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25 November 2011

Climategate scientists DID collude with government officials to hide research that didn't fit their apocalyptic global warming


  • 5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made
  • Experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a 'strong message'
  • Critics claim: 'The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering'
  • Scientist asks, 'What if they find that climate change is a natural fluctuation? They'll kill us all'


Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson was strongly critical of those who supported the 'Climategate' scientists
Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson was strongly critical of those who supported the 'Climategate' scientists

More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change.

Following on from the original 'climategate' emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches.
And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.

One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’. 

The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.

‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: ‘I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. 

'They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’

Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the centre of the affair, said the group findings did stand up to scrutiny.

Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones  - who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - said: 'Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. 

'I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.'

The University of East Anglia, where most of the emails originated - none of the newly released emails appear to be post 2009, but clarify the extent of government involvement in the scandal

The University of East Anglia, where most of the emails originated - none of the newly released emails appear to be post 2009, but clarify the extent of government involvement in the scandal


In another of his emails, he wrote: 'I’ve been told that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is above national Freedom of Information Acts. 

'One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.'
 
More...
Other scientists are clearly against such a policy, but some seemed happy to collude with concealing and destroying evidence. 

One nervous scientist wrote: 'The figure you sent is very deceptive.'

'I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,' wrote another.

The lead author of one of the reports, Jonathan Overpeck, wrote, 'The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.' 

A weak performance by Environment Secretary Chris Huhne on Question Time has helped to inflame the row over the second leak of private  UEA emails  - now described as Climategate 2.0.

Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, appears before the Science and Technology Committee after the last dump of leaked climate-change emails
Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, appears before the Science and Technology Committee after the last dump of leaked climate-change emails


Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation warned against ignoring 'shortcomings' in a letter strongly critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It said: 'The BBC, in determining its policy towards the coverage of global warming, which is of course not simply a scientific issue but an economic and a political issue, too, ought to shred that section of the Jones review and revert to the impartiality laid down in its charter.'

He was also strongly critical of sections of the media who lent support to the scientists.

Andrew Orlwowski, UK science site The Register's science correspondent comments on one email that says, 'What if climate change turns out to be a natural fluctuation? They'll kill us all' 

'The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.'
Orlowski says, 'That won't be necessary.' 

Clive Crook, a commentator for the Atlantic, who described the earlier inquiries into the Climategate emails as 'ineffectual' and 'mealy mouthed', reportedly said, 'The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. 

'The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.'

There is other correspondence from scientists such as Prof Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Penn State University, some of which have a distinct feel of PR 'spin'.

The release of the information echoes the 'Climategate' leaks of hacked private emails two years ago ahead of crunch climate talks in Copenhagen that referred to ways to ‘hide the decline’ in global warming. 

A series of independent reviews cleared the East Anglia researchers of impropriety, but they were told they had been too secretive.

Today's leak may also be timed to disrupt the next session of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change next week in South Africa.


The new email leak is accompanied by a text file which appears to protest against the huge expense of anti-warming technologies - highlighting deaths from poverty against the $36 billion expense of 'green' energy
The new email leak is accompanied by a text file which appears to protest against the huge expense of anti-warming technologies - highlighting deaths from poverty against the $36 billion expense of 'green' energy


The emails have been released in the form of quotes carefully 'chosen' to show bias, or that scientists were pursuing a particular agenda in their research.
The unnamed individuals who released them chose the 5,000 emails from keyword searches, saying, 'We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics.'

The emails were posted on a Russian server - Sinwt.ru - as a downloadable ZIP file in an apparent attempt to cause disruption in advance of next week's climate change conference in Durban.

They were rapidly reposted on climate-sceptic blogs such as The Air Vent.

It is not clear, though, whether they are new, or indeed whether they indicate any kind of conspiracy.

The release of the data was accompanied by a 'press release' in the form of a readme file, which said, 'Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.'

'Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.'

'Today's decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline,' said the file.

The identity of the people who posted it was not revealed - although the clear political statement is new.

The file also contains more than 200,000 other emails, which are encrypted, and no password is provided.

Presumably, this is to protect the individuals involved - or simply because the material is so non-controversial or boring that it's not worth releasing.

NASA thermal satellite image showing the world's arctic surface temperature trends: Today's emails appear to show scientists interested in painting a particular picture of such trends - but the information is not new
NASA thermal satellite image showing the world's arctic surface temperature trends: Today's emails appear to show scientists interested in painting a particular picture of such trends - but the information is not new


The University of East Anglia has not confirmed whether the material is genuine.

None of the material appears to be new, either: it seems to date from the first release in 2009.

