28 Responses to “BUY NORDIAZEPAM NO PRESCRIPTION”

1. Charles Says:
   November 24th, 2011 at 2:24 am

   If you can’t say exactly what they should do can you suggest a way in which they can start deciding for themselves? I don’t think a hundred local finger-waving pow-wows are going to generate a broad general strategy. I have no idea what could but I agree they must, and soon.

2. Dan O Says:
   November 24th, 2011 at 6:30 am

   I’ve spent a fair amount of time at Zucotti park and in the several marches, and while it can be really exhilarating, I agree that it needs to be concerned with power. So far I’m not seeing that.

   In fact, I’d contend that the whole system of the GA they’ve set up and their constant insistence that there are no leaders works against this. They are simultaneously so afraid of being co-opted by the Dems and constitutionally allergic to power, that they can’t even recognize the need for leadership in their own group.

   They need real spokespeople. On the OWS website they squawk about how “our homes” have been taken from us. I can’t imagine a more counter-productive and nauseating thing to the general public aside from violence. The park isn’t your home.

   And while the “they don’t know what they want” line is just a cheap Fox News jab, it’s been really effective. Almost everyone I talk about it, says this. Real leadership could work to combat that view.

   At Foley Square the other night a group of students were yelling for “free education.” I know you can’t control everything, but this kind of bullshit just plays right into the hands of their opponents and makes a joke out of the very serious issue of rising education costs.

   On the other hand it was CJR or someplace that said that over the last couple of weeks 13% of TV news stories have been about income inequality and related issues, proving once again that our media is as lazy as our politicians.

3. Haps Says:
   November 24th, 2011 at 10:50 am

   Dan, is right about raw power, but let’s not be in too much of a rush. We want it all. This is a nascent rebellion, it’s in it’s early raw, expansive, and profoundly hopeful stage. We are looking forward at least 20 years, and onward. I’m 64, excited and enthusiastic, because there has been nothing this big since late 60′s. Likewise this is a change of consciousness, morality, & mood of inter-connectedness. Looking to the powers to be to grant demands empowers them with credibility when the system itself is corrupting. Our challenge is to make them irrelevant. The shift, can not happen all at once: yes, a transition from the present power arrangements will happen (hopefully) gradually, peacefully where possible, to extending real democracy to our brothers and sisters. We need to Occupy the houses of power, local, national, world. We are now gathering strength and numbers, strategies, tactics and essential purpose. Give thanks.

4. Haps Says:
   November 24th, 2011 at 10:53 am

   PS this is bigger than the 60′s, because that was narrowly focused on war. Now we have a planet and humanity to save. It must happen from inside the belly of the best, that is why we have been called.

5. John M Says:
   November 24th, 2011 at 10:35 pm

   OWS did not exist before September. It need not exist one second longer. It owes nothing to anybody. It is not representative democracy. It’s not even an organization. It doesn’t represent the 99%, its members are IN the 99%. I’ve only seen one member of the 1% in Zuccotti Park – Sean Lennon, and he was singing “Material Girl” in support of OWS (so much for your use of the Lennon name against the protesters – you misquoted “Revolution,” by the way*).

   Many observers act as if it was merely nice or inevitable that protesters got together and created a movement that swept the world instantly, as if this kind of thing happens all the time. But this is way beyond what happened in Seattle. This is way beyond what happened in Egypt. This is simply unprecedented. OWS hasn’t just “informed the debate,” they’ve bypassed the media, spoken to ordinary people directly. They even turned a retired Philadelphia police captain into a protester.

   OWS has been a clearinghouse for ideas of all stripes – it is the biggest tent there is – and this has been its greatest strength. Everybody feels like they are a part of it, including those who do nothing but tell OWS what to do. OWS doesn’t even have leaders who tell itself what to do. If you want to get an idea through it, you have to go to a General Assembly. They’ve created a presence and a process. If that’s not enough for you, start your own worldwide movement. The tools are available to anyone with a laptop and a YouTube account.

