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2,000 Rally to 'Stop War On The Poor'
A third day of demonstrations outside the Republican National Convention drew smaller crowds. Police and marchers clashed again, but arrests were way down.
St. Paul, Minn. - A vocal group of demonstrators took to the streets of St. Paul again Tuesday evening, voicing their anger about economic justice issues on Day 2 of the Republican National Convention.
Police fire tear gas at protesters near the Xcel Energy Center, the site of the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) September 2, 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Getty Images) The number of protesters and arrests were down from the 10,000 who
marched and the nearly 300 arrested Monday, but police and
demonstrators did clash briefly.
Video of the event available here and here.
Chanting "Stop the war on the poor," about 1,000 people in the "Poor People's March" left Mears Park about 6 p.m. and marched through downtown. Their numbers swelled to 2,000 after the march passed an all-day activist event that had coincidentally just wound up on the State Capitol lawn at 7 p.m. The march ended near the Xcel Energy Center about 8 p.m.
A plan for civil disobedience fizzled with no arrests after protesters decided not to scale 8-foot fences near the arena. They poked a "citizens arrest warrant for crimes against humanity" for the Republicans through the fence and left.
The march disbanded, but a half-hour later hundreds of protesters and others, mainly young people, clogged an intersection at 7th and St. Peter streets, causing police, over a loudspeaker, to order them to disperse. They didn't and police fired several smoke bombs and tear-gas canisters into the crowd.
At least 10 people were arrested during the day, including four at a tense showdown with police officers on horseback just before the march started at the edge of the poor people's rally. The officers pepper-sprayed some demonstrators blocking the intersection after one man pulled on a police horse's reins.
Cheri Honkala, a leader of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, which sponsored the demonstration, appealed to the rally participants to be nonviolent, pointing out that there were children in the crowd. She told anarchists intermingled in the crowd that she would hold them responsible if they interfered in the peaceful march.
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20 Comments so far
Show AllRepimplicans loathe and despise the poor because they have nothing. And in the childish, twisted and totally screwed up (so-called) Repimplican philosophy, God only loves those with wealth and loads of material possessions. If you have nothing then you are a miserable failure and an abomination in the eyes of God. Just ask McCain, who can't remember how many houses he owns or how much his trophy wife (whose money made his political career possible) is worth. If there is one molten core belief in the Repimplican party, that is it. The sole, only god the Repimplicans worship is money. And yet middle class people, who are losing more and more of what they have, keep voting for these morons. And after a generation of this, millions of fellow Americans still haven't learned that voting Repimp only makes you poorer, not richer.
sorry
Chomsky is an anarchist.
Christ was an anarchist.
Though anarchists embody the laissez faire corporations want, fascists, commies fundies and other conservatives hate anarchists because anarchists are against their totalitarian rule.
So anarchists and liberals get demonized by agent provocateurs.
right on... except liberals (along with anyone who supports any form of government) also love their precious prerogative to bully other people so i wouldn't lump them with anarchists. A true and objectively moral anarchist doesn't support or use violence in any form so whomever Honkala decided to hold responsible for the eruption of any violent actions are simply mislabeled. They are thieves, murderers, and vandals not anarchists.
Anarchists historically do not support lazzez faire capitalist economics only the latter-day "libertarian" variety. Capitalist economics require unequal distribution of power and wealth in order to extract the surplus value from labor. This doesn't sound very anarchist to me.
The typical solution anarchists propose are egalitarian, worker owned and managed cooperatives as be basic productive unit in the economy (anarcho-syndicalism).
If Christ existed in a form other than as an amalgamation of regurgitated myths.
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
Chomsky describes himself as a Libertarian Socialist, not an anarchist.
I wasn't going to post on this site ever again, but I have to, unfortunately.
ezeflyer writes: "Chomsky is an anarchist."
Chomsky is a CAPITALIST! He charges over $12,000 to speak, whether that's per hour or for the whole talk, I don't know. He did, however, charge $35 for people to talk personally to him after one speech he gave.
