We have a strict policy of not criticizing
Anonymous around here, so if you’re with
Anonymous, wear what you like. But for
the rest of you, this is not recommended
attire. It’s licensed property, so every
mask you buy puts money in media
conglomerate Time Warner’s pockets.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement enters its sixth week, I find it remarkable that the most basic facts about it remain a mystery to many. And perhaps more remarkable that so many who complain daily about the issues that the Occupy movement seeks to address sit on the sidelines, still bellyaching. I personally have been bellyaching about the banksters since 2008. After writing a few dozen articles about bailouts, corporate capture of government , and pork-bellied politicians and having even my best friends shrug nonchalantly, I sort of gave up. But my interest in social justice was revived in early September of this year, when I first read of plans for protesters to assemble in NYC. I wasn’t surprised when the media ignored them the first week, but before the end of the second week, I told like-minded friends that if they made it past the second weekend, I might have to go join them. When 700 protestors were arrested on October 1, I knew it was “on”, and also knew there was no way I’d get to New York within the next several weeks. So that day, I set up simple site at OccupyAnnArbor.org, and started looking locally for other people who were interested. Don’t believe everything you read about social networking enabling civil protest. It may work in some situations, but in many areas, the multitude of conflicting Facebook and Meetup.com postings actually caused as much confusion as solidarity. And in my opinion, Facebook discussions tend to do more damage than good – intellectual liberals engage in wheel-spinning debate that makes them feel like they’re actually DOING something, things get factionalized, and as I’ve felt compelled to point out – clicking “Like” won’t change the world. So, in spite of the fact that this hardly qualifies as a revolution yet,  Alexis de Tocqueville’s statement that “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end” is relevant all the same. We’re mostly going to stick to history and a little opinion here. As this clip about the 1946 Oakland strikes makes clear, things can change on an epic scale in a single day when people who just want a decent living for a day’s work are deprived of that simple luxury.

How Did It All Start?

Well, aside from the fact that we’ve gone from a country that enjoyed a middle class utopia for almost half a century to a nearly Dickensian dystopia in just a decade or so, the more recent Occupy movement has an interesting and rather ironic origin. Part of the impetus to assemble in New York was provided by a poster circulated online by the anti-consumer “AdBusters” magazine, urging people to “#OCCUPY WALLSTREET. SEPTEMBER 17. BRING TENT”.  The irony of course being that an anti-consumer magazine is sold in the consumer market in the first place, and in this case, it’s a CANADIAN magazine urging people to protest in AMERICA. Around the same time, a “Tumblr” was created called We Are The 99 Percent. End of story, right? It was an internet phenomena like Howard Dean’s meteoric rise in 2004, right? Wrong. While this is the spin that it gets via today’s inept and sound-bite-driven media, it was much more planned than this. This piece by Avery Morrow explains the original occupation’s socialist roots in the summer of 2011, and does a good job of explaining why the “assembly” method is crucial to the movement’s survival.

So The Occupiers Are A Bunch Of Socialists?

Hardly. That’s the next irony, and probably a great source of frustration to the small group of socialists that were astroturfing in the beginning. While socialists will probably remain an important (if small) component of the American populace – I mean, without them, who else would warn us of the evils of capitalism as they sip a soy latte at Starbucks – they endanger their own presence at a well-organized occupy assembly as soon as they start to push an agenda. The same is true if one starts spouting a specific democratic, republican, libertarian, or any other platform. That’s a key component of the whole movement if it’s going to be successful – NON ALIGNMENT. Most occupiers with half a brain are extremely leery of becoming the next Tea Party, no matter WHO is doing the co-opting.

So Who The Heck ARE These People Then?

Well, this Fast Company piece is one of the few attempts I’ve run across that attempts to figure that out with any specifics, and in spite of the media’s seeming glee in always talking to hipsters, gutter punks, and radical students, the movement is at least a third over-thirty five, of  broadly represented income, and about 70% choose to identify as independent, not democrat or liberal as the media would like you to believe. In fact, one of the founders of the original Tea Party movement has come out in support, and the biggest direct donor so far is a former Wall Streeter who also donated to the Romney campaign. At the assemblies I’ve attended here in Ann Arbor, I’d say the usual turnout is about half students, a third of the group is over 30, and overall the non-students are a healthy mix of professionals, academics, and “regular working people”. At the first assembly here in Ann Arbor, I was briefly booed off the “podium” when I asked people if they would self-identify their ideology with a show of hands. I was quickly un-booed, and when allowed to ask if people were socialist, communist, capitalist, or “other”, the dominant voice by far was “other”, comprised of a few phrases that would best be lumped together as “independent”. The first three options inspired a very reluctant show of hands that represented about 25%, 10%, and 70%, respectively. And interestingly, some of the most committed of the very small number of full time occupiers are Europeans, not Americans.

