Occupy May Day Report: FAIL

[miles]

Well, Occupy’s big May Day demonstration has come and gone. How did they do? Here’s my take; please add your own in comments.

Attendance : D+
For an event literally months in the making, the crowd turnout was weak coast to coast. I’m being a fair standard here; compared to other Occupy events from last fall, the numbers everywhere were smaller. Compared to other leftist events such as Wisconsin, the numbers were smaller.

Leftist Thuggery: A
While their numbers were small, the level of violent, crazy Black Bloc behavior got pretty intense. Especially in liberal west coast cities like Seattle and Oakland, the wanna-be ninja squads broke windows, spray painted and generally made a mess. They harassed cops with gusto, too -- throwing bottles, screaming obscenities and taunting the police to try to encourage a violent reaction from law enforcement.

Nationwide Strike : F
Occupy has claimed that this would be the first nationwide strike in the country’s history -- no school, no work, no shopping. You missed it too, right? A nation of over 300 million paid zero attention to the supposed spokespeople for the 99%.

Media Exposure : D
Look at headlines around the country and Occupy’s May Day barely registered. The broken glass to media coverage link was shockingly small. Big fail for the tattered remnants of the Occupy media team, who were trumped by the Black Bloc’s now predicable rage against the machine.

Big Symbolic Events : D
No Golden Gate shutdown; the unions nixed it. They managed to make commuter traffic bad in New York late in the evening but that’s not exactly unusual. I give them points for effectively shutting down LAX, another move guaranteed to win them no fans. In San Francisco they caused the ferries to shut down but there was no visceral moment from that.

Political Impact : F
Those salad days of being praised by President Obama and Nancy Pelosi seem to be over. Of course, they would criticize the mob violence, but you didn’t hear a peep from the Democratic establishment yesterday. Even at liberal nutjob paradise DailyKos, the Kos Kommunity was eerily quiet about May Day.

Summary : FAIL
Sorry, far leftists -- Occupy has fizzled. You’re going to have to come up with some new tricks if you want to remain an even remotely relevant force in the public discourse. You had the media on your side, you had academia on your side...gosh, you had the President of the United States of America on your side -- and you blew it.

Will you go away now? Of course you won't. You'll find some new gimmick to try to sell the American people on leftist revolution.

We know it won't be easy but don’t worry, though. You’ll have lots to be angry about under the Romney Administration.

Trash the source and ignore the content. It's what some of you do best.

 

[busybody..]

God Bless Them

 

[miles]

God Bless Them

We needed someone new to laugh at.

 

[KingOrfeo]

From The Nation:

Tens of Thousands March in Oakland, New York for May Day

Allison Kilkenny on May 2, 2012 - 11:27 AM ET

Occupy Wall Street, unions and immigrants’ rights groups collaborated to organize massive protests on Tuesday in New York City and Oakland and smaller events across the country and around the world.

Yet one would have little knowledge about the scale of the rallies by reading and viewing the establishment media. The New York Daily News absurdly claims “hundreds of activists across the U.S.” participated in the marches, despite the fact that in New York City alone tens of thousands of people took to the streets. Reuters concurred, calling the resurgence a “dud,” adding accusations of a “poor turnout.”

Even the so-called left-leaning network MSNBC devoted little time to the gatherings. (photo via @dontbeaputz)

Perhaps it would have been easy to adopt a pessimistic perception of the day standing in the rain at 4 am by the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting for a mass show of civil disobedience that never came or later sprinting through the streets of Chinatown on the Wildcat march that consisted of hundreds of masked young men and women overturning garbage cans, carrying a “Fuck the Police” banner and leading police on a wild goose chase that lasted forty-five minutes, as officers used their scooters like battering rams and activists seized police barricades to partition the street and make their getaway.

There was a time in that morning period when even the most devoted Occupier felt some anxiety about the protest. The weather was crappy, the turnout smaller than expected and police ultimately arrested around thirty activists (the AP puts it at fifty arrested), sometimes in highly aggressive fashions for specious reasons. For example, the Wildcat marchers barely took two steps before police attacked them, and one young man I saw arrested was taken into custody for jaywalking. (photo: Wildcat march)

Zack, an Occupier who had been involved with some of the May Day organizing, remained optimistic during those hours and said he attended the event to see how the past four months of organizing would shape up.