Visit Chomsky's official site. His words are COPYRIGHT and filled with advertisements for his books, no one else's! Chomsky doesn't even cite well known dissidents on his site, individuals from various countries who have risked their lives and suffered severe hardships as a result of the stand they have taken - Chomsky doesn't want his fans to know that he risks nothing, that there are far better people - and more courageous individuals! - out there than him.
This is a guy trying to save lives, is it? If you want to use Chomsky's articles to let others know what is going on in the world, you DAMN WELL PAY FOR THEM! Many of his books are rushed or badly written, quickly put together to bring in money. I bought one of his books - in the hope of getting a good explanation of things - and got a question and answer session from his friend, who also happens to be his agent. This is not what I expect from an academic. It smacks of laziness, and a lack of consideration for his readers.
Chomsky invests in oil stocks and corporations he claims to abhor. Chomsky has set up a trust fund for his children to avoid paying tax. Royalties from his books go into this fund.
When was the last time Chomsky went on a march and got arrested?
To cite Chomsky in virtually the same breath as Christ really shows how insane Chomsky fanatics are. Christ put his life on the line, shunned wealth, and was crucified! Chomsky puts other people's lives on the line and rakes in money as a pampered, well-paid, academic for doing so.
CHOMSKY IS NOT A LATTER-DAY VERSION OF CHRIST, LET ALONE AN ANARCHIST!
Read more about Chomsky here:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1385b76d-6c34-4c22-942a-18b71f2c4a44
Incidentally, Chomsky didn't deny what was written in this article, which originally appeared on another site (I've lost the link, unfortunately). Chomsky replied that he never said that others should not do what he is doing (raking in huge sums!), so he can't be a hypocrite. Chomsky should have been a lawyer!
Finally, the author of the article writes, "...Chomsky, with a net worth north of US$2-million.." - that's NORTH of $2 million. It's highly unlikely the author had access to Chosmky's bank account, various investments, etc., so it's very probably a significant underestimate.
For f#ck's sake. The National Post is owned by CanWest. It's THE neo-con, right-wing, pro-corporate, vehemently pro-Zionist, anti-Palastianian publication in Canada:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Post
http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/communications_rights/canwest_huffs_and_puffs_while_%3D6091
Adbusters magazine recently profiled CanWest and started a campaign against them:
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/77/media_bully.html
I wouldn't trust ANYTHING printed in this paper.
Staying-Sane,
Do you have any CREDIBLE sources to back up your attacks on Chomsky?
"Chomsky is a CAPITALIST! He charges over $12,000 to speak, whether that's per hour or for the whole talk, I don't know. He did, however, charge $35 for people to talk personally to him after one speech he gave."
Quoted for truth! Chomsky is a hypocrite and a liar. I've never heard of him actually DOING anything for anarchy. I'm an atheist and as there's very little, if any proof of Christ, I have no horse in that race.
Why is it that the anarchists, who are definitely fighting for what all so-called progressives want, seem to be demonized at every turn? I think, it's because even the liberals want someone to hold court over the people. Especially if it's them. No one rules me but myself and that's something even the most liberal statist can't accept.
People, please wake up! You are 'given' your choices and told you must like one or the other. Why not like and choose yourselves? There's no way that anyone should have been at the DNC or RNC protesting and begging for the right to live your lives in peace and prosperity. Ignore those fools and take your lives back or die, like the slaves we've all become. 'Cause, slavery ain't just a black thang, no mo'!
"Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." --- Thomas Paine, Common Sense
DNC Police State After Rage Against Machine Played
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA7hLPbxunc
How is the crackdown at DNC different from China or other countries. I need someone to edxplain this to me.
I think you dippty-doos are on the wrong website. =^..^=
The people have rights to economic security and top value healthcare, education, food, shelter and transport. The people have rights to land, water, and livelihood. Thes are just a few of the people's rights that are systematically violated by the elites. The elites are engaged in a class war on the people. "war on people" "war on the poor"... First order of business: Shift all individual exchange/association away from the elites, away from the power centers, and toward the local communities.
