this past October, conservative activist Andrew Breitbart ran nine stories on his website painting her as an anarchist bent on "the total annihilation of the American political and economic system." In fact, Fithian has a long history working with mainstream groups such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But Max Berger, an organizer of Occupy's moderate wing who cut his teeth working for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, sees her credibility with young radicals as crucial. "Nobody is going to say that what Lisa does is not badass," he says, "so she is in a very strategically important position of teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart."

Case in point: On September 17, the first day of Occupy Wall Street, police told the protesters they couldn't affix their cardboard "Liberty Plaza" street signs to utility poles around Zuccotti Park. Many people wanted to give the cops the middle finger, but Fithian offered a compromise: They would take down the signs and find new ways to display them. The important thing, she stressed, was to keep occupying.

On Day Two of Occupy, Fithian left New York to coordinate anti-bank protests in multiple cities on behalf of a coalition of religious and community groups. The overlap of her consulting gig with the birth of the Occupy movement was sheer coincidence, but Fithian made the most of it. She shuttled around to the encampments popping up in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, schooling the fledglings in protest tactics and enlisting them to help her occupy banks or defend foreclosed homes. "It showed a lot of us how it is important to connect the larger message of inequality and corporate control of politics to more local issues," says Kelvin Ho, an organizer with Occupy Chicago.

In late October, Fithian was called back to Manhattan to help the movement catch its stride. While Occupy Wall Street was succeeding beyond its organizers' wildest dreams, its internal politics were a mess, and meetings of its quasi-governing body, the Spokes Council, often devolved into shouting matches. Fithian, an old pro in dealing with nonhierarchical groups, agreed to help facilitate. "We are not going to be making tons of decisions but streamlining our work, making this a more functional process," she announced, kicking off a Spokes Council meeting a few days after police razed the protesters' encampment in Zuccotti Park. As each of the committees known as "working groups" voiced their needs and concerns, Fithian took notes on a sheet of construction paper, but she stopped writing when Sage, a homeless occupier in fatigues, began rambling. When she tried to cut him short, Sage protested loudly about "a line between the haves and have-nots of language." Fithian cut him off again, holding out her palms as though blocking a pit bull and offering a quick summation: "How about, 'Respect for diversity of expression'?" With Sage appeased, the meeting could proceed. "I heard a ton of people mention afterwards, 'Oh my God, I wish that we had a facilitator like that before,'" recalls Logan Price, a movement organizer. "She helped the Spokes Council get to the point where people felt comfortable about continuing it."

A new problem arose in November when a spate of graffiti and window smashing at a march in Oakland, California, fueled notions that the movement's tent cities were full of thugs. Some Occupy protesters supported the mayhem, citing the need for "diversity of tactics." But Fithian countered in an open letter that "diversity of tactics becomes a code for 'anything goes,' and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions." Stephen Lerner, an SEIU executive board member who has worked with her for 18 years, believes Fithian's widely read statement helped cement the movement's nonviolent culture: "When she says it, I think it has a different kind of credibility because of her own history."

Even criticism from Fithian's peers is tempered with admiration. "She has a reputation for taking things over by accusing other people of taking things over," one prominent occupier told me, but "I think she has stuck with it and is a smart person and has done great work building bridges."

As Occupy marches on, perhaps its greatest internal tension is between the reformers—pragmatists with concrete goals—and the revolutionaries, idealists who feel that asking anything of a corrupt system only marginalizes the movement. "This isn't a protest movement, because protest movements are to address issues that the power structure could conceivably be willing to give up," a black-clad occupier named Max Bean told Fithian over lunch in early December. "We are asking to dissolve the power structure. And you can't ask for that. You can't protest for it. All you can do is grow until we are so big that we are everything."

Fithian weighed her response carefully. "Movements build because people have some sense of hope and victory and accomplishment," she replied, setting aside her plate of steamed kale. "We might win on the millionaires' tax in the next six months. That's gonna be fucking huge." She smiled as Max gave her "twinkle fingers," the Occupy hand signal for approval. "So it's the balance between reforming and revolutionary things. And that's why this movement is so beautiful, because it holds both."