So Why “Occupy”, And What’s With This Hippy Dippy “Assembly” Method, Anyway?

The answer to these two questions is intertwined. But first of all, the tens of thousands who protested the invasion of Iraq with virtually ZERO media coverage proved that marches are pointless unless Glenn Beck or Comedy Central are backing things. A full time occupation of a public place, testing the mettle of a municipality’s willingness to shut down free speech in a place that’s probably already “occupied” – by the unemployed and homeless – is a winning strategy. And although many of the organizers around the country who model their assemblies after the NYGA method don’t even realize it, the original purpose of this approach was two-fold, and quite intentional. First of all, simply inviting people to a public place to listen to your soapboxing will get you nowhere. But tell everyone they can have a voice, and – much like the internet – they’ll show up in the hope of spouting their two cent’s worth. The second angle is that in places where there’s a significant number of occupiers, there’s frankly a hell of a lot of time to kill, and an assembly structured in a directly democratic fashion like this will – trust me – kill some time. I jest a bit, but the method is brilliant. When an assembly is properly facilitated, collective concerns are well addressed, consensus is reached, and the human microphone serves three purposes: 1.) It mitigates rambling, polysyllabic speechmaking, which is impossible when you can only use at most five syllables in succession. This keeps things focused on immediacy; the crowd will give you a silent beatdown or verbally shut you down if you’re just opinionating.  2.) It makes the group much more visible and interesting to passersby, often pulling them in. And 3.) It actually has a powerful unifying effect on the group.

What Should I Wear?

Well, if you’re in the northern climes, something warm, obviously. It’s going to be a long winter. But if you’ve been thinking of wearing one of those fashionable Guy Fawkes masks, think again. If you’re anti-corporate, every time you buy one of those things, you’re supporting one of the biggest media conglomerates on the planet. They’re licensed property of Time Warner. They must be fairly popular with occupiers though; when I looked them up on Amazon, the “customers who bought this item also bought” suggestion was telling:

So When Do We Get A Platform?

The reason to avoid a rigidly defined platform has been covered thoroughly elsewhere;  if poorly conceived and easily “partisanized”,  it would bring things to a screeching halt. But here’s my two cents worth about what kinds of things should and shouldn’t be part of the message:

1.) Stop talking about “the rich” and taxing them more. Do the math, and you’ll realize that this won’t fix much. More importantly, plenty of affluent moderates who might very well be supportive of “fixing” Washington and corporate influence immediately put themselves on the other side of the fence when you use the word “rich”. Wealth itself isn’t the problem.

2.) Start getting a LITTLE BIT specific. Some unifying themes are government policy paralysis, corporate personhood, and sane banking regulation. Don’t talk specifically about reviving Glass Steagal, instead point up the blatantly obvious connection between de-regulation and the collapse of the banking sytem that was prevented only by taxing our unborn grandchildren. And how heinously irresponsible that is. Talk about how if corporations have the same rights as people, we should have the same tax shelters, and how corporations should be subject to the death penalty if they take human lives. Which many of them do.

3.) Don’t try to roll ending war, health care for all, promoting gay rights, and saving the whales into the “demands”. A lot of today’s current problems are symptoms of the core problems, not causes in themselves. If you want to get specific about health care, demand that congressmen have the same plan we do. If you want to address issues related to war, talk about returning soldiers that can’t get a job.

4.) Don’t give up. We deserve a decent life for a decent day’s work, and we will take back what we deserve.

Perhaps Most Importantly, Know What Kind Of Assholes You’re Up Against

Don’t be reasonable.  The Overton Window works both ways. It’s INSANE to expect someone who has made it their life’s purpose to simply amass wealth to ever give a shit about your petty human concerns. Just read this leaflet that some asswipe on the Chicago Merc dropped on the occupiers in Chicago. It actually makes some cogent points, but mostly highlights the sociopathic mindset of a typical trade floor grunt that thinks he’s the next Gordon Gekko:

We are Wall Street, It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much. So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money.  You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?