“I think this is going to be a really important test for the movement and where we’re at in in New York. We’ll see what kind of support we have from the city and the people of the city,” he said, emphasizing that the protest was just one day. “It’s a day of economic noncompliance, a day of withdrawing our consent. It’ll be interesting to see how the collaboration with unions and immigrants rights groups pans out.” (photo: protester arrested after jaywalking)

I asked Zack what he thought would need to happen for Occupy to consider the day a success.

“We’ll know it if we feel it. I think a lot of people have taken down their expectations quite a bit from like a couple months ago just because it does feel like we’ve lost some momentum. I think the solidarity march will be really powerful, and I think success looks like…the pickets going really well, and us really working together and working in solidarity with each other to be very disruptive today so we’re actually affecting capital and we’re actually disrupting the economic engine in the city.”

While Zack admitted the day was “pivotal,” he shied away from calling it a do-or-die moment for the movement.

“It’s definitely going to affect whether this kind of format or the meme of Occupy maintains traction in the coming months, and over the summer, but I definitely think as economic conditions worsen over the next several years, or even months, people will be more receptive to grassroots activism and organizing. So I do think public perception of Occupy is going to be affected by today. But I don’t think this is do-or-die because a lot of us are in this for the long haul, but it is a critical moment.”

In the afternoon, several breakout protests, called the 99 picket lines, picketed businesses that have a history of mistreating workers.

Members of the Legal Services of NYC, including Gibb Surette, president of the Legal Services Staff Association, a part of UAW Local 2320, met at the New York Times building on Eighth Avenue to fight for a better contract. (photo: picket outside NYT)

“We spend our days fighting for other people’s rights, but on some days like this, we have to come out and fight for our own,” said Surette, after listing a laundry list of complaints against management and the board, including abuse of senior workers and the targeting of another round of givebacks to healthcare.

Surette said he think it’s extremely important workers in the United States show solidarity on May 1 with the laborers of the world.

“May Day is International Workers Day, and internationalism is an extremely important concept for workers’ rights—not just because of globalism and solidarity with workers in other countries—but because the character of the working class in the United States is extremely international, and it always has been. It was a major feature of the working class movement and the struggle that gave birth to May Day. Most of the Haymarket martyrs were immigrants. The ability to target and exploit a class of people with less rights than others undermines the rights of all workers, so to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with groups that are fighting for immigrants’ rights is an absolute natural for labor.”

Though Surette said a great deal of credit for labor issues reclaiming the national spotlight must go to the organized labor movement itself, Occupy has managed to refocus attention on wealth disparity—and, he adds, the group has been successful in its effort to “take back the dialogue from an obsessive focus on artificial budget deficits, and I say artificial because of the enormous military spending, and spending on tax breaks for the rich, among other things. And of course, when you talk about wealth disparity, and disparities in power, that obviously has everything in the world to do with labor.”

“99 pickets” converged later in the day at Sixth Avenue and 49th Street for a lively march that included protesters screaming “Fuck Jamie Dimon!” as they nearly stormed a Chase bank before security and the NYPD, batons wielding, frantically pushed back the surging crowd, and protest organizers convinced the activists to keep marching. (photo: police seal off Chase bank entrance from protesters)

But it was in the evening, long after the rain passed and Reuters’s Conway Gittens hurried home to file, that the coalition representing the 99 percent really got to flex its muscle and show its potent strength.

Tom Morello and the “guitarmy” led hundreds of protesters along Fifth Avenue from Bryant Park to Union Square where bands and artists, including Das Racist, Dan Deacon and Immortal Technique, and speakers entertained the teeming crowd.

Afterwards, tens of thousands of individuals poured out of Union Square and marched up Broadway where stores and restaurants along the city’s most famous street closed for the evening, thereby aiding Occupy in at least one of its goals for the day: disrupting business.

The procession was led by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, who drove a handful of taxis at the front of the march with a sign attached to one of the cars that read, “No disability insurance—15 years on the job.”