The SEIU sent Fithian to Washington three days later to coordinate Take Back the Capitol, an Occupy-style assault on corporate lobbyists. Bona fide occupiers were flown in to help union members blockade K Street and take over congressional offices—part of a labor strategy to forge alliances with Occupy—but some occupiers chafed at the union's unwillingness to risk more than a few symbolic arrests. Fresh out of jail and gumming a wad of Copenhagen, Joe Carriveau of Occupy Milwaukee told me he was "done with this Democratic coalition crap. We are supposed to be down here for some radical action."

The following day, in a tent on the Mall, Fithian helped run a session aimed at easing tension between the two factions. She let almost everyone else speak before taking the floor. "One of the problems is when people are doing different shit, we are starting to disrespect each other because we are thinking that your way is not as rad as our way," Fithian said. "We are bringing in all these judgments, and it's very destructive. We have to accept what each movement's gifts are, and where we can be in alignment."

Union members and occupiers can work together to "interrupt the space between corporate America and democracy," she went on, to murmurs of assent. "It's not about getting our elected officials to do something. Shit. They ain't gonna do shit."

She spoke faster and faster, running her words together, before stopping abruptly 90 seconds later. "Sorry, I talked a lot," she said sheepishly. But no one seemed to mind. For once, the crowd abandoned its twinkle fingers for applause.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Lisa Fithian - Tools for a Movement of Leaders

[Nordic]

I'm still on MoveOn.org's mailing list from way back. Never cancelled it, probably signed up way back when Howard Dean was running -- I can't even remember now!

Anyway they are REALLY trying to equate themselves with Occupy. The last few days I've gotten e-mails where they're offering to train people and have seminars in protesting, OWS style.

They seem all rah-rah gung-ho about it and it's really easy to read these emails and think "hey that's cool!" before realizing ......... wait a minute, these people are DEMOCRATS.

Anybody else notice this, or were you all smarter than I and unsubscribed to moveon a long time ago?

[TerryBain]

Occupy Interview - Delphi Technique Infiltration of OWS
OASN Radio Podcast

http://occupyamerica.ning.com/profiles/ ... e=activity .

[JackRiddler]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Locker Associates
Date: Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:40 AM
Subject: Reportback: The 99%Spring Training for Trainers
To: Michael Locker

Reportback: The 99%Spring Training for Trainers and the Plot to Coopt #Occupy

by Charles Lechner
March 25, 2012

http://tech.nycga.net/2012/03/25/report ... pt-occupy/

This past weekend I attended the Training for Trainers
(T4T) of the 99% Spring. This is being organized by a very
large and powerful coalition in which MoveOn is one of the
larger partners, as is the AFL-CIO. The 99% Spring action
plan is fairly straightforward: train 100,000 people in
non-violent direct action (NVDA).

On the one hand, this is obviously a progressive agenda
that most occupiers would agree with. On the other,
occupiers have struggled with the fear of cooptation to an
exhausting degree. I've participated in online and in
person conversations about the 99%Spring, and the
critiques fall into three main arguments:

- MoveOn and the DC based labor movement bureaucracy can't
be trusted as they are committed to working within the
system and for Democratic candidates.

- The 99%Spring uses occupy inspired themes and memes ("the
99%") but without doing the hard work of actually working
with Occupy Wall Street.

- The overall effort seems utterly disconnected from the
nationwide May First plans that many (most?) occupiers are
actively working towards, which are also referenced with
"spring" language.

This isn't it's own thing, but rather me making fun of how
the nervous nellies respond to larger forces in the
political world: "Halp! We're being coopted! The
Democratic Party is both capable and interested in
implementing a well thought out plan to make us serve
their interests!"

