24 November 2011

The Rise and Demise of the Zuccotti Park Commune

Zuccotti Utopia: Portraits of The New Revolutionaries

From Sophie: Bravo, El Marco, Bravo!

23 November 2011, by El Marco

I recently traveled from Colorado to New York the weekend before the demise of the revolutionary social experiment in lower Manhattan known as Occupy Wall Street’s “Camp Anonymous.” I went intending to capture for posterity photographic images of the people and infrastructure that comprised that hopeful utopian “model community for a new world.”

A pamphlet entitled Mutual Responsibility OWS I picked up at one of the information desks stated:

The global reality is not the currency or market fluctuations, but rather a direct result of the new global, integral, and social restructuring taking place. Until now, we developed ourselves on a personal level. Now humanity is approaching a new phase, and the old world must make way for the new world. We are dealing with the natural law of development. Everything that we considered true up until yesterday no longer works …

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– Buckminster Fuller

Utopian futurist Buckminster Fuller, in the mid 1960s, popularized a “new model structure” for the way we would all live in the future. The geodesic dome hasn’t exactly transformed the global human condition as promised. Today, the Occupy Wall Street revolutionary utopians are offering a “new model social structure for the entire global community“. The OWS big thinkers created an entire revolutionary community in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street. It thrived and grew for two months until the liberal billionaire mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, ordered police and sanitation workers to relegate it to the trash-heap of history.

This is the first in a series of photo-essays which will bring you into that model utopian community created by the anarchists and Marxists of the OWS revolutionary movement. These people are convinced, each in his or her own way, that this new movement will bring down the entire global free enterprise system, and replace it with their kinder, better, wiser, revolutionary … uh, you know … revolutionary thing.

These were the first Occupiers I encountered in Zuccotti Park. They are self-described anarchists. Above, the boy on the right wears a shirt with the motto of Anonymous, an international activist hacking group which set its sights on Wall Street earlier this year. On March 2, 2011, Anonymous issued a press release:

Attention Brothers: The opportunity to create financial chaos and public unrest and from that, there will be a previously unachieved amount of lulz to be had. Charge your lasers and aim them at the New York Stock Exchange.

We are not merely human. Anonymous is something much more for we possess neither fear nor mercy. It is time to show the world the true power and the true face of the faceless, the nameless and the ghosts of society.

Like Icarus, the powers that be have flown too close to the sun and the time has come to set the wings of their empire ablaze and watch the system their power relies on come to a grinding halt and come crashing down around them. We must strike at the heart of their empire by once again throw a wrench into the machine, but this time we face a much bigger target; the global financial system. This time our target is the New York Stock Exchange.

This is a call to arms my brothers who for too long have stood for nothing but have criticized everything. Stand now, behind the banner of free men against the tyrannical matrix of institutions that oppose us. Ready your weapons and aim them at the New York Stock Exchange. This is the operation to end all others. Innocent people may stand to lose something from this but the powers that be stand to lose much more. Bring the rain brothers.

We are Anonymous
We are Legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect Us.

Internet activists have joined with international Marxist-Leninists, 1960s radicals, powerful labor unions, neo-flower children, and elements of the Democrat party to form what has become the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Colleen, age 20, from Johnston State College in Vermont.

Zuccotti Love

This Floridian spent every day, all day, soliciting funds for the commune’s women’s group. Panhandling seemed to be the only productive activity I witnessed during my four days inside the Zuccotti Park commune. The woman above, and many like her, have to turn in the majority of their funds to the Central Committee, which in turn passes it on to the Finance Committee, some of whom were staying in $700 a night hotels nearby.

Most protesters still can’t define their goals beyond ending capitalism and making life more fair, which means they want other people’s money. Meanwhile, donations of goods and cash pile up, with a reported $500,000 on deposit. (now over 600,000 – El Marco)

The cash marks an embarrassment for a movement supposedly railing against capitalism and wealth, especially now that a radical group called the Alliance for Global Justice is legally sponsoring the protest. By lending its tax-exempt status — for a 7 percent cut! — the global-justice group allows donors to deduct their contributions from federal taxes and gives its own board control over the money.

