Say it again, Jackie! Bravo !

Damn it, can we step away from the wonking intellectual bs about the movement? Yes she could have completed her thoughts in a sentence or two...but what pisses me off, hello, there's a big thing happening on the west coast and y'all are sittin here reading this blah blah. Shorten it so we can get on to other stuff. And please, don't say it again unless you say it shorter...and a little more real. And tell us something we don't already hear all over. Are you even talking to the people in the streets?
p.s. your title doesn't really speak to current much either, history yuppr, NOW

As someone who was in Seattle in 99, I can attest that Jackie Smith is right on target. Great quote from Seattle Chief of Police Stamper. " My support of a military solution caused all hell to break loose". That sums up the Battle in Seattle. There would have been no so called "battle" without the police provocation, but it made great headlines and was a way to demonize the protesters and their message about the WTO . Kudo's to Common Dreams and Jackie Smith for a truthful article about the battle in Seattle.

I remember Seattle and it wasn't the protesters that were violent. And the May Day 2007 protests you don't hear much about the 13 million dollar settlement for civil rights abuses that LA paid out.

I think it's like the lies about Iraq leading up to the war: If you say it often and loud enough many will believe you, even if you have no proof. With the Occupy movement too many of us are aware that the only health hazard they present is to the status quo of the 01%.

Have we forgotten Kent State? I haven't.

The first step in solving a problem is accurately describing and understanding it. People have to know exactly what they're opposing so that they may develop effective strategies for defeating it. It does little good and some harm to characterize the protests in Seattle and OWS as against "inequality" and "globalization." Inequality and globalization are consequences of capitalism's normal, profitable, unfettered operation. The protests and movements are in one way or another are profound expressions of opposition to this and the complete capture of the US political sphere by capital.

Capital's internationalization in pursuit of greater profit involves US workers' jobs moving to lower wage countries. US workers are placed into direct competition with low wage countries workers through "free" trade agreements. Inequality is the result of the conscious policies of the last 30 years to redistribute income upward away from the working class to the capitalist class.

People need to recognize that capitalism is ultimately responsible for the present economic crisis that created massive US unemployment, nearly unprecedented income inequality and all the phenomena associated with the euphemism "globalization." The main opponent in this struggle is capitalism and the consequences of its normal, profitable operation. We will never win or make significant progress in this struggle until people realize this and develop productive tactics and strategies for combating or overthrowing capitalism.

The marginalization of the Occupy movements goes beyond Elite media and infects grassroots online news forums too. Maybe this is the result of a few commenters hearing and reading things in the elite media and then spreading this BS in online forums. Or maybe they are paid to disseminate BS propaganda. I dunno... there could be quite a few reasons why, and quite a few different types of people who would come to a progressive website to try to undermine a progressive movement.

In Sheldon Wolin's amazing book, "Democracy Incorporated" he had a chapter that explained demotic movements. There was a particularly brilliant insight, among hundreds of others of his, that caught my attention. He was writing about the popular uprisings and protests of the 1930's. The insight was related to what the power-holders had learned from these populist movements.

Wolin writes... "Each movement was received coolly by the New Deal leadership and kept at arm's length. The lesson for the political establishments of the major parties was that "mobilization" should be carefully controlled so as to preclude its becoming a challenge to the far narrower notions of popular participation represented by the two major party organizations."

In other words, the popular movements taking place in the US right now threaten the two major parties. And that scares the shit out them. Hence, the plethora of party hacks, and status-quo guardians here on CD trying to undermine these popular movements.

I originally wrote about this when a commenter here at CD was attempting to undermine a comparison I had made to the occupy movement and to the insights that MLK had about why the protests of the civil rights movement were important. After this persons condescending little screed he concluded with, "Camps and protest serve NOTHING. Votes do."

Is this either a blatant attempt to try and re-write history to serve some ulterior purpose? Or is this simply showing that this person is a complete dunce when it comes to understanding history? I tend to think it is the former because this person has posted here many times and comes off as a very educated person.

But, more importantly, look at what these two short sentences do. First, it is a clear attempt to undermine the occupy movement. And, second, it works to mobilize people back to the two-party system. It also gives us an either/or. Why can't we do both?

Truth is the first casualty of war

With very few exceptions, the so-called American 'mainstream media' are corporate propaganda outlets, as are the more narrow establishment specialized journals such as Foreign Affairs. That they would produce sloppily reported hit pieces is merely a matter of course. That Occupy Wall Street has garnered the attention of so much of the propaganda apparatus of the elite is a sure sign that it has scared them to their very core...and that is good.

There's definitely truth to the idea that a picture is worth 1000 words. I don't know if it's a purposeful black-out (I presume it is), or that the little I view of mainstream media makes it clear that it's attempting to thoroughly marginalize this movement; however, if one looks up METONIA films, the forum's "Durrutix" has come up with a new documentary that shows impressive footage of the thousands gathered in streets in numerous nations. Somehow SEEING the reality of this, the thousands upon thousands protesting globalism and the way a handful of elite interests have managed to use the banks to bludgeon The People, is beyond hopeful. I see human beings operating like an ocean of ants powerful enough in their numbers to rumble the foundations of the old hierarchy. It's matured to the point where so few control so much that, as I've often stated in this forum, we're living witnesses to the world's people being morphed into slaves while a number of enormous corporations play the role of modern pharaohs. It's BREATH TAKING to see so many waking up at the same time. This genii will NOT go back in the bottle. The question is, how much violence will elites (and their government enablers) use in efforts to seek that ends; and how much will they then use media to suggest that any use of violence had its provocation in those prominently placed inside the protest groups. Who will still believe them?