This image makes more sense
when you see the whole thing.

I find it interesting that the media forces behind the political movement in America that fancies itself to be somehow modeled after the protests of the Boston Tea Party are amongst the loudest voices proclaiming that the teachers, fireman, police officers and others who are protesting to protect the livelihood of the working class in Wisconsin are “rabid mobs of criminals and thugs”. I also find it interesting that in spite of plans for a “day of rage”, the Saudi Arabian monarchy managed to prove once again that the best way to oppress people is to tell them that God wants it that way. And in efforts to squelch information elsewhere, it’s likely that the appeal by the lawyers of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange will fail, and he will be extradited to Sweden, and later be snagged by the US government, in keeping with the Swedish government’s previous complicity in US-organized rendition and torture. One minor problem the US government may face is where to torture people like Assange now; the Egyptian protesters seem to have breached their favorite destination for torture. Not to worry though, they can just stick him naked in a cell with Bradley Manning if they have to, right? But these are interesting times, and I don’t think that these conventional methods are going to stop the slowly growing sense of injustice that’s spreading around the world. It’s becoming difficult to even keep track of where exactly the unrest is; this CNN summary covers much of the Mideast, but almost no media sources are talking about what’s happening in Portugal for instance. And aside from the public protests, there’s another interesting movement afoot. One that will be very difficult to target as an “enemy”, because it has no body, no face, no singular agenda, and no headquarters. I’m not only talking about hacktivists like Wikileaks and Anonymous. I’m talking about people like me, and maybe you. People who have enough common sense to realize that in almost every country in the world, the concern for collective well-being is no longer about which political party is in office, but which corporations own them. Hacktivists will obviously play a role for a while, but in an environment of protests, whistleblowing, and crackdowns against them, it will be hard to keep the facts straight. One recent example of this was when, in an hilarious variation on the ancient adage “if you meet the buddha on the road, kill him“, the American media was hoodwinked in a huge way about the nature of the amorphous internet group Anonymous. MSNBC recently interviewed a fellow who claims to be a “senior strategist and propagandist” for Anonymous, and even tech blogs like this one took the bait and ran with it. People seem to just eat this stuff up; one of the few sources you’ll find that questions the likely fallacy of this fellow’s claims is TheOtherMcCain.com. It doesn’t take a genius to piece together that a group of extremely intelligent anarchistic programmers probably doesn’t send their chain-smoking general to lay out their agenda on MSNBC. Another example is a recent Gawker piece that asks What Does Anonymous Have on Bank of America?, and then goes on to basically say “nothing”. But that you should watch for that nothing this coming Monday. Careful Gawker, remember what happened last time you got Anonymous pissed off. But I personally expect to see more unrest, and to see it fueled by the kind of leaks that can only happen via the internet. Regardless of whether you approve of the specific actions of groups like Anonymous or Wikileaks, or individuals like Bradley Manning, they’re going to affect you. It may be impossible to intentionally engineer a bankrun, but the seed gets planted in the mind, and when the dirt comes out on a politician like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, we’ll see more events like the bankrun by Wisconsin fireman against M&I. Anonymous may be more on the mark than we think with the slogan “none of us is as cruel as all of us”.

If you really DO prefer astroturf to grass roots,
you can always buy some on Amazon

If you’re an American who’s angry about joblessness, the cost of living, government spending, and your mortgage payment, I want to ask you to do me a favor. Put down that teacup and that Obama sign with the Hitler moustache drawn on it for a second, and think. When you go to the polls this fall, don’t think about elephants and donkeys, think about power, money, greed, and media. Now that a corporation has the same rights as a person, and a handful of wealthy people who aren’t you control corporations, before you give that person that vote, ask yourself: am I just voting against something again? Because if you are, there’s a pretty good chance you’re being sucker-punched. When less than a hundred people in America make over fifty million dollars, and money wins elections, who do you really think you’re voting for? Ignore for a moment the fact that NPR is a frightening haven for aging hippy liberal academics, and take a look at this interactive graphic that they’ve created that shows the cash flow between allegedly “grass roots” political action groups and GOP or Democrat sources. If you read or listen to the whole article, you’ll find it’s not anti-conservative, it’s anti-public deception. In fact, it compliments conservatives for refining the dirty methods of Democrats. Don’t think partisan when you vote this time, think about whether or not you want a guy that George Bush referred to as Turd Blossom shaping how you think. Because there’s a good chance he is.