The alliance, based in Washington, is a hotbed of far-left causes that range from backing hunger strikes in California prisons and supporting Hugo Chavez to denouncing the CIA and oil companies. Its Web site says the group sponsors operations in the Gaza Strip, with Hamas, and boasts of an alliance with Anarchists Against the Wall, which contests Israel’s security barrier in the West Bank. - NYPost

Free Wi-Fi, yeaaaay! The masked man, above, is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, named for a member of a 1605 plot to blow up the British House of Lords. The mask was designed for a comic book, V for Vendetta, which was made into a movie of the same name in 2006, and is popular with angry adolescent males. The movie’s hero never removes his mask as he kills policemen by the score, and detonates landmark buildings in a dystopian London of the future. Anonymous, Wikileaks, and anarchists around the world have adopted this mask as a symbol. Julian Assange, of Wikileaks, wore one of these masks at Occupy London Stock Exchange recently.

This truck is owned by supporters of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. They were parked beside Zuccotti Park most of the time I was there. They sleep in the back, on sofas, and hand out Free Bradley Manning stickers. Manning is the U.S. soldier “whistleblower” accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of documents from the US Military and handing them over to Assange and his Wikileaks organization. Manning has become a total celebrity to the anti-American left, on the level of cop-killer Abu Mumia Jamal.

When I queried this fellow about where one could find fascists in New York, his reply encompassed practically anyone who doesn’t support the Zuccotti Park commune, and especially “the bankers.”

The statement below was published by OWS Mutual Responsibility, in a flyer distributed at all information desks at the park.

“The free market, and its tycoons, will continue to thrive and be a central factor in this new stage of global development on condition that we learn together how to establish the relations between us and organize a social structure that truly benefits all. Economic prosperity cannot be achieved without considering universal social wellbeing.”

This sounds strangely like core fascist ideology of the twentieth century. This fellow might be surprised to know that Mussolini was hailed by Lenin as the most perfect socialist in the world.

Ludwig von Mises noted that the National Socialist slogan Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz – the commonweal ranks above private profit —

“implies that profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immense majority and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution.”

Doug Schoen, the longtime professional pollster and Democrat, an adviser to the Clintons, (polled) Occupy Wall Street camp in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Here’s his piece in the Wall Street Journal.

What did he find? “The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. “Then Schoen says:

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda.

Coming in at about the same time was a poll taken of one hundred of the Occupiers by New York Magazine which found an unnamed number wanted to “burn it [Wall Street] down” and that 34 percent believed the United States government was “no better than, say, Al Qaeda.” - American Spectator
.

I ran into a lot of young kids from the ‘burbs, who skipped school to spend time in Zuccotti Park.

One 17 year old who was staying in the park told me that this was the moment he had been waiting for his whole life. “I always wished I was born in the 1950s, so I could be the exact right age to be there in the ’60s,” he said. The myth of the idyllic “Summer of Love” has been airbrushed, packaged, and sold to these kids, as a utopia lost in the psychedelic mists of time. The 1960s mythical utopia seems to be the main historical reference point for many of today’s youngsters.

The legacy of harm done by the counter-culture movement of the 1960s was on display everywhere in Zuccotti Park. Damaged young people rubbed shoulders with broken-down old hippies. The smell of potent modern hybrid cannabis was constantly in the air. The young man, above, was in such a state that he stared at the sky for minutes on end before bending down to add another little squiggle to his poster-board. It appeared to me that he was so high he couldn’t speak, or even acknowledge the presence of people around him.