It also occurs against a rather different scientific background, after  the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature review of climate-science data by prominent climate sceptic Richard Muller, which analysed 1.6 billion temperature records, and concluded that global warming was a genuine effect.

It is still unclear what effect - or combination of effects - is causing the current warming of the atmosphere, which has risen around one temperature in the past 50 years. 

Professor Mann, speaking to the Guardian, described the release as 'truly pathetic.'

'Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. 

'I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.'

A police investigation is ongoing.

Anarchy in the U.S.A. - The Roots of American Disorder




By Matthew Continetti

Ever since September, when activists heeded Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn’s call to Occupy Wall Street, it’s become a rite of passage for reporters, bloggers, and video trackers to go to the occupiers’ tent cities and comment on what they see. Last week, the day after New York mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to dismantle the tent city in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the New York Times carried no fewer than half a dozen articles on the subject. Never in living memory has such a small political movement received such disproportionate attention from the press. Never in living memory has a movement been so widely scrutinized and yet so deeply misunderstood.

If income equality is the new political religion, occupied Zuccotti Park was its Mecca. Liberal journalists traveled there and spewed forth torrents of ink on the value of protest, the creativity and spontaneity of the occupiers, the urgency of redistribution, and the gospel of social justice. Occupy Wall Street was compared to the Arab Spring, the Tea Party, and the civil rights movement. Yet, as many a liberal journalist left the park, they lamented the fact that Occupy Wall Street wasn’t more tightly organized. They worried that the demonstration would dissipate without a proper list of demands or a specific policy agenda. They suspected that the thefts, sexual assaults, vandalism, and filth in the camps would limit the occupiers’ appeal.

The conservative reaction has been similar. A great many conservatives stress the conditions among the tents. They crow that Americans will never fall in line behind a bunch of scraggly hippies. They dismiss the movement as a fringe collection of left tendencies, along with assorted homeless, mental cases, and petty criminals. They argue that the Democrats made a huge mistake embracing Occupy Wall Street as an expression of economic and social frustration.
A smaller group of conservatives, however, believes the occupiers are onto something. The banks do have too much power. Wages have been stagnant. The problem, these conservatives say, is that Occupy Wall Street doesn’t really know what to do about any of the problems it laments. So this smaller group of conservatives, along with the majority of liberals, is more than happy to supply the occupiers with an economic agenda.

But they might as well be talking to rocks. Both left and right have made the error of thinking that the forces behind Occupy Wall Street are interested in democratic politics and problem solving. The left mistakenly believes that the tendency of these protests to end in violence, dissolute behavior, and the melting away of the activists is an aberration, while the right mistakenly brushes off the whole thing as a combination of Boomer nostalgia for the New Left and Millennial grousing at the lousy job market. The truth is that the violence is not an aberration and Occupy Wall Street should not be laughed away. What we are seeing here is the latest iteration of an old political program that has been given new strength by the failures of the global economy and the power of postmodern technology.

To be sure, there are plenty of people flocking to the tents who are everyday Democrats and independents concerned about joblessness and the gap between rich and poor. The unions backing the occupiers fall into this group. But the concerns of labor intersect only tangentially with those of Occupy Wall Street’s theorists and prime movers. The occupiers have a lot more in common with the now-decades-old antiglobalization movement. They are linked much more closely to the “hacktivist” agents of chaos at WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

When the police officers and sanitation workers reclaimed Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street’s supporters cried, “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.” Whether the sympathizers or the critics really understand the idea and the method of the movement is a good question. The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism.

It was February 25, 1825, and the U.S. Capitol was under occupation​—​sort of. Robert Owen, a successful Welsh businessman and socialist, wasn’t standing in the Rotunda holding up a placard. He was addressing a joint session of Congress from the dais of the House of Representatives. President James Monroe and president-elect John Quincy Adams were present for at least a portion of the speech. As Joshua Muravchik explains in Heaven on Earth, a history of socialism, the elected officials were mesmerized by Owen’s plans.

In the speech, Owen shared his dream of cooperative villages where workers would see their poverty alleviated and their spirits transformed. Inspired by the success of his New Lanark community in Scotland, where employees lived in hospitable conditions and the children of laborers received early childhood and primary education, Owen hoped to bring to America exquisitely planned spaces where a new, improved mankind would come into being. Owen thought his scientifically organized village would “lead to that state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness, in practice, which has been foretold by the sages of past times, and would at some distant period become the lot of the human race!” Utopia, according to Owen, was not confined to the printed page. Utopia could be realized.

The site of his American utopia would be New Harmony, on the Wabash River in southwest Indiana. Owen welcomed residents to his colony that April. “I am come to this country,” he told them, “to introduce an entire new state of society, to change it from the ignorant, selfish system, to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all cause for contests between individuals.” There would be no 1 percent versus the 99 percent in New Harmony.