Speaking as an occupier most active in the Tech Ops
Working Group of the NYC General Assembly, my first
response to the 99%Spring was envy. Why aren't we
initiating, leading or participating in this kind of
serious coalition work? But that's unfair. We are working
on May First actions, which in New York include a march
carried out together with labor and the immigrants' rights
movements. What we aren't doing is training 100,000
activists and organizers in nonviolent direct action. So
why not welcome an effort that is doing that?

The T4T Training

I'm just back from two days of training for trainers, and
this is my verdict: the Training for Trainers was
fantastic. Hundreds of people in attended the same
training as me in New York, and thousands more took part
across the country.

The folks attending the training represented a cross
section of our country's progressive, 99% movement. I met
community organizers, peace activists, union members,
occupiers, and many more. The group was inter-
generational, racially diverse, gender balanced, and
included folks from all NYC boroughs, Long Island, CT, NJ,
and upstate. My impression is that most are experienced
organizers, but from many different traditions and
organizational homes.

The curriculum had three parts:

The first is your basic Marshall Ganz story of self/us.
This is training delivered for years now at countless
political and organizational homes, including my old
synagogue. For those who don't know, Ganz started his
career at the United Farm Workers, working with Cesar
Chavez.

The second is your basic nonviolent direct action
training, with roots in Gene Sharp, Training for Change,
and the Direct Action Group that emerged post-Seattle in
the anti-globalization movement. It wasn't out of step
with anything that say, Starhawk or Lisa Fithian or the
Ruckus society would have done.

The third part was the story of the 1% vs. the 99%. It's
basic training in understanding the economic crisis and
our collective crisis as a country. This is more or less
the kind of training being used by unions and community
organizing groups around the country for the last 2-3
years.

There was zero, none, nada discussion of the Obama
campaign, electoral politics, the Democratic Party, or
MoveOn. To sum up then, the critiques against the
99%Spring are false. Those who lobbed uninformed critiques
are now in a position of having to apologize and take back
their words or lose a certain amount of credibility. The
'proved' that MoveOn provided real support for an amazing,
collaborative effort resting on principles and teachings
widely used inside and outside the Occupy movement.

The Larger Context

Questions might still be asked about the ultimate purpose
of MoveOn, unions, and the long list of community
organizing groups that make up the 99%Spring effort. One
of the most important is: Where is this coming from? What
might it be going?

The information I have is based in part on conversations
with folks who know better than me. Sorry about no
sources, but here goes:

Liz Butler of the Movement Strategy Center is one of the
prime movers and shakers of this effort.

The overall strategy seems to be similar or based on what
Stephen Lerner (formerly of SEIU) was articulating in a
series of talks about "creating a crisis for the rich." In
a nutshell, it proposes mass direct action aimed broadly
at the 1% in order to force them to make concessions.
When we talk about 'demands' or 'goals' there are laundry
lists galore. Winning strikes, raising taxes, winning
elections, targeting specific corporations, etc. But
behind all those disparate goals lies a framework:
increasing the share of wealth that flows to the 99% and
reducing the portion controlled by the 1%. That's the
prize. And large parts of the power structure (i.e.,
Democrats and even some corporations) think it's a good
thing too.

Getting MoveOn to be part of this coalition isn't as
simple as it looks. MoveOn is large enough to do whatever
it wants without local partners, and for a long time
that's what it did. But the last few years have seen
greater efforts to partner, with Van Jones' Rebuild the
Dream as the shining example But the 99%Spring is an
example of a large powerful organization placing resources
in the service of a pretty radical agenda and allowing
others to take the lead.

Others that include Domestic Workers United, a labor
rights organization representing working class women of
color. One of their staff members, Harmony Goldberg, was a
lead trainer this weekend. If you think Goldberg is a
MoveOn/DemParty dupe, please shoot yourself right now.
Whew! You're still here! Thank god.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Based on my experiences this weekend, all I can say is -
sign up for the trainings to take place on April 9-16.
Help organize more trainings. Invite as many occupiers to
attend as possible. Consider the advantage of influencing
all those moderate, not radical enough people likely to
attend and how our superior political praxis will surely
attract them to let go of their electoral illusions.

