Some choice bits:
What is now a classic line, from near the top of column two (bolding mine): The crisis in imperialism has meant triple taxes (really strange to hear Leftists complain about taxes), cutbacks in safety (which ironically allowed terrorist groups like the SDS to flourish), speed-up, falling wages, and death on the front lines to working people.Black and brown workers have been hit the hardest . . .
Update: this is the oldest use of the "minorities hardest hit" gag that I can find.
(middle of column four) Up until now, a lack of international solidarity on the part of US white workers has meant that they were objectively scabbing on the rest of the word proletariat.
One of the ways in which we build this solidarity is by attacking white supremacy. We should see that white supremacy and national chauvinism are key factors in the war in Vietnam and that the war is a white supremacist war. By attacks on white supremacy, we can also connect the war in Vietnam to the war in the black colony in the minds of the people.
The big demands for what they wanted, and when they wanted it (column five):
Immediate withdraw from Vietnam
Immediate release of Huey Newton and all political prisoners
No more surtax
Independence for Puerto Rico
Support for GI's rights and GI rebellions
The article closes with an ironic quote from the murder most grand, Mao Zedong: Mao says that "all reactionaries attempt to stamp out revolution by mass murder, and they think that the more people they massacre, the weaker the revolutionary will become. But contrary to this wishful thinking of reaction, the facts are that the more people the reactionaries massacre, the greater the strength of the revolution becomes, the nearer the reactionaries are to their doom. This is an irresistible law.
The bombings conducted by the Students for a Democratic Society began a few months later, on 7 October 1969, at the Chicago memorial statue to police officers murdered at the Haymarket riot of 1886. After the statue was replaced, they blew it up again almost one year later to the day. The SDS blew up more things and people over the coming years during their armed struggle.
In the shop-in,. demonstrators enter a store, fill shopping carts with, groceries, wheel them to the counter, have them checked out, then say they can't pay and leave the sacks and boxes piled in front of clerks.
Members of the Congress of Racial Equality began the tactic last week at supermarkets of Lucky Stores, Inc. in San Francisco, at Berkeley, home of the University of California, and at Palo Alto to the south, adjacent to Stanford University.
They contend Lucky didn't fulfill an agreement to hire additional Negroes. Lucky flatly denied it, pointed to its Negro employes and said it would have no part of "reverse discrimination."
Tuesday, the largest Negro group in San Francisco, the Baptist Ministers Union said it would sever its ties with CORE if the shop-ins didn't stop.
"CORE has a right to picket, but if it continues 'to use this tactic, we just can't go along," said the Rev. George L. Bedford, head of the group representing 40,000 of the city's 85,000 Negroes.
In 1964, CORE was picketing grocery stores that they did not like, but that tactic did not impact business enough. So, they tried a new tactic, clogging up the stores so nobody else could buy anything. Later in 1967, CORE was a key player in the Detroit Riot.
Now, the new kids come along with their version: #OccupyBlackFriday
Instead of a trespassing protest on private property to get a grocery store that already employs Black people to . . . employ Black people a la CORE, the #Occupy kids make a mess trespassing on private property to demand . . . people shop locally?
The original shopins were so successful that they ended up on the trash-heap of history for almost forty years. The old fart Commies running this #Occupy circus must have some memory of the shopins of old, and how they went over. Perhaps they do not, because until recently one had to remember them from the 1960s because there was precious little to be found about them online. The effect was pissing people off, so maybe they do remember and it fits right in with the rest of #Occupy. There is an old film or two about the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that PBS channels play on occasion, but that is about it. I have been asking for source information about shopins for years and this week was the first time I found a news report from the period that mentioned "shop-ins".
In Liberal Fascism, or during his book tour, Jonah Goldberg mentioned that around the time of Hitler's rise in Germany there were protests against department stores there, similar to the Walmart hate we witness in America today. I am still looking for direct references to that and any information is welcome.
Daniel J. Flynn has a great response to #OccupyWalmart at Human Events. Rush Limbaugh mentioned the ruckus on his show, apparently before it spread to Target, Best Buy and other stores.
Black Friday shoppers in Dayton, Ohio, were in for a rude awakening when Occupy Dayton protesters (we’ve reported on their antics before) entered a local Walmart and Target and began mic-checking and berating individuals and families.