Here’s O’Donnell proving she’s ready to devour her opponents if necessary.

*Apologies for talking like a White House chief of staff.

My Pew Research Quiz Results:

Ignorance is not a partisan issue. See for yourself:

Barack Obama Voters

Sarah Palin Voters

“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” — P.J. O’Rourke

Remember when you were in grade school and you would insult somebody, and say “no takebacks“, and they’d say “I’m in a no ‘no takebacks’ zone, so your ‘no takeback’ doesn’t count!” and it would perpetually escalate into an absurdly recursive game of making a rule about a rule that didn’t exist? Well, apparently some people have trouble outgrowing this behaviour. Back in March I saw this piece about a flurry of arrests in Indiana involving Sovereign Citizens, who – among other things – claimed they weren’t US citizens, but rather diplomats living in embassies, and would produce documents they’d made themselves to back it all up. I kind of wrote them off as typical rural Midwestern loonies; there are areas in just about every one of the United States where you might wanna turn down the Cat Stevens as you drive through if you don’t wanna get shot. But it turns out these people are for real, and as ginormously high-larious as their proclamations are, their deranged and misinformed logic has already caused one of the greatest tragedies on American soil, the Oklahoma City bombing. Yes, Terry Nichols, friend and accomplice of Oklahoma City Federal Building bomber Timothy McVeigh was one of them. More recently, you may have read about how the group Guardians of the Free Republics sent letters to 30 state governors demanding their resignations. Well, as my grandpa would say, “their elevators don’t seem to go to the top floor” either. Their site has a deadline of March 31 of this year for the bizarre actions they ramble about on this page. And all the pages of the site have a weird seal at the bottom that says “Private web site under non-corporate venue. This seal conveys immunity from public scrutiny, discretion, regulation or trespass. Trespassers beware. Co-claimant fee applies to impairment.” I’m sure if you stop by their embassy they’ll be glad to explain what that means. If you can find the bomb shelter it’s located in.