The propaganda has been constant since television has become the main purveyor of "reality'' and news in America.
The Foreign Affairs hit piece is an example of how the television echo chamber receives its intellectual firepower ."Experts'' who quote academics who quote historians who are all well paid and feted to maintain the technocracy.

It should be instantaneous for the people to recognize that an establishment, that fails to respect the people's right to self-rule, is corrupt and deserves to be confronted and dismantled ASAP.

1. I spent the best week of my life in Seattle in '99--best because my dream of the world's citizens uniting to struggle against our common oppressors was a living, breathing reality for an entire week.
2. I did see protesters throw an orange traffic cone once, and they rolled garbage dumpsters toward police (that I saw on TV). I didn't happen to see the "black bloc" spraying graffiti and breaking shop windows, because I didn't happen to pass that stretch of downtown during the hour, perhaps, that it happened.
3. That evening, back at the place we stayed, we watched local TV news, rotating between 3 Seattle stations. All featured the same scenes, consisting almost entirely of the "violence" of the Black Bloc and sometimes of the police attacking the 5000 direct action people who were blockading the 13 entrances of the convention center--thus actually preventing the meeting from taking place. Toward the end of the hour there was a 2-second shot of the 40,000 people peacefully marching (mostly labor but including people from various movements all over the world including a group doing a skit on Korean oppressions, once per block, and a man from somewhere in South America arrayed in a gorgeous costume of feathers--unfortunately I was out of film at that point). So, 5000 direct action people are shown only in apparent battles with police (you can't tell from TV clips how one-sided the violence was) nobody interviewed about WHY they were there; 40,000 people almost entirely ignored; and somewhere between a handful and several dozen vandals depicted in 80% of the coverage. This begs the question, how many were agents provocateur? We'll never know.
4. I attended the 2002 World Social Forum and led a workshop of Corporate Control of Mainstream Media. Attendees from a dozen countries told similar stories of deliberately biased media--the only different ones were I think Turkey, where journalists were often jailed, and Philippines where supposedly media would threaten exposes until politicians bribed them not to.
5. In Genoa a few years ago, there was a claim that "black clad anarchists" were filmed hopping out of a police van at the beginning of a day of protests. They smashed car windows and small shops, then as the (uniformed) police moved in, they moved on to the next group of demonstrators, while the police violently attacked peaceful protesters. If the media did their job right, it looked like a righteous response to violent protesters smashing small businesses.
6. The last evening I was in Seattle, I attended a meeting of a Cuban American group, in which the Cuban delegation reported first, that the group had attempted, with a large youth contingent, to approach the convention center Tuesday and found the barricades--but they thought an uprising in the US was a wonderful thing. The protesters, seeing that this was the Cuban delegation, allowed them to pass. And, someone read aloud the text of the declaration of the Latin American and Caribbean countries refusing to sign on to the agreement. We read about this the next morning, as the meeting broke up with no agreement--later read that some of these delegates said they were tired of being pushed around by the US/EU/Japan bloc, and heartened by the uprising in the streets. Not a success? Tell me another one!
CONCLUSION: Maybe some reporters are lazy, but it's clear that the biased coverage of protests, among other things, is the result of a deliberate policy. Marginalizing the OWS movement is a deliberate strategy, designed to keep the public at large quiet when protesters are dealt with in unconstitutional and violent ways, and designed to reduce the numbers joining protests.

Here's what I saw at the 2003 protest in San Franscisco against the invasion of Iraq. on the street behind the library, three maybe four guys with black t-shirts threw some rocks or bricks at some cars and broke a couple of windshields, then up the street about thirty cops were coming down the street and I thought, "oh boy, now those guys are going to get it." but they didn't try to run away at all, they ran right towards the cops and the cop line opened up, and those guys went right through them, and then the cops start yelling at people to move off the street. This only happened late in the day after the crowds thinned out. and the cops presented much more of a force. Had they showed up a couple of hours sooner, they would have been dwarfed by the crowd. I know there are fake anarchists. I absolutely know it. I witnesses it. Was SF some isolated event? Did it only happen that one time in history? I seriously doubt it. Look at the thugs that pass for law enforcement these days. Trained in Iraq and Afghanistan, Their superiors say that the protesters should feel lucky they're not in those countries. But how long will they be satisfied with pepper-spray, batons and tasers. Not long I think. Soon the shooting will start and once they get away with the first couple of murders it'll be open season. I consider them traitors and anti-American criminals hiding in uniform. And already the police are indistinguishable from the military. So it's going to get worse before it gets better. I don't say this to discourage anyone from participating in protests, but people need to know what they're up against. And please, don't bring you children.

I have been complaining about the "press" for almost 20 years now. As I have said many times in many different replies/posts in many places, that the Press has been failing in the RESPONSIBILITY that goes along with their RIGHTS. As I have also pointed out to many people in well over 10 yrs now, that we don't really have an Independent Press anymore. If you take a look at just about ALL of the major/big newspapers (I won't even get into the TV/radio media), they are all owned by 5 or 6 corporations.

So on top of taking away any type of independence, you also have them "deciding" which events are even "news-worthy", and then the bias/slant they give to whatever issues they do decide is "news" and/or "important". Then you have the shrill, loud , corporate voices on the right, with their constant whining about the "liberal media", when the facts show it's anything but liberal, and this article then points out the results that the corporate owned US government wants us to see. All the better, to control the peons/masses with.

That's why we have people like you to keep things straight and hold elite medias feet to the fire. Keep up the good work.