Can we all stick to the topic here, which is this badly constructed account of a protest. It's the usual cops vs. anarchists theme. The mainstream corporate press has some template that gets recycled at every protest, and this is their only story.
The three authors cite just one person, the march leader, appealing for peace. That's the only quote.
Someone pulled on a horse's reins causing the police to pepper spray other people, according to this account. Did the journalists see the pulling of the reins? If so, why don't they say so. The pepper spray reaction is not normal cause and effect by the way. It suggests a trigger-happy police force.
Try to ignore such stories, especially the cops vs. protesters ones. If the press doesn't actually record people's opinions on the street, and speeches on the ground, they just aren't doing their jobs.
-TIA
A voice of sanity.
Have you ever been poor?
Thoughts_Into_Action writes: "Can we all stick to the topic here..."
I hate to shatter your bubble, but it really doesn't matter whether people stick to the topic or not.
CommonDreams has swept the comments section under the rug. It has done this to protect its revenue stream, to keep those readers who are too mean to buy newspapers happy (to those too mean to buy newspapers, and who will therefore not be reading this comment: buy the newspapers or else they will report less and less serious news or go out of business, and then CommonDreams will follow).
Individuals, like Noam Chomsky, fool younger people into believing discussing these topics endlessly and into absurd detail is the solution. It's the solution to filling Chomsky's bank account, that's all!
If people like Chomsky gave a damn, he'd be helping running and funding an Internet media outlet, NOT complaining about how the mainstream corporate media supposedly doesn't give him airtime.
Chomsky spends a lot of time publicising himself. For example, Chomsky wrote a letter praising Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who, after being sacked from his job, set up a site regurgitating the news from the corporate mainstream media, with a few of his own comments thrown in (www.craigmurray.co.uk).
Craig Murray's job as ambassador was to "open up" economies for British corporations. In other words, to create situations British corporations could exploit in order to get a foot in the door of other nations' economies. Noam Chomsky is supposedly appalled by such economic and military hegemony.
Craig Murray praises BAT, British American Tobacco ( http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2004/11/speech_to_royal.html ). Noam Chomsky has condemnded tobacco companies for selling their drug to children; for compromising the health of the poor, who do not have access to adequate health care, and who can't afford to get sick, in any case. This is exactly what BAT has been up to in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in that region, as well as engaging in tax avoidance.
"BAT and Big Tobacco's Conquest of the Former Soviet Union":
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2005/052005/gilmore.html
Extracts:
"British American Tobacco (BAT)...in the 1980s expounded a policy of seeking new opportunities in markets hitherto the preserve of state-owned tobacco monopolies [sounds familiar? It's the same game Big Oil plays abroad!].
"By 1999, BAT had achieved a market share of over 70 percent in Uzbekistan, and as the country's largest foreign investor, has been able to secure favorable treatment from the government, including a five-year extension of its preferential tax-exempt status.
"Individual country smoking rates also appear to reflect industry activity: countries that were recipients of major tobacco company investments in the early 1990s and the focus of their marketing efforts now have higher female smoking rates than those that were not."
Craig Murray writes of BAT: "British American Tobacco is the largest foreign investor in Uzbekistan. They deserve congratulation on their efforts to improve the lot of the farmers who supplied them and to encourage real private enterprise." [big corporations are Murray's heroes!]
Noam Chomsky praised Craig Murray, who then proudly posted the e-mail on his Web site. Chomsky did this because Murray gets eyeballs, and it was another way for Chomsky to get his name out there, to reach foreign individuals and journalists, to sell a few more books, to be invited to speak for more money.
Ever get the feeling you're being exploited by the rich and successful?
sanda, yes.
Cheri Honkala= impotent, liberal shitbag.
"I will hold anarchists responsible if
they interfered in the peaceful march."
Cheri Honkala
cowardly, impotent liberal
Future co-opted pawn against
democracy.
2 September, 2008.