On the protest group’s YouTube page, a five and a half minute video has been posted. In it, Occupiers document and promote the torment they attempt to inflict on shoppers.
At the 40 second mark, you’ll see the first clip, which was taken at a local Target store. Around 1:08, a male voice can be heard asking, “Ready?” Within seconds, the protesters begin yelling, “Mic check!” Then, they launch into their seemingly endless chant:
“Hello Daytonians. We have a message for you. This will only take a moment. It is shameful that you spend your hard-earned money at a corporation who does not care about your family. They insult the 99 percent. They pay little or no taxes, while profits soar. Our tax money goes to our public schools. We find it an outrage that you continue to shop here in support of a corporation who does not support you.”
Video from The Blaze:
I am not up on Walmart getting any free ride on sales taxes. They frequently get property tax incentives thrown at them by local governments competing with other local governments for Walmart to build a store in their town, which is really an abuse of government power. Neither am I certain if Ohioans fund public schools with sales taxes generated at Walmart. I am betting that the Occupiers have a few tax facts wrong.
Also, if you don't think that the American Nazis are Socialists, try looking at their endorsement of #OWS for their "anti-capitalist" positions. Just because they mix racism with Socialism does not make them any less Socialistic.
The Twitter-length answer is that: Communism (International Socialism) is a subset of Socialism. What is hilarious every trip of the train is how the Socialists (National, International, Scientific, Democratic) all pipe up that anybody who notices this needs more education.
No, little Ninja, we do not need any more education. We usually arrive at this realization by examining the facts in spite of the propaganda from the Western Education Industry.
They might be different in rhetoric, but in practice they are the same.
Obama has some catching up to do if he is going to be a hero of the Left.
PS. @Truseattleite, if Socialism is somehow divorced from Communism and you #Occupy urchins truly believe that you are something different from Communists, you might want to direct your education advice at the folks making your posters:
By-the-by, that "power fist" goes back to the 1860s or earlier. The Democrats opposing Lincoln used it in their posters.
As a frequent reader and infrequent commentator at reason magazine's blog for several years, I am somewhat shocked at the latest incarnation of David Weigel, who goes by the name Mike Riggs, gracing their blog.
The new Dave Weigel Socialist at reason: Mike Riggs
Everything Bloomberg does to you is for your own good, even jail! was his tone when the city of New York finally got around to clearing out the #Occupy squatters defiling privately owned Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. I defy you to distinguish the reason post from the worst one can find daily in the Nation or Slate for refusing to even acknowledge that private property owners have any rights whatsoever.
Reason no longer confines itself to being a champion of stripping real property owners of any control of their land, while bashing the police for actually doing something that they are supposed to do. No, as if Leon Panetta, Joe Biden, Norman Fleishman, Tom Friedman (and the rest of the New York Times staff) were not falsely touting Communist China's crony capitalism (conveniently leaving out the word "crony") in the mainstream media, reason recently entertained us with this bit of Bradley Gardner pap: New at Reason: Bradley Gardner on China’s Black Market City
Chen Mingyuan has lived here all his life, but he still gets lost every time he drives into Wenzhou. “All the roads in this town were built by businessmen, so none of them make any sense,” Chen says as we back out of what we just discovered is a one-way street. For the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure.
The article fawns over the people of Wenzhou for building the infrastructure that the government did not build, and the Communist Chinese government for "looking the other way" so that these brave entrepreneurs can engage in commerce. Perhaps a video of what the Chinese government does build around Wenzhou should dampen any praise for Communist engineering, or any respect for private property to build disasters waiting to happen:
Not a matter of if, but when.
Oddly, the reason take on the situation is that if the Communist government took a peek and went away, then they will continue to do so.
There was no pondering of how long it would be before the autocrats in Beijing show up to claim the "people's property" without so much as a thankyouverymuch and seizing the privately built roads and utilities. No, the article waxed on about how this is the way Chinese capitalism works. Something else missing was any government enforcement of contracts, but there was a slight nod to the iron-fisted loan shark enforcement that may or may not exist.
This is an incredibly naive view of how authoritarian governments operate. Even here in the United States, where nobody could argue with a straight face is anything approaching the authoritarianism demonstrated in China, when people make property valuable the government swoops in to take it over or get their unconscionable cut.