David Everitt-Carlson, a homeless liberal blogger in New York City is seen begging, painting and pontificating at Camp Anonymous. After a few years in Asia, he hit bottom in Vietnam, and was recently repatriated by a US State Deparment program for indigent expats. The government picked him up at the airport and delivered him to a homeless shelter in midtown Manhattan. He has enjoyed becoming a bit of a cause célèbre for an eager press looking for a new “poster-child” to “put a different face on the issue” of homelessness. As the photo above illustrates, he is still a flaming liberal, but after living eight weeks among the crack-heads and murderers that inhabit his new “homeless” world, a few rays of reality have pierced the fuzziness of his artsy-lefty mind-box. From his blog:

The last few months have been fraught with soul searching. “How did I get here?” … And what I have come to realize is that once one succumbs to the psychological mind frame that allows a person to live as a “professional homeless,” the battle has been lost. You will have become what you fear most. And compromises must be made to live on a state owned bed and just $200 in food stamps and $45 cash a month that the government allows you. One of the men in my room at the shelter is a loan shark for crack heads. He loans them $20 and they give him back $40. [talk about greed!] Another can sell three packs of cigarettes a day at the shelter, one by one, and pocket maybe $20. And not a one of them is looking for a job – they already have jobs. In fact, in my entire time at the shelter I have not met one single person who mans the commercial job hunt and is really trying to work themselves out of the system – rather, they learn how to gig the system – how to get the most out of it that they can in legal or less than legal ways. It is not exactly a breeding ground for role models.

I love it when liberals are mugged by reality. Hopefully he keeps having epiphanies like this and develops into a mature conservative who can really do some good in the world by creating wealth and employment for himself and others. Good luck, and I hope you find your way out of your liberal box, sir!

Help me paint peace – Day 51

On the weekend, the park was packed with people who didn’t necessarily support the “tear it all down” mindset of the Occupiers. The man above is from Shanghai, China, and is protesting China’s recent crackdown in Tibet. The day before I took this photo, a nun immolated herself, bringing the two week total of self-immolation to twelve. This man was surprised when I expressed sympathy for the death of the nun in my first sentence to him. He told me that the Occupiers were oblivious to China’s current crackdown in Tibet.

I didn’t speak with this young man, but I suspect that he is one of that very rare species of protester known as the conservative infiltrator. Such people regularly appeared at anti-war/kill George Bush rallies after 9/11.

Ady Lambert was one of the few bright spots that I encountered working around Zuccotti Park. She radiated calm sanity, in her red tartan scarf and headphones. I’m sure she has a brilliant future in photography and in the fashion industry.

Raz Drastic, from New York’s lower east side, is a singer-guitar player in the retro-punk style. His top issues are: corporate greed, reforming the economy, and smaller government. What … smaller government?

Raz, you rascally rebel! You should be with the Tea Party. Raz’s Facebook page says his favorite activities are drinking Jack Daniels, communicating with aliens, and just being retarded. That being said, he was one of my favorite people who I encountered in the park, with a calm, congenial, and lucid personality.

Stu McGowan from Burlington, Vermont.

Roll over, JFK.

Just passing through.

Occupy Wall Street baby, Khloe Smith, with her mother, panhandling. This woman and her red-bearded husband were a permanent feature on the corner of Liberty and Trinity, which is known around the world as Ground Zero. Directly across the intersection, the new World Trade Center Plaza is reaching skyward, while on this side, a neo-primitive community of panhandlers raises money for the global anti-capitalist revolution.

Baby Khloe, with daddy and mommy. Daddy is a homeless poet. I bought one of his poems. It is arrhythmic, and includes:

Why is it I hate my life and sometimes I wish I was a victim at Columbine?
Why did you give me two beautiful Daughters to be so proud of, Without a way to respectfully take care of them?
How is that people see me as less of a man asking for help?
Instead of a man with a plan with no alternative left?

What is the difference between me and him?
And her? And them?
Why am I considered the least of the bunch?

Mommy and daddy entertain tourists, for cash, by simulating sexual positions with a bronze statue. Note the excited man with camera giving the thumbs up in the background.

This famous statue is of a business man, sitting in a park with briefcase open, head bowed as he works. It survived the collapse of the World Trade Center, at which time this area was covered in several feet of debris.