   When the energy, passion and commitment are drained from it – hopefully not beaten out of it – OWS will end. The real tragedy will be people thinking that OWS is the answer. It’s not up to OWS to save the country. It’s up to all of us. OWS isn’t a cult of personality – there is nobody carrying pictures of Chairman Mao – it’s a culture of peoples. Before OWS the 99% kept looking for someone to represent them (they thought it was Obama). They finally stopped looking for a leader and found it in themselves (“Don’t follow leaders, watch yer parking meters” – Bob Dylan)

   The next step is not to present our own demands to OWS (they don’t even have leaders to process such things), but for all of us to realize that we all have the power.

   If OWS could accomplish what it has in such a short period of time, what might others accomplish? My own issue is a constitutional amendment to revoke personhood for corporations. I see no reason to filter that through OWS at all – in fact, its 90% consensus rule will slow down its passage.

   OWS has done more to inspire, thrill and focus than anything else. It is not a political party. My experiences at Zuccotti Park were largely spiritual. This quality of the occupation has been ignored by the media, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

   Almost nobody disagrees with OWS’s sentiments, yet its methods and tactics are subject to criticism from the left, hostility from the right and physical violence from the authorities. I am not an OWS member, but I am a supporter and sympathizer. They have my full support, both for their aims and their process.

   “We are the 99%” is another way of saying “Power to the people,” to quote Sean Lennon’s dad.

   *”If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow”

6. Bruce S Says:
   November 25th, 2011 at 12:45 am

   I’ve been overjoyed to see the occupy movement arise and am among it’s supporters. Some of its internal ideology and tactics as typified by the Zuccoti Park encampment mystify me, but the central message of “the 99%” against the upper-most economic elite turned out to be brilliant and based on some sound analysis (see Joseph Stiglitz much-read piece that appeared, bizarrely, in Vanity Fair some months back) and an almost inarguable inclusiveness, despite it being backed up by drum circles and other harmless accoutrements of feel-good activism.

   I’ve participated in the local marches in conjunction with OWS, my church has organized support action and, while as confused as anyone else where this thing might go next in a political sense, I see it as a significant and positive development.

   But I’ve also experienced stuff in relation to the movement that is disturbing, not so much in terms of “left” critiques at the margins but my sense of whether there’s enough political maturity among the key activists to broaden the strategy beyond encampments or to use the goodwill generated – mostly by police over-reaction and brutality – to build an authentic social movement around this. First, our very large local support demo was hijacked by crazies who broke the windows of local merchants who had shut their doors and posted signs in SUPPORT of the movement on the day of the mass march. Then a couple of days ago, having been rousted from downtown Oakland (I was out of town and deliberately vacationing from local news during the last round of rousting, so I really can’t speak directly to what happened or how) a large Occupy Oakland showed up on a vacant lot at the end of my block.

   Initially talking to the group they said they were trying to stop a bank foreclosure against the lot and an occupied house that is adjacent. That won my support. Then, talking to a local reporter on the scene, I got the news that the owner of the lot – who does face a one-month deadline from the bank to do something to keep the properties out of foreclosure – was not supporting the action supposedly in her defense. The renters occupying the house had not been talked to by the occupiers, no one in the neighborhood had been talked to, none of the occupiers was actually from the neighborhood, no family member or friend or anyone who actually had developed any relationship with the owner was participating and the story became something of a disaster. And, of course, the occupiers were mostly white in a mostly black neighborhood – with a handful of young black participants too-obviously put out in front as (increasingly uncomfortable) spokespeople. Again – no organizing in preparation for the action, no knocking on doors along the block to discuss the issue and ensconced in a narrative that made them look like interlopers and idiots. Which was in fact what they had chosen to become, with the entire incident being broadcast on local news and spread in the local papers.

   It became increasingly clear that the occupy group had done nothing to make their issue plausible or make sure that they had the most minimal support. They had to rely on making a story up as they went along, and it collapsed upon investigation. (Maybe we locals didn’t get the message because we’re not on Twitter or Facebook. I honestly think this was an instance where the buzz over “social networking” among activists has subsumed reading and considering, at the least, a little Saul Alinsky or perhaps Taylor Branch’s epic history of the civil rights movement, it’s growing pains, successes and failures.)