May Day protests were held across the country, where police fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades at demonstrators in Oakland, protesters smashed windows in Seattle, and activists occupied a building owned by the Catholic archdiocese in San Francisco. Protests were also held in Chicago; Washington, DC; and Atlanta; and globally in Greece, London and Turkey.

In total, the Occupy movement organized protests in 125 US cities, according to the group’s website.

In Seattle, Mayor Mike McGinn said he was making an emergency declaration allowing police to confiscate items that can be used as weapons following the May Day chaos.

A group of about 1,000 Occupiers gathered at a park on Water Street to the east of Bowling Green in New York at around 10 pm and discussed the possibility of trying to spend the night in the space, though police eventually moved in and pushed most of the protesters out of the park with little resistance. However, some activists did resist, again leading to sprinting chases through the streets.

Midnight came and an estimated 100 protesters gathered at Zuccotti—protesters cried, “We’re home!” upon seeing the small concrete square—to discuss whether or not they should stay through the morning.

Beyond the short-term conversations about reoccupation, however, activists are asking big questions about the future of their movement, namely if the solidarity felt on Tuesday will last throughout the summer.

Not a fail.

 

[miles]

Oreo, nobody gives a shit. It's yesterday's news. Old, tired, and meaningless. But we all know you live in Bizarro world where failure means success.

 

[phrodeau]

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/...a-party-rally-draws-about-40-to-iowa-capitol/

Tea Party rally draws about 40 to Iowa Capitol.

 

[miles]

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/...a-party-rally-draws-about-40-to-iowa-capitol/

Can you make it through one day without deflecting or answering a question with another question?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Oreo, nobody gives a shit. It's yesterday's news. Old, tired, and meaningless.

Then why did you start a thread about it?

 

[Disgustipated]

Can you make it through one day without deflecting or answering a question with another question?

Care to make it through one day without whining?

 

[JohnnySavage]

Care to make it through one day without whining?

The protesters heard some douche from the internet was going to execute them and decided not to risk it.

 

[bra_man69]

Maybe there really saving it for Chicago few weeks.

 

[RoryN]

Attendance : D+
The only people who regularly respond favorably to miles' posts are right fringe hacks or their racist brethren.

Rigtist Thuggery: A
Miles would kill men, women, and children who identified themselves as "liberal" in his perfect world. This is because he has a two-centimeter penis and cannot stand his extreme lack of wit being challenged by those of even average intelligence.

Nationwide Strike : F
Other than loonies on the right, no one would follow this pathetic, old sack of crap.

Media Exposure : D
Miles tries to remain relevant on a daily basis. Mostly unsuccessfully.

Big Symbolic Events : D
Miles once started a thread about "Great songs to fuck to", and his lead example - made not in jest, but as a serious suggestion - was the syrupy, ultra-50s-Ike-era Then You Can Tell Him Goodbye. This pretty much confirmed all we needed to know about his personal life: an old man stuck in the 1950s, entirely out of touch with current social norms, who's probably a lousy lover during the few opportunities he gets.

His lack of knowledge about subjects he contributes to is legendary. He has an avatar of Clark Gable, yet makes fun of British members for the stigma of bad teeth (Gable had notoriously bad chompers).

Political Impact : F
After Ginny went on a racist rant, Miles was the first to stick up for her...though very careful to do as minimal damage to himself as possible. He's obviously racist, but tries to avoid the portrait. He also tries to direct GBers to personal information published about members he doesn't like (RoryN).

Summary : FAIL
It's all pretty obvious: we're talking about a lousy human being in real life. He's perennially one of the biggest pussies on the GB, and one of the lamest trolls this forum has ever seen. There would be a surprising but not totally unexpected amount of apathy and garbage talking if it were announced that the man behind the posts was found dead of a heart attack. His legacy will be that of an asshole.

 

[phrodeau]

Can you make it through one day without deflecting or answering a question with another question?

I think it's hilarious that a major Tea Party rally in Des Moines only attracts forty people, especially after reading this in your post:

You’re going to have to come up with some new tricks if you want to remain an even remotely relevant force in the public discourse.

 

[Sean Renaud]

It's because miles, like all of the RWCJ think like this.

40 TEA PARTIERS vs. 1000 OWS

Just like you're not scared of gerbils no matter how many of them happen to be there he's not worried about them.