And then, after considering such a vision, let it go,
because it's bullshit. The training is quite good. Go
because it's great to be on the same page for a moment
with eager, enthusiastic 99 percenters who want to make
this great land of ours a better one. Drop your defenses
(if you have any) and rest assured no one is talking about
elections. Let's focus on the original OWS vision: mass,
creative, effective direct action against the banks, Wall
Streeters and political forces that drove our economy off
a cliff and want to charge us for getting back on the
precipice again.

___________________________________________

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[Nordic]

"Halp! We're being coopted! The
Democratic Party is both capable and interested in
implementing a well thought out plan to make us serve
their interests!"

This guy is a fucking tool. What a disgusting bunch of claptrap.

This whole thing reads exactly like a fake Yelp review.

barf.

[Allegro]

.

Police Arrest 73 in Occupy Wall Street Crackdown
As Protesters Mark Six Months of Uprising
— Democracy Now! | uploaded Mar 19, 2012

YOUTUBE NOTES. Michael Moore led hundreds of people from the Left Forum conference to Zuccotti Park on Saturday where hundreds had gathered to re-occupy the park to mark six months since the launch of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last September and launched protests around the world that gave voice to “the 99 percent.”

That night, New York City police officers cleared the park making at least 73 arrests. Many people reported excessive use of force by officers, several cases were caught on camera. In one widely reported incident, a young woman suffered a seizure after she was pulled from the crowd and arrested. Witnesses say police initially ignored Cecily McMillan as she flopped about on the sidewalk with her hands zip-tied behind her back, but she was eventually taken away in an ambulance.

For more we talk to Guardian reporter Ryan Devereaux, who has been following the Occupy movement closely.

[8bitagent]

I want wait to see all this Occupy hub bub for myself. Im facebook friends with some of the Occupy people in the eye of the storm, sounds like cops are pretty brutal lately.

It's interesting that so much of the Occupy activity is a few blocks from where all this madness started: world trade center. Yet I have not seen any indication the Occupy folks are too interested in
*that* mystery mindfuck. At least some in Occupy are networked with NY We Are Change, so the rift doesn't seem to deep.

[JackRiddler]

Yet I have not seen any indication the Occupy folks are too interested in
*that* mystery mindfuck.

I've seen loads of indication that a skeptical view of it prevails, in a low-key way. It's not the current way to make a movement.

[2012 Countdown]

I want wait to see all this Occupy hub bub for myself. Im facebook friends with some of the Occupy people in the eye of the storm, sounds like cops are pretty brutal lately.

It's interesting that so much of the Occupy activity is a few blocks from where all this madness started: world trade center. Yet I have not seen any indication the Occupy folks are too interested in
*that* mystery mindfuck. At least some in Occupy are networked with NY We Are Change, so the rift doesn't seem to deep.

Wow, where to begin? So, because a movement trying to focus on financial fraud and tyranny doesn't highlight 9/11, it is a fault? Further, they have apparently rebuffed 9/11 issues in your mind, and so much so that there is a 'rift' according to you. Okay...all imagined in your mind with no substantiation, but okay.

This post reminds me of ones made by zealot 'no-planers' or the pod-on-plane people who insult anyone who doesn't champion their issue. Actually its a worse situation. At least their zelotry is directly related to the event. Its not like they do not tackle a host of financial issues, and thet those are many and time consuming. No. What about the child kidnapping rings and immigration? Where are the occupy WALL STREET people on lizard people?! What is Occupy's stand on the Annanochi?! Where are these occupy hub-bubists on these issues?! There must be a contemptious rift afoot! They must be stupid, clueless, in denial, or agents. One surely finds it 'interesting'.

[Allegro]

.
National Occupation of Washington
Begins with Demonstration at the EPA
— The Real News | April 2, 2012

Protestors March on EPA Headquarters demanding environmental sustainability and the protection of federal agency whistle-blowers.