NEED donations to get a cage for my three pet rats … need $420 for cage and food.

“We are at the start of the Global Era. We have come to the conclusion of our natural development as individuals. In the new world, no individual will be able to enjoy while others are starving because everyone’s basic needs must be met. However, along with basic necessities, all people will receive a basic education about the process humanity is going through, which will expand our awareness beyond our personal concerns.” – Mutual Responsibility, OWS

Brings to mind Karl Marx’ maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” doesn’t it?

This mentally ill young man, Jeremy Clinch, told me that due to his bad behavior, the commune had prohibited him from receiving food, and evicted him from the Zuccotti Park. Now he sits on the sidewalk, begging for food. He asked me to go to MacDonalds and buy a meal for him. He told me he didn’t want to eat the communce food anyway, because the week before it had made everyone sick for two days.

Clinch made the front page of the NY Post, under the headline Occupy Wall Street Animals Go Wild ... ZOO-COTTI!. He was assaulted by a delusional Turk named Iskender, who took exception to the early morning tantrum Clinch was throwing. Though this young man struck no one, the Turkish thug who decked him was allowed full communal privileges while Clinch was exiled.

In a bizarre rant after the dust settled, Iskender told The Post that Clinch “is a police agent.”

“He is a Bloomberg agent, disturbing and disrupting the protest,” said Iskender, who after the fight donned a message board that read, “USA-Turk Army Ended My Diplomatic Career 6 Times,” and also charged that “AC Tropicana Casino Robbed My $30K Pay For My Driving Job.” NYPost

They cut off Jeremy’s food and exiled him! How inhumane. Too bad our government doesn’t have the power to exile Stalinists, like the Zuccotti park communards exile the mentally ill.

Yes, at the “leaderless” Zuccotti Park utopia, people can be banished for life, just as in many primitive societies. Even the mentally ill. Where’s the compassion?

This is the now infamous Jew-hater, Danny Cline. A full month after his anti-semitic rant shocked right-thinking America, he was still an honored and protected member of the commune. Here he stands, wearing stolen police netting, like some form of primitive war trophy.

The day before, Cline was in full panhandling mode. With Sharpie in hand, he had just written on his abdomen $1 donations – U CAN TOUCH

Cline was teamed up with one of the many official Occupy beggars who ringed the park day and night with white five gallon buckets. I didn’t observe this activity for more than two minutes, but during that time, I took a number of shots of offended New Yorkers, including a ten year old girl and her mother. I won’t publish that photo as the photos above suffice to illustrate why this commune was hated by local residents.

The right to live ones’ life, in privacy and Freedom, in whatever way one wants, so long as others are not harmed, should be a sacred principal in a Democracy. – H. Zinn

Marxist-Leninist Howard Zinn’s toxic People’s History of the United States reads like 1940s Stalinist anti-American propaganda, and is widely revered by the left. Zinn’s quote on this sign sounds like the hippy credo of the 1960s. Who is it that determines in anarchy, what constitutes harm?

Ali is from Egypt, and he has been harmed by the Zuccotti Park commune’s very existence. He has an elaborate food cart at one end of Zuccotti Park. When I asked if the commune was giving him good business, he bitterly complained about his plight since the occupiers showed up. “They buy nothing! They all eat in the park. I had many good customers every day, but now they don’t come here.” I also spoke with the men at Charlie’s Pizza. They are also immigrants to America, and they were apoplectic when they described how Occupiers came in at all hours, stoned or drunk, demanding food for free, and even fighting with staff and customers. Other area businesses have had similar experiences.

At a lower Manhattan community board meeting in October, residents also talked about how fed up they were:

“They are defecating on our doorsteps,” fumed Catherine Hughes, a member of Community Board 1 and a stay at home mom who has the misfortune of living one block from the chaos.

“A lot of people are very frustrated. A lot of people are concerned about the safety of our kids.”