   Near the end of the day, an essentially bogus and condescending leaflet (“A Friendly Message”) was being put on the windows of parked cars and a few doors-steps, claiming this was an action by “members of the West Oakland community.” By this time, the whole thing was being treated derisively, with good cause, by the longest-standing residents – from mild resentment to a total joke. After a day, most of the occupiers left, leaving a few stragglers for another day or two and a couple of porta-potties sitting on the sidewalk of a block that is struggling to make a come-back against negative perceptions and the legacy of very real income inequality.

   I don’t write this to attack the movement “from the left,” but to suggest that there are some real problems going forward and that activism based on narcissism and fumbling good intentions is a real danger to taking advantage of a historic moment and building something we truly need – a movement to radically curb the abuse of privilege by an economic elite, to shift the growth in income inequality back to broader benefits and to get more democratic accountability from our political system that has been corrupted.

   I will simply say that Occupy Oakland has made it harder to build any such movement locally if their “brand” is attached to it, at least in my neighborhood where they are now seen as a bunch of clueless kids playing games. I’m going to do my best to take the lesson from this that other folks have to step in and fill the vacuum with broader-based strategies (easier said than done of course), but I can’t say I’m not seriously disappointed and pissed that so much energy and potential goodwill was squandered in such a puerile and counter-productive charade, marked by such arrogance and narcissism. I’m so old that I’ve been through this movie before, so I guess I should have seen stuff like this coming. Events framed through a larger lens will probably obscure this mess – my guess is that it didn’t make it past the local news – but having seen what was initially characterized as “the next step” of Occupy Oakland up about as close as you can get – and about as far from “Wall Street” as you can get – and trying to make some sense of it has been frustrating and disturbing, to say the least.

   The movement has, frankly, benefited from police brutality (it was not a coincidence that SCLC chose Birmingham for a key protest, knowing that the police would almost without question respond brutally to mass demonstrations) but this can’t become the central issue. Again, there’s a need for movement building beyond tent cities and confrontation with cops. I don’t have any easy answers. I see this current phase as encouraging but very likely to play itself out. More experienced organizers weren’t able to provide the catalyst, which is why OWS has been so imporant and impressive, but at this point people who have some broader strategies are needed to build on this largely spontaneous outburst. I don’t want to see what went down on my block writ large, but I can’t say I have a lot of confidence. I will say that given this is the Bay Area, any movement is going to attract more than it’s share of folks who are totally delusional and/or utterly narcissistic. But I also have to say that the folks who organized the stupidity I witnessed seemed pretty self-possessed and weren’t selling strange newspapers touting revolution in Nepal or the virtues of Castroism. Unfortunately they showed as much regard for the folks they pretended to speak and act for as those Leninist morons.

7. Bruce S Says:
   November 25th, 2011 at 7:32 am

   “This is way beyond what happened in Egypt. This is simply unprecedented.”

   Please. Stop. Some sense of proportion and…uh…reality. A rebellion with revolutionary implications swept North Africa this past year and has changed the face of the region. It is delusional to compare what has largely been very successful political theater by OWS – amplified by a clearly indefensible police response that at its worst reached the level of “rubber bullets” resulting in, to my knowledge, one serious hospitalization – to the risks, sacrifices and tangible political results of the Eqyptian movement in the face of a regime that routinely engaged in long-term imprisonment, murder and torture of domestic activists. Hundreds – I think nearly a thousand – were killed in the Egyptian protests. Yet they continued and were successful in the first round of toppling Mubarek. Yeah – toppling the government. Not to mention the chain reaction spreading to Libya, where people had to fight a real war against the regime.

   I’m glad you had a spiritual experience in Zucotti Park and feel empowered in some way, but this kind of, frankly, incoherent magnification of symbolic protest is the Achilles heel of participants that others here are attempting to address. I too want to work to spread the potential that was unleashed, but not by ignoring weaknesses or underestimating the difficulty. And certainly not by assuming this OWS movement is operating at some “unprecedented” world-historical level that overshadows the sacrifices of people who know they are risking their lives when they resist actual dictators whose thugs don’t think twice about killing you with real bullets.