You know America has really gone to hell when a self-respecting white supremacist can’t attend a tea party rally without getting harassed by some elitist intellectual teabagger type. We suggested a while back that the country may be headed for some kind of red vs. blue civil war, but this thinking was based on the pretty narrow evidence of two-party voting behavior during a national election. Now that we’ve had a chance to see America showing its true (mostly white) colors, we’re rethinking things a bit, and think the real civil disorder will be just that: civil disorder. And mostly amongst the hard-to-define factions known as rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash. Yes, while American spatial mobility seems to have slowed around 2007, we’re still left with a lot people from different American subcultures transplanted to a variety of urban areas. And as the old saying goes, “you can take the boy out of the country” yadda yadda. I was reminded of how powerful these subcultural influences can be recently when I used the term “white trash” in mixed company. And by “mixed company”, I mean a group of white people from various parts of the country, some of whom are only spittin’ distance from their more rural roots. I really thought that in an age when so many oppressed groups of people had reclaimed the power of words used against them – i.e.: gay men calling themselves fags, black people calling themselves niggers, etc. – that my reference to my white trash background was pretty safe. How wrong I was. The hilarious arguments that ensued regarding what the differences were between rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash inspired me to do a series of utterly unscientific pop-anthropology overviews of the distinctions. Since my snuff-dippin’ grandmother from West Virginia always bragged about how the main thing that made her not a redneck was the fact that her family fought for the Union during the civil war, that’s the first line I’m going to draw. The strongest image in the redneck brand seems to be the confederate flag, so I’m going to assert that since grandma didn’t come from the hills, and wasn’t a redneck, she must have been white trash. Which gives me license to claim a certain expertise on this group. We’ll go into more detail in upcoming pieces (besides, we already covered how to talk like a hillbilly) , but I figure we’ll cover some basics right now. First of all, you’ll need a name. An awful lot of my white trash (see how comfortably I use the term now?) ancestors had that familiar “billy bob” or dotty mae” theme going on, so I highly recommend this white trash name generator. Two other fundamentals in life are food and housing. As a culinary guide, I can comfortably recommend White Trash Cooking . A friend gave this to me years ago (thanks Johnnie Sue!) and although I’ve never tried the recipes, my older brother borrows it all the time, which I think speaks to its authenticity. And for a nice home (more commonly referred to as a “trailer”) try Cullman Liquidation. As Mr. Cullman himself eloquently and honestly puts it: “These are mobile homes. Not mansions. They come in two pieces“. We’ll be back soon with a more in-depth look at rednecks, hillbillies, and white trash. If you have any expertise regarding these complex American subcultures, feel free to chime in.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time in America when if someone said they were having a tea party, they were probably under ten years old, and pretending. I guess things haven’t changed that much; these days if someone’s talking about having a tea party, they probably have the intelligence of someone under ten years old, and I suppose being delusional is kind of like pretending. It’s pretty amazing that we get so riled up about taxes at all, we pay significantly lower taxes than most of the world. It’s arguably because of our revolutionary roots, but I think we’ve lost sight of an important detail: American revolutionaries weren’t just protesting taxes, they were protesting taxation without representation. If a contemporary tea partier had a better grasp of that fact, they would have been just as angry at the last (or last several) administrations as they are at the current one. The thing is, the vast majority of these angry people are really just that – angry people. Today’s New York Times Polling the Tea Party survey highlights that fact in an odd way; the majority of tea party supporters are Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. Sounds like a recipe for being angry to me, especially when a black man with an apparent sense of humanity is in office. Respondents also openly expressed that they believe the president is a Muslim socialist. Apparently they’ve never met Rahm Emmanuel or other rabidly capitalist key White House staffers. And in my opinion, the fact that the poll also suggests that many tea partiers are college-educated highlights nothing more than a failure of the educational system. Heh. Had to get that one in. So in honor of you having paid your taxes once again this year, we thought we’d help you figure out where your money went. There are lots of clever graphs and charts out there like Death and Taxes (2.4MB jpg!), which is a little too pictographic for my tastes, but is probably cool to have on the wall to ponder over time. There are also annoyingly distorted charts like this one from Turbotax that not only makes it look like your company’s CEO pays all the taxes, but uses the color pink for the defense budget. Personally, I found this info from the National Priorities Project to be the most straightforward, and they also clarify who’s paying the taxes, not just where your income tax dollars go.

Given the recent court decision about corporations having the same rights as people, why don’t they pay the same percentage of taxes?

When I wrote about Why Democrats Always Lose & Why American Voters Need A Brand a while back, I was hoping for something a little more inspired than a choice loosely based on the title of a now painfully politically incorrect “tell all” book from the “swingin’ sixties”. Yes, the American liberal has once again built failure into their plans for setting the country back on track by letting the Republicans frame the debate. Oh, you have a tea party? Well, we have a…a…a COFFEE party. So there. The Coffee Party’s ragtag collection of unofficial spokespeople claim that they really have many of the same values as the teabaggers, but just think we need more reasonable discourse. They then go on to ramble about complex social issues in an intelligent and articulate fashion using all sorts of four-syllable words. Which is what Democrats do well. Analyze and calmly complain about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck while sipping green tea and listening to NPR. I mean, c’mon liberals, they ALREADY CO-OPTED YOUR PREFERRED BEVERAGE, for cryin’ out loud. No, I don’t think the Coffee Party Movement is going to be any great threat to the Republican party. The movement is almost certainly going to get bogged down early on in some kind of infighting about cappuccino vs latte, skim vs lowfat vs soy vs whole milk debate. For now, I’m sticking to my existing proposal for the American voter’s branding:

I shouldn’t be as astounded as I am that the GOP has once again taken ownership of a public sentiment that has absolutely no real foundation in a partisan stance. Tell me. Who in America (besides a bunch of bailed out bank executives) is NOT angry that tax dollars are being funneled into a mind-boggling array of government subsidizing of business and bailouts of epic business failures? And more importantly, how the hell did the GOP spin this out so cleverly and so quickly into their issue, when it is, plain and simple, their fault? This is the party that from Reagan to Cheney has said that deficits don’t matter. And now, suddenly, deficits are a horrible monster created by Barack Obama. The GOP is even benefitting from the humor and confusion that a typical witty liberal will enjoy when watching a pun-laden rant against tea parties, as in the MSNBC clip featured at left. Who’s behind this masterpiece of Astroturfing? Mostly the conservative lobby groups Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity. Nice job, Dems.