Fed up homeowners said that they’ve been subjected to insults and harassment as they trek to their jobs each morning. “The protesters taunt people who are on their way to work,” said James Fernandez, 51, whose apartment overlooks the park. - NY Post

Peter Cushing Allan, second from left above, is an entertainment industry attorney and local resident. He went into the commune to share his feelings with Occupy organizers. I heard him say, in the most civil of terms and tone, that he thought that one month was long enough to make a political point by occupying the park, but now in the seventh week, they had gone too far. He said it was time for the Occupiers to leave the neighborhood. In the photo above, Allan reacts when three Occupiers (two were out of the frame, on right) shouted in unison, “No, you get out!”

What Mr. Allan doesn’t realize is that these anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are in it for the revolution that they believe will topple the world economic system for the greater good of the human race.

Like proto-occupier Ratso Rizzo in the movie Midnight Cowboy, this young Occupier just wants to go to where the sun keeps shinin’ thru the pouring rain. When I took this picture, the young person above was speaking to four camera crews, like he was some kind of star.

Everybody’s talking at me.
I don’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind.
People stopping staring,
I can’t see their faces,
Only the shadows of their eyes.

Occupy Miami Beach – Please donate for needed supplies: sun-screen, beach towel, sunglasses, tiny umbrellas, boogie board, swimsuit. Thanks.

Why doesn’t the commune supply this Occupier’s NEEDS out of the $600,000 they have in the bank? The least they could do is buy him some tiny umbrellas and a bathing suit.

Here, a local resident tries to talk some sense into leftist numbskulls. These two have won life’s lottery by being born in the USA, and they don’t have a clue how lucky they are. Liberal indoctrination has completely debilitated them. I would love to send these two to a country with fewer opportunities than here for a few years to make a living. We could call it a re-education program. I can’t help but think of the book Hijack by Black Panther Tony Bryant, and his taste of life in Cuba, where he learned the hard way how good life is in the USA.

Full-time commune resident

I don’t recall the Tea Party ever needing legal fundraisers. In the background, one of many references to slavery. None of these references allude to the debt the politicians are running up for future generations to pay. One of the major concerns of the various Occupy movements in campuses around the country is student debt. Most in the Occupy movements everywhere want student debt forgiveness, i.e., that the productive tax-payers pay for everybody else’s higher educations.

The new concept of “wage slavery” is important to most of the protesters. This means that in a free market, workers are forced to “sell” or “rent” themselves into “wage slavery” under threat of starvation. Noam Chomsky wrote, “People should not be forced to rent themselves in order to survive.” You mean like prostitution, Gnome? That is what you lefties fully support as a respectable profession! Leftist lunacy shifts so fast. One day hookers are part of the noble working class, and the next day all wage earning work is dishonorable and equated to slavery. I have personal friends who are escaped slaves and they now work for wages here in the US. I will introduce them to this nutty concept and post their responses in the future.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the history of anti-semitism, “Debt is Slavery” is a Jew-hating concept that has led to many pogroms in Europe over the centuries. In our society, debt is a choice free people make. Slavery means the buying and selling of human beings who have lost their freedom, and who have no choices.

This man is an example of New York’s permanent protester class. He has been seen at every leftist anti-American protest since the ’60s. At least fifty percent of the participants in Occupy marches in New York are recycled anti-war leftists who also participate in protests supporting Hisbollah, or welcoming Irans’ president Ajmadenijad when he comes to New York. When the common business man statue isn’t being sexually harassed, it has to put up with this kind of abuse. For some reason, this veteran lefty thought it appropriate to sit for hours in this position, without moving a muscle day after day.

This is Amaz,who told me that Barack Obama is the most perfect man in the universe. He also told me that the word caucasian means “dead Asian,” and that because white people are dead Asians, they can’t produce melanin to color their skin. He told me way too many other things also, as he is a self-regarding sage with his own complex, religio-racist world-view.

Anti-fracking hysteria is an issue about which the vast majority of protesters agree. Energy independence would provide many jobs and make staples more affordable for the “99%,” bringing us lower utility bills, lower prices for food and all other consumer goods. Remember the statement from Anonymous, at the top of this post:

Innocent people may stand to lose something from this but the powers that be stand to lose much more.