   Also, Sean Lennon’s dad was quoting other people who weren’t pop stars when he adopted the slogan, “Power to the people!” as a rather facile song lyric. And that slogan was problematic and not exactly a political “magic bullet” in it’s original context at the time, however cool it sounds in retrospect. “The people” were decidedly not united on the critical issues- and a strategy rooted primarily in protest was in itself polarizing. Which can be useful in the moment, but hardly serves as an end in itself and can result in the death of movements that put primacy on their own affinities, their own lens looking outward, their “uniqueness”, a “new paradigm”, “the unprecedented”, etc. etc. This is a long discussion mired in complex and confounding history of what gets romanticized as “The Sixties” – which, of course, gave birth to Reaganism and it’s ghoulish contemporary pretenders as much as the greater social equality we achieve…and, of course, an end to war. (Oh…wait a minute.)

   Just saying. (In the interest of concision and focus, I’ll refrain from discussing any spiritual experiences I had back in 1967…)

8. Marc Cooper Says:
   November 25th, 2011 at 3:32 pm

   I totally agree with Bruce. This movement, if that’s what it is, will surpass what happened in Egypt when there are more people in Times Square then there are have been in Tahiri Square. So figure, say, about a half million Americans occupying mid-Manhattan. If that ever happens, they won’t be using a human microphone and they won’t be experiencing spiritual epiphanies. They will be making history.

   Like Bruce and the others here, I am undeniably pleased by the upsurge in activism and the INCREMENTAL elevation in public awareness that that it’s 1 percent pulling the strings.

   In the coldest terms, however, that is all we are talking about so far. Any Evangelical and obscurantist mega-church on any Sunday still draws a larger crowd that almost any OWS event has and the deformed Republican Party is still on track to take back the Senate. And, perhaps, the White House,

   Let’s not get carried away.

9. Mr X Says:
   November 25th, 2011 at 10:02 pm

   Occupy LA, anyway, shows all of the traditional idiocies of the left. It’s confused and easily exploited by parasites ranging from the CPUSA (!) to Deepak Chopra. There is no discipline or authority, so fools smoke dope in the middle of marches carefully organized by the SEIU and assholes play drums during general assemblies. Street people siphon off an increasing share of the movement’s resources.

   It’s not sustainable, but it’s worth getting arrested and beat up to keep it going a little longer. This is golden time for the left.

   As Marc says, Occupy has only a distinctive tactic, resonant rhetoric, and an odd talent for making their adversaries turn stupid. The young people at the committed heart of it have the basic ideas of the left – egalitarianism and democracy-and no other agreed ideology. But that’s *good*, because all the ideologies, platforms, and strategies past generations of the socialist movement have passed down to them are utter failures. Core groups of committed people are down there 24/7 talking and thinking.

   These are the people that are going to lead whatever fills the space left by the demise of social democracy, communism, anarchism, and left-liberalism. Maybe they will come up with the new ideas we need. It’s worth fighting to give them that space for another few days, or weeks, or however long it takes until the crazy people eat all the food or too many kids decide to go off to an ashram.

10. Mr X Says:
    November 26th, 2011 at 12:04 pm

    PS I thought the people’s mike was a pain in the ass. However, someone pointed out to me that PM makes it near-impossible to use the traditional way that ML cultists and police plants traditionally disrupt open meetings, which is to constantly call points of order and introduce irrelevant rhetoric in the middle of discussions.

11. ghost of john muir Says:
    November 26th, 2011 at 5:57 pm

    Platitudes aside, Occupy Los Angeles has already been consumed by the worst kind of insular delusions. It is moving at hyper speed like everything else and that has put them into the delusional phase much quicker than other movements like the anti-globalization movement.

    These bafoons think they are going to ‘shut down the port.’ Catch is they announced it 3 weeks in advance. So that is why Occupy Los Angeles and Occupy Long Beach are getting evicted. They have much smaller numbers than they appear to have as well.