 

[miles]

I think it's hilarious that a major Tea Party rally in Des Moines only attracts forty people, especially after reading this in your post:

I find it hilarious that you're comparing them. What have the occupiers accomplished?

 

[unregistered]

 

[Sean Renaud]

I find it hilarious that you're comparing them. What have the occupiers accomplished?

They've gotten the nation talking about wealth distribution in this country and upward mobility. We'll see if anybody can come up with a better plan than what we have here but a better plan is clearly needed. So there's that. We'll see in November if enough people are talking about it. Boehner seems to think there's at least a 30% chance that enough people are thinking about it.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Compared to the awareness and discussion and participation around last year's May Day in the USA (which appears to have been a 1,000 percent increase) I think in those terms it was a success.

After all where was the last time the phrase "International worker rights" was in ink in the Globe, Journal and Post?

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Mother Jones:

Why Occupy Should Be the Left's Tea Party

May Day was a success, but Occupy needs to rethink itself if it wants to change America.

—By Josh Harkinson

| Wed May. 2, 2012 8:05 AM PDT

By most estimates, the Occupy movement's May Day protests were a resounding success, with demonstrations held in more than 100 cities and a march in Manhattan that drew some 30,000 people—more than any Occupy event last fall. But if the movement is going to sustain the kind of momentum that captured the nation's attention six months ago, it must begin to evolve in a different direction. Occupy's much-hyped Phase 2, the "American Spring," suggests an end game that's virtually impossible in today's America: the toppling of a corrupt political system under the sheer weight of its own repression. Unlike in Egypt or Tunisia, the only real revolutions in our comparatively affluent nation have ultimately been won or lost at the ballot box.

For months I've devoted myself to reporting on Occupy Wall Street, but I haven't shared many of my own views of the movement until now. I see myself foremost as a reporter, not a pundit, and I also thought that other observers were too quick to judge. I have the utmost respect for original OWS organizers such as Marissa Holmes, Sandy Nurse, Amin Husain, Nicole Carty, and Jason Ahmadi, to name just a few, who took the art of calling bullshit on the political system way further than the chattering classes thought it could go. Instead of handing over the movement to the Professional Left, they effectively gave the reins to anyone who felt disenfranchised. Their famously nonhierarchical General Assembly and working groups might have been unwieldy, but they're also what lent OWS its legitimacy as a true movement of and for the 99 percent.

In the early days of the General Assembly, Occupy Wall Street seemed poised to grow in any number of directions. There were people who wanted to make concrete political demands or get involved in electoral politics, and people who didn't. Yet the meetings were long and tedious, and those who slogged through them all winter more often than not tended to be the same kind of people who'd first slept in the park, which is to say, radicals, often anarchists, who believed that engaging with the political system would only legitimize it. Still, many of them were happy to collaborate with more mainstream groups, such as labor unions, on protests against common enemies like Wall Street.

For a while I believed that this kind of limited partnership could be enough to keep the Occupy movement relevant. The thinking goes that the protests will gradually win over more Americans, growing in size and frequency to the point that corporations and elected leaders, whoever they are, will somehow be forced to respond. This has certainly happened to a degree, with Occupy protests arguably playing a role in extending a millionaire's tax in New York state and helping to convince the shareholders of Citigroup to vote against a cushy pay package for CEO Vikram Pandit. Still, that's pretty small potatoes compared to all the press Occupy got this fall, which could be why the press and most Americans have mostly stopped paying attention since then.

If May Day somehow leads to major political victories for Occupy, it will be the first time that an American social movement has caught fire without sending its own guys to Washington. "There really isn't any precedent for that," Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University professor who studies social movements, told me last month. Though politicians don't always fulfill their promises, history shows that social movements tend to advance when they help elect people who at least feel compelled to listen to them. Lyndon B. Johnson was not seen as a great progressive in the '60s, but his time in office coincided with the civil rights and anti-war movements. Obviously, the left hasn't fared as well under Republicans.