A popular sign at Occupy Wall Street is “Fracking makes 99% sick, and 1% rich.” This is pure myth. No one has ever been made sick by fracking, yet President Obama and the Democrat Party are so beholden to the radical environmentalist lobby that they are throwing all kinds of roadblocks up to thwart this ultra-safe technology.

Pieman, Aron Kay, is another professional protester, famous on the left since the days of Berkeley’s Free Speech movement. His role, as a Yippie in that movement, was to popularize throwing pies in the faces of speakers with whom the flower-power Marxists of that time disagreed. This human pig-man has done more to shut down free speech in this country than any one I know of.

Ben Cohen serves free Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream out of a freezer that was permanently situated on one side of the “kitchen” in the Zuccotti Park commune. The day I took this photo, he was digging ice cream for hours, which was quite impressive. When I asked him about the multi-city protests he spearheaded in September 2008, he stunned me by denying any memory of his activities.

On the first anniversary of the Tea Party movement, I wrote:

This phenomenon might instead have been dated to September 25, 2008, and the movement called the Ice Cream Party, had the November election turned out differently. Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, is the founder of the Soros funded radical leftist “grassroots group” True Majority. Cohen claims 700,000 members and says he organized over 251 events in 41 states to protest against a bill in the House which would eventually become Bush’s $700,000,000,000 TARP bailout of Wall Street. The protests also included a laundry list of unions and leftist groups including ACORN.

Mr. Cohen denied that he had been involved. I couldn’t believe that he would lie to me in front of all those children waiting for ice cream. Of course, left wing protests against big government bail-outs died out immediately once Obama won the election. When the Tea Party emerged in February, 2009, protesting against TARP and Obama’s $780 billion Porkulus bill, the left was at first silent, and then started screaming racism.

Now that Barack Obama has utterly disappointed true hardcore leftists like Ben Cohen, rather than direct their anger at the government and their own Democrat Party, which would be racist, they now channel their anger against “the capitalist system.” Shame on you, Ben Cohen, for not remaining true to your small government principals of the pre-Obama era. In retrospect, we can now see that Cohen’s “Ice Cream Party” had nothing to do with principals, but was just an anti-Bush movement. The proof is that you haven’t had a negative word to say about all of Obama’s massive spending and bailouts.

Another mega-bucks celebrity figure who frequented the Zuccotti Park commune was Russell Simmons. Known for being a recording and fashion industry entrepreneur and author, he also is the founder of a fee-based credit card company called UniRush Financial. I somehow doubt that he was trolling the Occupy crowd for new customers. Self-styled Hindu-Buddhist-vegan-yogi Simmons seemed to me to be uncomfortable greeting some of the anarchists within the Occupy Wall Street community. With a net worth of $350 million, Simmons is a “capitalist pig” who “hoards cash,” according to the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street. “Capitalist pig” Ben Cohen sold his company to UniLever Corporation, one of the world’s largest conglomerates. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more hypocritical in the world than a “filthy rich” commie sympathizer.

Dehumanization of the capitalist “pigs” is a staple of the Occupy movement.

This is an anti-semitic poster from an OWS activist web site. Note that the occupiers are all holding giant pins, with which to destroy the hideous, stereotypical, Jewish tycoon which symbolizes capitalism. Karl Marx was born and baptized a Lutheran in Trier, Germany. His early writings for that city’s newspaper were pure anti-semitic diatribes, similar to those written by Martin Luther. Marx went on to become the leading anti-semite of the nineteenth century, according to James Carroll, in his seminal book, Constantine’s Sword, which is a chronicle of anti-semitism as the central tragedy of western civilization.

Ben Cohen and Russell Simmons, you are hanging out with anti-semites, who also happen to hate you because you’re part of the 1%.