    They are all novices or are the gaggle of KPFK listening cretins that finally have a captive audience. They will bring this ship down.

    The level of naive insanity you hear out there is staggering. “We are in a revolution” kind of insanity is maddening. They have no more than 500 supporters in OLA but they think they have some sort of mass movement.

    To top it off, the SEIU and other Dem operatives have all weaseled into the leadership. Russell Simmons, a guy who represents the worst of the 1% is more or less their spokesman and a funder. Who did he campaign for last time around?

    I had to walk away from it. It will implode quicker than you think and a chunk of them will end up campaigning for the same old gang of corporate Democrats.

    Hate to be so negative but the left is so desperate for something that it has put its eggs in this basket. I can’t blame em but…

12. ghost of john muir Says:
    November 26th, 2011 at 6:07 pm

    In the end, much of the radical rhetoric is masking middle class entitlement. UTA middle school teachers in Che shirts calling each other brother and sister talking about mobilizing 5,000,000 of the 99%. My god is it sad and depressing. This is the left in 2011, more delusional than ever.

    I was active in the “anti-globalization” movement and while you had a certain idiocy of the black bloc types, they were fairly marginal. I found that rank and file folks engaged in the movement had far more knowledge of specific issues (like food systems) or a at least a decent knowledge of global capitalism, in particular the trade agreements, IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc… The ignorance at OLA is astounding. Absolutely astounding.

    While some labor unions and creepy Dem operatives are working to co-opt the movement, they have failed to outreach key constituents like the environmental movement. In LA, you can’t do much without them.

    It really is a gaggle of well intentioned by ineffective people. Publicity is not enough, they got to actually change something.

    It really makes me want to leave the USA actually. It kind of led me to loose hope.

13. Mr X Says:
    November 26th, 2011 at 6:44 pm

    >It will implode quicker than you think
    >and a chunk of them will end up campaigning
    >for the same old gang of corporate Democrats.

    GOJM, take what you can get. Fifty or a hundred people in the core group of Occupy LA, maybe a thousand nationwide, might be able to resist both the revolutionary delusions and the Borglike sway of the Democratic Party. That’s future leadership.

    I suspect that university boards will be a little more reluctant to raise tuition next year. I’m not one for immediate demands, but the cutoff of working class access to education is truly a social emergency. Occupy has put some wholesome fear into university administrations.

    Labor/student connections have been made that would have been very exceptional in my time as a student radical, 25 years ago. Back then, in Nor Cal, we knew some ML types from the ILWU, and that was it. Most student “radicals” cared a great deal more about baby seals than about any human being who worked by the hour. Occupy has made a good deal of headway on that.

    We’ll be in a better position to build the left when the next wave starts than we were in September. Nothing is going to happen on the left during a Presidential election year, so there’s a long dark time ahead. The longer we keep the action going now, the less we will dissipate during the lull. That’s worth getting your ass kicked over tomorrow night.

14. Brad in SoCal Says:
    November 26th, 2011 at 8:43 pm

    OWS succeeded in tapping a fundamental issue in American life. Kudos to all those who participated and supported. Refusing to suffer in silence, bearing witness day after day, sent a powerful message.

    But camping out is not a strategy, as Marc also suggests. The anarchist outlook at the center of OWS, while heartfelt, probably cannot succeed in altering the political debate. Organization matters. Speaking in the name of the 99% is not the same as mobilizing them for real change.

    Especially when talking about elections, and power, abstaining is not a way forward. Perhaps if OWS can be a catalyst to encourage labor and the left to really challenge corporate power and defend the public sphere, then that would be an important contribution. Even better would be if OWS encouraged others, currently unorganized, to stand up for economic justice, rather than continuing to suffer in silence. We can’t all camp out, but we can resist.

15. Drydock Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 2:07 am

    Hey Bruce– could you stop making shit up. What you said about what happened in west Oakland is a fucking fiction. The action wasn’t a success, but everything you said about is wrong. The corporate media didn’t even make up the shit you just did. Stop lying. Thank you.

