Month: September 2011

Here is a mid-day update on the protests going on currently around Wall Street in New York City. “Occupy Wall Street” actions and a takeover of a local park continue. Tensions between demonstrators and police are mounting, one protester is in critical condition, and it appears that YAHOO was – for a while at least, censoring emails on their accounts that had the words “occupy wall street”. The “problem” appears to be over.

In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing.

Tea party offers a lesson, but progressives don’t get it.

By Rick Janhkow

Below is a recent NYT News Service article that illustrates a point I have tried to make in the past about why progressive activism in this country is so weak and ineffective, and why counter-recruitment and school demilitarization work is an antidote to that weakness.

In general, peace and other progressive movement organizations in the U.S. focus on electoral campaigns, legislative lobbying and street protests that are immediate responses to crises, while they fail to simultaneously pursue long-term strategies that are necessary to make the general public willing to embrace and actively seek progressive social change.

Protestors continue their “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations in New York City for the fourth day. In what began as a day of rage on Saturday, the 17th, continues into this week. Hundreds have been camping out at what used to be called Zuccotti Park – renamed “Liberty Park”.

A livestream video of the protests is available at the OB Rag sidebar.

This morning – the 20th – the livestream reported:

At 730 am of 9/20 three people were arrested including one of the media team. Always classy, NYPD. At any time, 50-70 people typically surround the park w/ about 200-300 people in it.

The newly empowered Republicans in Pennsylvania are considering changing the way the state awards its electoral votes in presidential elections despite growing concerns by some Republicans that the move could backfire

Former Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, calls the effort to change how electoral votes are awarded in Pennsylvania “somewhere between despicable and reprehensible.”

Get your history of voter suppression right here! GOP rev’s up efforts to make voting more difficult by Americans

In the 1964 presidential elections, a young political operative named Bill guarded a largely African-American polling place in South Phoenix, Arizona like a bull mastiff. Bill was a legal whiz who knew the ins and outs of voting law and insisted that every obscure provision be applied, no matter what. … It turned out that it was part of a Republican Party strategy known as “Operation Eagle Eye”, and “Bill” was future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.

By Channel 8 News

A strike by 10,000 grocery workers in San Diego County was averted Monday when union negotiators struck a tentative agreement with the owners of Albertsons, Ralphs and Vons/Pavilions.

The two sides faced a 7 p.m. Sunday strike deadline, but labor talks continued through the night, with both sides indicating that some progress was being made.

Editor: This was originally published on Sept 19, 2011, so the intro is somewhat dated. But I’ve picked this tomb up in the last few days to reread it – and it is definitely worth a second look.

Last week on KUSI’s Republican campaign infomercial, Carl DeMaio, Jerry Sanders, Kevin Faulconer, and all the usual suspects lined up to pound home the point that the pension scandal is the root of all things evil in San Diego.

If only we can bust city employees’ pensions, the future will be golden for San Diego’s taxpayers. It is time, they said, as the KUSI lapdogs nodded along, to save the city from the horrors brought them by the public employee unions. Other than the show trial-like atmosphere, this exercise in right-wing demagoguery was nothing new. And it explains little. Back in 2005 in the afterward to the paperback edition of Under the Perfect Sun, I addressed the emerging scandal by putting it in its larger context…

By Micah White and Kalle Lasn / September 19, 2011

We need deeper changes to our financial system, or tent cities of people angry at corporate greed will keep appearing.

On Saturday 17 September, many of us watched in awe as 5,000 Americans descended on to the financial district of lower Manhattan, waved signs, unfurled banners, beat drums, chanted slogans and proceeded to walk towards the “financial Gomorrah” of the nation. They vowed to “occupy Wall Street” and to “bring justice to the bankers”, but the New York police thwarted their efforts temporarily, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints.

Wall Street Protests Continue, With at Least 5 Arrested

By Colin Moynihan / New York Times / September 19, 2011

In a continuation of the demonstrations that began on Saturday, nearly 200 protesters marched along Wall Street and other parts of the financial district Monday morning, brandishing American flags and signs denouncing the economic system. At least five of them were arrested.

Boy, things you do when you’re seventeen.
Especially when you think you just about the coolest thing
the world has ever seen.
Know what I mean?
Now, I was cool at seventeen,
not to brag or anything,
but being a teenage male Negro
in 1955,
a dude had to be cool
just to stay alive;
That’s positively no jive….

By Kit-Bacon Gressit / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / September 19, 2011

I vaguely recall the first time someone asked me what it means to be a feminist. I was still a kid, freshly baptized in the blaze of radical feminism.

Or so it seemed, as our consciousness-raising group met in Anita’s living room. She was into her middle years, a professional woman returned to college, and the group was a school project.