A gay, Jewish civil servant, on left, reacts in horror to the comments of this sign-carrying radical Israel-hating non-Jewish Jew. The man with the sign supports Hamas and other Jewicidal groups, and I also photographed him surrounded by muslim men and women who were delighted by his anti-Israel exhortations.

Anarchists had the largest and most centrally located propaganda operation of the Zuccotti Park commune. In the October 22, 2011, issue of the broadsheet published by the commune, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, in an article entitled Enacting the Impossible on Consensus Decision Making, David Graeber writes that at the very first meeting of their 12 person central planning committee anarchists dominated:

“The anarchists in the circle made what seemed at the time an insanely ambitious proposal. Why not let them operate exactly like this committee, by consensus.

It was, in the least, a wild gamble, because as far as any of us knew, no one had ever managed to pull off something like this before. Consensus process had been successfully used in spokes-councils — groups of activists organized into separate affinity groups, each represented by a single “spoke” — but never in mass assemblies like the one anticipated in New York City. Even the General Assemblies in Greece and Spain had not attempted it. But consensus was the approach that most accorded with our principles. So we took the leap.

The direct democratic process adopted by Occupy Wall Street has deep roots in American radical history. It was widely employed in the civil rights movement and by the Students for a Democratic Society. But its current form has developed from within movements like feminism and even spiritual traditions (both Quaker and Native American) as much as from within anarchism itself. The reason direct, consensus-based democracy has been so firmly embraced by and identified with anarchism is because it embodies what is perhaps anarchism’s most fundamental principle: that in the same way human beings treated like children will tend to act like children, the way to encourage human beings to act like mature and responsible adults is to treat them as if they already are.”

Thus the old guard Marxist/hippy radicals joined with younger anarchists who typify this movement.

Note the spelling of AmeriKKKa on the cardboard sign above. That’s how Obama’s pastor and mentor of 22 years, Reverend Wright spells it too. Wright and Obama have both embraced this movement, and even stroked it a little.

The man in the hardhat is Charles Helms, Communications Director, and Assistant to the President, of the Hudson County, NJ, AFL-CIO. He joins with Marxist-Leninists at the Zuccotti Park commune.

This woman sang revolutionary songs of a type that were so bizarre that I was flabbergasted. The one that I recall, the refrain was Plaster my legs, referring to broken legs. Very strange. Note that she is wearing a purple heart. I wonder if she got it stumbling on her hammer and sickle, drunk on Cuban rum …

All persons or entities that deliberately harm America financially or otherwise are nothing less than HOME GROWN TERRORIST.
THE RICH refusing to pay their fair share
THE BANKS with their mortgage and foreclosure schemes
THE CORPORATIONS exporting jobs out of the country
WALL STREET with its underhanded manipulation of the market

Name me one game in the world, played by humans of any age, that doesn’t breed dishonest men, or dishonest four year olds.

A large percentage of OWS participants are 9/11 truthers, or followers of Alex Jones, who on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 led a howling mob of thousands to Ground Zero to scream insults at the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. I encountered a number of truthers who had come to New York on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to demonstrate at Ground Zero, and stayed to join the Occupy Wall Street movement on September 17.

Another union man, peddling a communist newspaper.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Recent reports in the New York newspapers say that Outlaw Bobby Steele is one of the few protesters left in Zuccotti Park, after Mayor Bloomberg’s cops and Sanitation Department kicked OWS out of the park.

Steele was actually a very pleasant guy, who said that he had worked on Wall Street for a decade. I think it’s a safe assumption that was before he got his facial tattoos.

This is the delusional Turk who punched out Jeremy Clinch and enjoyed the full support of the central committee of the Zuccotti Park commune until the bitter end.

CAMP ANONYMOUS, Always Here, Always Watching

Well, they’re not always here; they’re gone now. The residents, business-owners, and workers (a.k.a. the 99%) in the area are breathing a collective sigh of relief. I’m glad I was there to document this leftist debacle for history. In Zuccotti Utopia part 2, I will chronicle the infrastructure and daily life of the revolutionary Occupiers of Zuccotti Park.