16. Bob Williams Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 3:04 am

    I delight in the OWS movement. Each new day is like Christmas.

17. Bruce S Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 8:16 am

    I think Bob Williams captures fully the emotional gratification so many of us feel in the discourse being shifted from nutty right-wing fantasies to real economic problems like income inequality and the theft of democracy by a bloated, utterly irresponsible financial sector. The harder issue, of course, is making this upsurge of public approval for the Occupy issues stick and developing winning political strategies over the long-term. Otherwise Bob is going to suffer a huge let-down from his current euphoria if the full-blown depravity of the Tea-Party/GOP and the attendant pathology of too many Democrats scared even of their own shadow re-asserts itself. But enjoy the moment, Bob, as do the rest of us.

    As for Drydock – nothing I said was wrong. Not even a little bit. I talked to the media present, the demonstrators, one of the owner’s relatives and a resident who spoke to her directly. I live on the block. And why are porta-potties still sitting on our sidewalk. You are part of the problem and slandering me for telling what happened from the direct perspective of a person who lives on the block is pathetic. Either address my points in detail with information that you can verify or shut the hell up. Don’t call me a liar and run away.

18. Bob Williams Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 8:24 am

    Bruce totally misses the reasons for my delight in OWS. But I’ll take it.

19. Randy Paul Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 8:54 am

    Bruce, that’s just Bob Williams right knee jerking. Pay no attention to it.

20. Bruce S Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 9:18 am

    Bob – I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this. Since public opinion has dramatically shifted to supporting the goals of Occupy, and the Tea Party is roundly disdained in polling, it’s hard to fathom that you aren’t a supporter if you truly are delighted by the appearance of this movement. Perhaps you are the one who is missing something significant, if as implied by Randy Paul you are actually some kind of a right-winger. I respect irony when it’s at least suggestive or grounded in an apparent point, but it sound like you might just be confused.

21. Bruce S Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 9:35 am

    Drydock: “The corporate media didn’t even make up the shit you just did…”

    From “corporate” SF Chronicle story: on the occupation:

    “We thought the owner wanted us here, but I think maybe she didn’t know what she was getting into and changed her mind,” Occupy activist Leo Ritz-Barr said as he cut a huge “Occupy Oakland” banner off the fence surrounding the lot at 18th and Linden streets. “We’ll find another action.

    “The encampments aren’t the most important part of our work, and we can find other ways to fight for people to stay in their homes. If anything, this shows how hard it is to help them,” he said.

    Police gave the group a warning to clear the lot at about 8:30 p.m., protesters said via Twitter.

    Earlier Tuesday, the woman who owns the lot said the group had moved in without her permission and that she wanted them out.

    “I have asked them to leave,” said Gloria Cobb, who owns the lot. “They won’t leave. I can’t afford to stop work and physically go down there.”

    Activists had said late Monday that Cobb gave them permission to set up their tents, but Cobb denied that.

    “No, it is not the case,” said Cobb, the sister of longtime activist and Oakland Post Publisher Paul Cobb.

    About 25 tents and a food station had gone up since late Monday, when Occupy Oakland’s general assembly voted to take up residence on the grassy patch of land, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence.

    Police spokeswoman Officer Johnna Watson said Gloria Cobb contacted the department Tuesday and was in the process of signing a form to allow officers to enter the property.

    (For so-called “organizers” to prove themselves this inept is pathetic, as I said previously. If Drydock wants to slime me as a block resident sympathetic to the movement who had to go around and try to make some sense of this fiasco and found nothing credible coming from the Occupy direction other than vague defensive statements, rather than his engaging in some acknowledgment and contemplation on just how messed up this was from the perspective of Organizing 101, it’s just more of the same problem. Doesn’t bode well…)

22. Bruce S Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 9:36 am

    And note the “organizer’s” money quote – “If anything this shows how hard it is to help them…”

    As I said, arrogance and narcissism of the first order.

