Tomorrow, Occupy Wall Street plans an international general strike. The general strike has long been the far Left’s key threat: a shut-down of the economy. Fortunately, this never works. They don’t have enough people to slow down anything. But by trying, the organizers of Occupy Wall Street will symbolically fly the red flag.
Occupy-related events are planned in 115 cities throughout the U.S., from college towns such as Amherst, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia.
In San Francisco, demonstrators intend to hold a rally at the toll plaza of the Golden Gate Bridge from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. local time that “will result in the shutdown,” according to their website.
Across the bay in Oakland, protesters said they intend morning marches on banks and the Chamber of Commerce, followed by an afternoon rally and a march downtown.
General strikes always fail to shut down anything in the United States. This event is what the Left calls “consciousness raising.” It is done to give members a sense of participation.
The strategy has always relied on provoking the police to do rash things. The organizers are not naive enough to imagine that the average American is going to pay any attention to them. Americans are too busy for mass protests. But if the police get out the tear gas, the group may get TV air time.
The leaders chose May 1 for a reason: to identify the movement’s roots as Leftist. May Day for over a century has been the day of choice for the far Left to protest, march, or otherwise strut its stuff.
May Day was the day when the Soviet Union rolled tanks and weapons down the main street of Moscow.
May Day is International Workers Day. This is from Wikipedia.
International Workers’ Day (also known as May Day) is a celebration of the international labour movement and left-wing movements. It commonly sees organized street demonstrations and marches by working people and their labour unions throughout most of the world. May 1 is a national holiday in more than 80 countries. It is also celebrated unofficially in many other countries. . . .
International Workers’ Day is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, when, after an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they dispersed a public meeting, Chicago police fired on workers during a general strike for the eight hour workday, killing several demonstrators and resulting in the deaths of several police officers, largely from friendly fire.[1][2][3][4] In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle, following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests.May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International’s second congress in 1891.
Subsequently, the May Day Riots of 1894 occurred. In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on “all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace.” The congress made it “mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers.”[5]
In many countries, the working classes sought to make May Day an official holiday, and their efforts largely succeeded. May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist and anarchist groups. In some circles, bonfires are lit in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, usually at dawn.[6] May Day has been an important official holiday in countries such as the People’s Republic of China, Cuba and the former Soviet Union. May Day celebrations typically feature elaborate popular and military parades in these countries.
Occupy Wall Street is socialist to the core. It is not in favor of reforming the banking system as a stand-alone project. It wants to shut down capitalism in general.The movement is a throwback to the Left of the 1930s. It is out of touch with America, as we shall see on May 1.
Megaphones, yes. Mindless repetitive chanting, yes. Influence, no.
occupy movement is dead, its been dead and no one that could have made a difference was ever listening. if nothing changes they will be relegated to a minor blip in history.
if occupy wants to be heard they are going to have to take steps like they did in london or like the race riots in the 60's
no ones gonna listen till ya get their attention and that generally happens when you affect the wallet i/e the money supply. like the bus strikes in alabama. a london striker said in a video that 'no one was listening till we set stuff on fire'
The Occupy movement has gotten a bad rap. The corporate owned media always focuses on the infiltrators who were sent by DHS to discredit everyone who is upset with Wall Street and the bailouts that the vast majority of Americans told Congress not to pass and it did anyway. The official cost of $700 billion is waaay underestimated according to Dylan Ratigan. Probably closer to $100 trillion.
The Occupy movement is ordinary Americans who have been screwed out of their life savings, investments and homes by a corrupt government in partnership with the banksters. The movement includes retired police chiefs, Marine combat veterans and middle class people who lost their homes and jobs to robo-signers and fraud.
OWS is not Marxists dedicated to bringing down the American way of life, Wall Street and the federal government did that already without help from anyone!
It is only fitting and appropriate these anarchists should fly a red flag on May 1st. After all, every good Communist shulf ceebrate May Day flying a red flag. We ought to round up all the journalists from every left wing news station and newspaper – I mean all of them – and include, Pelosi and Maxine Waters and force them to sit in with the scumbag occupiers and then surround them police and military until a huge wall is built around them and let them rot right there. Treat the scumbags as you would all garbage.