Reason, it has been nice knowing you as a sometime voice of reason (drink!) in a world teaming with Socialists. Now you have joined their ranks as a sideshow act, destined to be a punchline in the monologues of David Corn and Katrina Vanden Heuvel on cable news appearances.
Have you noticed that those fun loving, crazy little #Occupy Wherever kids are angry about something, but not very focused about exactly what they are angry about?
Have you noticed how they react when people like National Review'sCharles C. W. Cooke confronts them with some facts and their anger shrivels up, even for just a few moments?
NPR affiliate WBEZ took a visit to a middle school, found the same characteristics in a young boy and discovered that even a public school teacher can straighten out children better than any Liberal Arts program at an expensive university can.
Listen to ACT SIX. GRANDE WITH SUGAR and understand how the #Occupy crowd is less emotionally developed than a middle school kid.
The boy is a victim of circumstance. He takes care of his grandmother in a home without electricity or water, other than the water that pours through the roof when it rains. In the real world of home, the child takes on and conquers adult problems that other children his age never think about. Then he arrives at school in dirty clothes and frequently unwashed, with general complaining that the school was "unfair", nothing specific.
In the case of #OWS, the fault is mostly with the parents. In the ages old truism that anybody can be whatever they like in America, the Baby Boomer parents left out a key ingredient: some careers don't pay much. The OWS children were told to get a degree, but nobody told them that all degrees were not created equal. However, they are not middle school children with problems at home, they are adults who made their own problems, possibly by following bad advice.
Today there are dozens of annoying hipsters and hippies wallowing in their own excrement, on private property in Manhattan, who have no concept that literature degrees are not very lucrative. They think the American system is unfair because they have to pay back loans and work at being successful. They are shocked that the people they need to pay the loans back to are wealthy and cannot make the mental connection, so they assign "unfairness" to the predictable outcome.
Certainly there are children who grow up to be financially successful artists and poets, but none of these protestors are complaining about an "old boy network" in West Chelsea, they are whining that bankers made money when the bankers lent students money and the federal government guaranteed those loans.
They are not even whining that the education industry ripped them off, by rapidly expanding "staff" positions, overpaying faculty, and creating ostentatious monuments to academia. No, their Socialist indoctrination about "fairness" overrides any facts that are flying in their face.
One thing that can possibly sillier than the #Occupy "movement" is the people who write about it. Especially the ones looking for similarities to the Tea Party.
Other than being diametrically opposites, exactly like Socialism vs. Libertarianism, there are no similarities at all. Yes, I said it that way on purpose.
If you want to find a similarity between #Occupy and anything modern, you must turn to fiction entertainment. One film that comes to mind is Fight Club, a film from 1999 with the social message that we can all be equal if only the evil, bad, unfair credit bureau databases were erased. In the movie, the domestic terrorism plot was financed through fraud against a corporation, resulting in billions of dollars worth of information and real property blown up in Manhattan.
The #Occupy crowd has a similar solution, although they have not yet used explosives. They are calling for loan forgiveness on pretty much any loan that their members willingly received, typically for college degrees that employers find less valuable than a Commercial Driver's License. Other loans are in there too, but this crowd expects the government to steal from "the rich" and "the banks" to pay for their collective bad consumer choice.
Somehow, they feel that the way to do this is by empowering the same government organs that now over regulate lenders even more power. The sad thing is, these people would not have the debt they have if it were not for government programs proscribing this sort of haphazard lending to begin with. The #Occupy crowd wishes to give even more power to the government people who bailed out the lenders several times in a row, with little or no relief to the people who ignorantly bumbled, or rushed, into these questionable loans to begin with.
If only the government were more Libertarian rather than Socialist, the government would be concerned with the properness of contracts and the people lending the money would be worried about getting their $100,000 back from an art student, or not.
Finally, one group has come forward to condemn the Anti-Semitic rhetoric emanating spewing from the #OccupyWallStreet and #OccupyLA Marxist demonstrations.
Via Israel Today:
See some earlier posts for full context of the #Occupy crowd and their Jew hatred. Remember, the Nazi was a product of the Liberal Left and that is one of the few things they still manufacture.