23. Drydock Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 10:31 am

    I was there for a lot of what happened. Here’s how it went as far as I saw. Some young African-american guys initiated an action to camp on Gloria Cobb foreclosing property. Within 24 hours the family changed their mind for unclear reasons. A guy I know talked to the a family niece and she didn’t ask them to leave. A few hours later the family called the police without informing the protesters. Their was a lot of confusion when the police came and the protesters left within about 2 hours. The main offense as far a can tell was being loud on a residential street at night. Not much harm. A portopotti was left for a day or two in front of an empty lot. Big Deal. And actually most of the neighbors I encountered were pretty supportive but Im willing to reconsider this point since you say that you live there.

    As far as organizing goes, the dudes that initiated the action failed. But they were young guys inspired by the occupy movement to do something in their neighborhood. They weren’t seasoned baby boomer organizing pros like Bruce who’ve been organizing the poor and working class of Oakland to victory for decades.

24. Drydock Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 10:47 am

    Here’s an article on the action.

    http://oaklandlocal.com/article/notes-scene-w-oakland-occupy-camp-faces-uncertain-future-police-make-them-leave

25. Bruce S Says:
    November 27th, 2011 at 1:27 pm

    Drydock – sorry, but whoever initiated that action failed organizing 101. There was no serious attempt to build support in a residential neighborhood that had potential to be sympathetic. The main offense was spending a lot of time and energy on a ridiculously ill-concieved action. I don’t know of anyone who complained about noise – maybe someone did, but you’re avoiding the core issues and facts on the ground.

    “A guy I know talked to the family niece and she didn’t ask them to leave.” That’s pretty pathetic as a rationale. I also talked to the family niece and she seemed not to know what the hell was going on and came to find out. Which is bizarre. This isn’t worth debating with you, if this is your best explanation.

    And the porta-potties are still sitting there. It’s not a huge deal and you may brush that off, but try to set up porta-potties on the sidewalk and leave them there in a white middle-class part of town. Your attitude toward our block is a little too familiar.

    And the article you link to could be used as a text-book list of just how ill-conceived and poorly organized this mess was. You seem to lack even minimal self-awareness or understanding of even the most basic tactics of community or political organizing. There are plenty of church and community groups that anyone with their head screwed on could reach out to. There are plenty of people on this very block who are sympathetic to the general goals. Not even minimal outreach was conducted. So your “good intentions” appear to be enough for you. That’s just sad. First and foremost, cement a relationship with the people you pretend to speak for and who actually “occupy” the space in contention.

    The notion that this was conceived by anyone who has any organic relationship with this neighborhood or who comprehend it beyond the end of their nose is just a fiction, to use your term. I talked with the main spokesman and he waved toward some guy he claimed lived near here, noting that he himself lived across town. The individual best known to people on the block who was hooking up and interacting with the protestors has relationships and a reputation that are problematic, to say the least. The point isn’t that you have to live on the block, but that you can’t helicopter in and try to create relationships with people who do when the media and cops are swarming around the neighborhood and folks are scratching their heads about the whole damned thing. That’s just crazy.

    And you can shove your lazy snark where the sun don’t shine, because it makes you seem even more lame if you’ve got to reduce the discussion to that kind of bullshit.

26. Occupy. What tactics and strategy should come next? | Politics in the Zeros Says:
    November 28th, 2011 at 6:01 am

    [...] leftie Marc Cooper on Occupy. Letting this movement descend into a prolonged cat and mouse battle over physical space, tents and parks would be tragic. [...]

27. Michael Turmon Says:
    November 29th, 2011 at 11:10 am

    @ Mr. X: You say:

    “in my time as a student radical, 25 years ago. … Most student “radicals” cared a great deal more about baby seals than about any human being who worked by the hour.”

    The way I remember it, the major cause for student radicals 25 years ago (mid-80s) was the anti-Apartheid movement, which was rather successful. Another major cause was limiting American support for the government in El Salvador. It wasn’t all baby seal stuff.

28. Sillon relax Says:
    December 1st, 2011 at 12:00 pm

    Sillon relax…

    [...]Marc Cooper » Blog Archive » Occupy What?[...]…