Stop Me Before I Vote Again

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2007/1/27/183023/081

Okay. That is not really accurate. There were many more people than 'tens of thousands'. I can tell this by comparing the crowd to a Michigan football game. Michigan alum ejmw concurs with my estimate of well over the sellout crowd at Ann Arbor.

We may have seen an early apex; we may have seen merely the beginning. The youth mod department needs to kick in fiercely, and if the raw-to-cooked ratio in the Mall yesterday was higher on raw, we may see a serious size surge at the next goaround.

I think we'll need to galvanize with a to-do while there -- maybe a real "occupation" of the mall this spring. March in March at the time of the Congress votes on Iraq funds. And how's about a homecoming beltway encampment: we ain't leaving Peace-lager 07 (pop. 1 million) till our kids over there are back here.

Noting the obvious -- amazing how seldom people bother to do that:

At left is Andy Stern, prez of the Service Employees International Union, and he's a menace to America's entire underpaid wage force.

Despite his multimillion-dollar self-promotion campaign, everyone inside the labor movement knows Mr Purple Wave -- even on his best day of the month -- is an egomaniac and slippery power freak.

And summed up as a wage-class leader -- well, ask Sal Rosselli, president of United Healthcare Workers West, a 65-000-member, California-dreamin' chunk of Stern's outfit:

"If SEIU goes in the direction that Stern is currently leading it, it will become a business union movement, a service-type organization, as opposed to where were coming from. We want to build a real movement of workers, a real social movement union, for workers, by workers, where workers are encouraged and trained to be decision-making leaders."

So is Sal fightin' back? You bet. First he resigned from Andy's national "executive committee," and now "meetings of rank-and-file leaders... are starting to happen." At the union's national convention this May, Rosselli plans on "checking the authority of the president with member democracy."

Perhaps the Brits could send a bit of this rage across to us, as they gave us the gift of the Beatles and Stones... although a comparison to The Who or Slade might be more appropriate.

Oh, yeah, c'mon feel tha noize, 'cause mama, weer all crazee now:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/23/police-civil-unrest-recession

Police are preparing for a "summer of rage" as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain's most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming "footsoldiers" in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police's public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become "viable targets". So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis....

Hartshorn said he also expected large-scale demonstrations this year on environmental issues, with hardcore green activists "joining forces" with middle-class campaigners over issues such as airport expansion at Heathrow and Stansted. With the prospect of angry demonstrations against the economy, that could open the door to powerful coalitions.

"All you've got to do then is link in with the environmentalists, and look at the oil companies. They're seen to be turning over billions of pounds profit in issues that are seen to be against the environment."

Another entry in the Security Comedy chronicle: A US Air flight from New York to Lousville was diverted to Philadephia -- horrors -- because a 17-year-old Jewish lad was incautious enough to put on his tefillin in flight and try to pray.

So many layers of irony here, I've run out of fingers and toes.

Not a publication I usually read, but this link crossed my e-desk this morning:

By night Berlin has become a battlefield. Each morning reveals new casualties: burned out cars. There have been over 500 in the past three years. These nocturnal arson attacks are part of a protracted campaign of resistance to the city’s increasing gentrification....

Meanwhile, in my town, from another publication I seldom read:

Psycho cycler's revenge
Attacks limo & driver who clipped him

A raging cyclist fed up with aggressive Manhattan drivers took matters into his own hands yesterday, jumping on the hood of a limo that clipped him and smashing in the windshield with his fists.

Bike messenger-gone-wild Perzeus Forte, 20, also ripped out the front passenger window, tore the shirt of driver Darr Mohammed, 49, and clocked him in the face during the savage road rage attack around 1 p.m., sources said.

"He hit me and kept going," Forte later fumed to The Post. "I'm sick of this."

Forte's rampage began while riding his bike up Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, where Mohammed grazed him around West 19th Street. The limo kept going until he got stopped by a red light at West 20th Street.

That's when Forte flipped out, ditching his wheels and sprinting 100 yards to the car. He leaped onto the hood while screaming, "I'm going to kill you! I'm going to kill you, motherf- - -er!" according to one witness.

Somebody give this guy a movie contract, instantly!

For something like the third or fourth time since last weekend's great SUV fizzle, Times Square was shut down for an hour because somebody left a bag with some water bottles in it on the sidewalk. The starship troopers (one is shown above) were of course called in, in all their glorious absurdity.

How I hope somebody is doing this deliberately. And that it happens so often the authorities have to close Times Square for good. Turn it into a bird sanctuary, or something.

I must say, it's nice to see police cars burning, even if it was reptile-fund provocateurs that did it. (There seems to be some reason to believe that's what happened, or part of what happened.)

Provocateurs are an old story, but I wonder whether they're really an effective tactic for our rulers. The idea is to "discredit" the opposition and give a pretext for a crackdown. But since when did they need a pretext for a crackdown? Isn't cracking down just what they do?

Could the opposition already be more "discredited", by the unrelenting efforts of the ideological apparatus? And isn't there some risk that people, seeing a police car burning, might start to think, Hmmm, not a bad idea?

One wonders if this isn't a case of the Enforcement Sector trying to create work for itself (and, of course, increased levels of funding.)

Our earnest northern neighbors are said to have spent something on the order of a billion dollars on "security" for this politicians' schmoozefest. Now there's absolutely nothing rational about this. They could meet in the Falkland Islands, or Antarctica, or St Helena, or just do a videoconference, for a fraction of the cost.

It's theater on both sides -- the Authorities with their stolid mook battalions, and the Black Bloc, perhaps including but clearly not limited to provocateurs, on the other.

Sitting as I do in the gallery, I find the Authorities a bore. More burning police cars is what I want to see, and I don't care who's burning 'em.