Since the Occupy movement probably can't stomach campaigning for Obama, it could instead loan its 99 percent message to MoveOn.org and the unions and progressive PACs, who are already hammering Mitt Romney as Mr. 1 Percent. But while occupiers are justifiably skeptical of Obama, they're also unjustifiably paranoid about being co-opted by Obama supporters, to the point that Adbusters, the magazine whose call for protest helped spark Occupy Wall Street, recently blamed MoveOn for the "derailment of our movement."

Occupy activists, many of whom don't have a lot of experience with politics, seem to think that MoveOn is taking its orders from the White House. In reality, MoveOn polls its 7 million members on which candidates to support, and it often runs campaigns to unseat Blue Dog Democrats when it thinks a more progressive candidate has a shot at winning. But whatever. What Occupy really ought to do if it intends to live on is plunge directly into electoral politics on the local, state, and congressional level. It ought to co-opt the Democratic Party.

Though Occupy could support many sympathetic candidates in Democratic primaries, some pundits haven't pushed the idea because they worry about a tea party effect on the left, with liberal Democrats losing to Republicans in the general election. Yet other than a third-party bid, with its potential for another Nader debacle, this may be the only way to command Washington's attention. Many occupiers believe it's futile, however, because they'd never win against an avalanche of unregulated corporate political spending.

Maybe they're right, and I'm wrong. Maybe it's too late now that the Occupy brand has lost some of its early resonance. But I'd like to think that now's the time to consider a true diversity of tactics. Occupy has drawn attention to the rigging of the political system by boycotting it. Now it can campaign against that political system—against Washington—by working to elect people who will unrig it. Forget "Hope." Think of it as another iteration of the popular Occupy placard: "Unfuck the world."

 

[BoyNextDoor]

"What Occupy really ought to do if it intends to live on is plunge directly into electoral politics on the local, state, and congressional level. It ought to co-opt the Democratic Party."

I am not sure we need a left-wing version of the TEA Party running around Washington taxing and spending us all into the poor house.

What they should do is take back the trade unions and get the corruption out of them and reform them into what they are meant to be - advocates for good wages, safe working condition, unemployment insurance, healthcare insurance and other benefits for working people.

 

[KingOrfeo]

"What Occupy really ought to do if it intends to live on is plunge directly into electoral politics on the local, state, and congressional level. It ought to co-opt the Democratic Party."

I am not sure we need a left-wing version of the TEA Party running around Washington taxing and spending us all into the poor house.

What we need is for the GOP to go away forever. Failing that, a real Democratic Party in the field can only help matters.

 

[miles]

They've made a fucking mess out of everywhere they've shown up.

Well, there's rape, murder, blowing up bridges...

 

[miles]

What we need is for the GOP to go away forever. Failing that, a real Democratic Party in the field can only help matters.

No GOP? What about the liberal mantra of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance?

Blow it out your pompous ass.

 

[Sean Renaud]

"What Occupy really ought to do if it intends to live on is plunge directly into electoral politics on the local, state, and congressional level. It ought to co-opt the Democratic Party."

I am not sure we need a left-wing version of the TEA Party running around Washington taxing and spending us all into the poor house.

What they should do is take back the trade unions and get the corruption out of them and reform them into what they are meant to be - advocates for good wages, safe working condition, unemployment insurance, healthcare insurance and other benefits for working people.

The trade unions are all but dead. They were broken a generation ago and that's a large part of the problem we are in.

No GOP? What about the liberal mantra of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance?

Blow it out your pompous ass.

Tolerance for different races, different religions, different sexual orientation, even different ideas. Not tolerance for mean spirited ignorant bigots. Nobody said we were gonna love and tolerate people who think it's a good use of tax payer money to make sure that crack heads starve. Not tolerance for people who want to limit the opportunities in this country so that only wealthy people get wealthier. I know you got your idea of what tolerance is by looking at Superman and realizing nobody can be that loving and tolerant of others and then decided you shouldn't even try. When you found people who tried you compared them to that and decided they must be stupid to be striving for the impossible. It is impossible. Sometimes somethings have to be destroyed because if you let them survive they'll fester.

The short version being shut the fuck up miles.

 

[phrodeau]

No GOP? What about the liberal mantra of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance?

Blow it out your pompous ass.

Who are you trying to kid? The last thing you want is to be embraced by liberals.