Greater Tampa population, well over one million people. Initial Occupy Wall Street protest drew less than 40 protesters … (more news people there than 'Occupiers')
With in 2 weeks there were about 6 full time 'occupiers at their chosen site. You can find more homeless people than that at many downtown locations on any given night.
One TV station had to actually ask where to find the OWS protesters to do a interview with them in the park they were occupying.
It was a non event other than the fact the media covered it.
In perhaps a interesting side note, protests over a county wide law limiting panhandling at traffic interesections has drawn and continues to draw many more 'protesters' (both pro and con for the new panhandling laws than OWS ever did) for hearings and votes.
Past generations of Americans fought wars to win and to maintain their liberties, and to end slavery. The current generation of Americans, as exemplified by the clueless OWS (Obama’s Witless Stooges) parasites, appears all too willing to surrender their freedoms and to submit to state controlled slavery. The problem is that they’re willing cede freedoms belonging to the rest of us as well.
You are kidding, right?!!!!!
You have no clue what you are talking about. The OWS useful Idiots are a Communist movement inspired by Obama and funded by Soros and the Communist controlled Unions.
You need to get yourself a fresh cup of coffee and wake up along with a bunch of other people in America.
I would like to see some of the Tea Party take down their Communist Red Flags and burn them in the street for the 6:00 o-clock news.
I wish people would get the facts about the London riots straight. They were not about "protest" of any kind. 80% of the "protesters" that were caught and prosecuted, were professional criminals with long criminal records for burglary who were solely there to grab as much booty as they could amid an organised riot started by a group on facebook. Some of those caught were even millionaires children and some off duty policemen. It was an opportunist "flash mob" nothing more which led to some innocent bystanders losing their lives who tried to stop them.
These are Obama's and Georgieboy's buddies. They seek to collapse the USA and install Obama's "New World Order."
At its core, Occupy is anarchist.
…
This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between [Kalle Lasn, Adbusters' founder] and [Micah White, Adbusters’ senior editor], who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June, Adbusters sent an e-mail to subscribers stating that “America needs its own Tahrir.” The next day, White wrote to Lasn that he was “very excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme. . . . I think we should make this happen.” He proposed three possible Web sites: OccupyWallStreet.org, AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org.
“No. 1 is best,” Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org.
…
White watched as the e-mail’s proposal raced around Twitter and Reddit. “Normal campaigns are lots of drudgery and not much payoff, like rolling a snowball up a hill,” he said. “This was the reverse.” Fifteen minutes after Lasn sent the e-mail, Justine Tunney, a twenty-six-year-old in Philadelphia, read it on her RSS feed. The next day, she registered OccupyWallSt.org, which soon became the movement’s online headquarters.
…
[Typical rally speaches] alienated the roughly fifty Adbusters supporters, mostly anarchists, who came expecting a planning session. There was some angry shouting before a group of anarchists broke off, sat down in a circle on the cobblestones, and held their own meeting.
The anarchists immediately agreed to use “horizontal” organizing methods, according to which meetings are known as general assemblies and participants make decisions by consensus and give continuous feedback through hand gestures.
…
—Pre-Occupied (The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street.), Mattathias Schwartz, November 28, 2011, The New Yorker
OWS was an attempt to "counter" the TEA Party. It was probably hoped that OWS would represent a "popular movement" and might inspire a "counter" to the 2010 congressional races that lost the House for the Democrats.
What happened instead was that the average American realized that "occupation" meant that these people did not have steady work but could live in expensive urban locales for weeks on end without visible means of support. When some of the OWS people resorted to public defecation it was realized that these people were living like animals and lacked even the basic rudiments of civilization. The stories of OWS camps becoming incubators for respiratory disease, rapes, assaults and squatting began to annoy the average American.
In contrast TEA Party members showed up, did their thing and went home. They were people who were honestly fed up with the system, took time out of their lives to protest and then returned to those lives to earn a living or at least to live within their means. I am sure that a few were "inspired" by GOP controlled media outlets but as far as anyone can establish were not paid to protest and were not Trust Fund Babies taking time off from Eternal Student lives to "pursue relevance".