Things did not work as planned, however. Structuring a community along rational lines was extremely difficult. There weren’t enough skilled laborers. Many of the residents were lazy. Shortages were commonplace. Central planning hampered the efficient allocation of meals. Factions split off from the main group. The community closely monitored the activities and beliefs of every member. Alcohol was banned. Children were separated from their parents; one later said she saw her “father and mother twice in two years.” Owen expelled malcontents. Only his generous subsidies held New Harmony together.

And not for long. Owen’s “new empire of peace and good will to man” fell apart within four years. But the socialist utopian impulse lives on to this day. America in particular has a long and storied tradition of individuals coming together to create perfect societies. In these earthly utopias, competition is to be replaced by cooperation, private property is to dissolve into communal ownership, traditional family structures are to be transformed into the family of mankind, and religion is to be displaced by the spirit of scientific humanism. The names of these communities are familiar to any student of American history: Brook Farm, Oneida, the North American Phalanx. None of them lasted. None of them realized the ecstasy their founders desired.

Historian J.P. Talmon wrote in Political Messianism (1960) that the American and European utopians “all shared the totalitarian-democratic expectation of some pre-ordained, all-embracing, and exclusive scheme of things, which was presumed to represent the better selves, the true interests, the genuine will and the real freedom of men.” The men and women behind the utopian movements drew inspiration from the French Revolution, which proclaimed the liberty, equality, and fraternity of all, and from the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who taught that individuals born free and equal were made subservient and estranged through the institutions of society and private property. Lost freedom could be recovered by dismantling the obstacles that prevent man from being true to himself. The reconstruction of society along rational lines would allow us to reclaim the state of natural bliss that had been lost.

Utopianism attracts goofballs as light attracts moths. The postrevolutionary thinker Charles Fourier was a classic example. “He was an odd old bachelor,” Talmon writes, “a denizen of boarding houses, with the ways of an incurable pedant, loving cats and parrots, tending flowers; rather frightening with his uncanny fixed habits and air of mystery; brooding in immobile silence, but flying into a temper when anyone interfered in the slightest with his routine.” Fourier’s vision was mindboggling. If his plans were put into effect, Fourier believed, “anti-lions” and “anti-crocodiles” would one day transport people across the globe. Hens would lay so many eggs that the British national debt would be paid off in months. The possibility existed, in Fourier’s mind, that the oceans would turn into lemonade.

The basic unit of social organization in Fourier’s dream world was the phalanx. Six million of them would be enough to encompass all of humanity. Fourier planned each aspect of his fantastic environment in intricate detail. Every structure​—​from dormitories to stables to restaurants​—​was precisely designed. Once men lived in the phalanx, there would be no need for property or law or God or family or restraint. Every person would live in accord with his fellow man and nature. This self-regulating community would unleash the creative potential in every human heart.

Children were the clay from which Fourier would sculpt new men. “The phalanx containing an exceedingly great variety of occupations,” he wrote, “it is impossible that the child in passing from one to the other should not find opportunities of satisfying several of his dominant instincts.” There would be no resentment in Fourier’s ideal community, no envy of others. The passions would flow freely. Every want would be fulfilled. It would be, indeed, paradise.
When he looks at the world, the utopian is repelled by two things in particular. One is private property. “The civilized order,” Fourier wrote, “is incapable of making a just distribution except in the case of capital,” where your return on investment is a function of what you put in. Other than that, the market system is unjust. Economics is a zero-sum game. One man holds possessions at the expense of another. For another nineteenth-century French utopian, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, property was theft.

Private property embodies the chains of society that keep man down. As Talmon put it, for the utopian, property is “an instrument of irrational and selfish exploitation; instead of a vehicle for enlarging our personality, a tyrannical master to both the haves driven by insatiable cupidity, and the have-nots, whose lives were being stunted by want and alienated through bondage.” And because property is the source of inequality, only through the communal redistribution of goods can true equality be achieved.

The utopian’s other great hatred is for middle-class or “bourgeois” culture. Monogamy, monotheism, self-control, prudence, cleanliness, fortitude, self-interested labor​—​these are the utopian’s enemies. “Morality teaches man to be at war with himself,” Fourier wrote, “to resist his passions, to repress them, to believe that God was incapable of organizing our souls, our passions wisely.” What were called the bourgeois virtues had been designed to maintain unjust social relations and stop man from being true to himself. Thus, to recover one’s natural state, one “must undertake a vast operation of ‘desanctification,’ beginning with the so-called morality of the bourgeoisie,” wrote the twentieth-century utopian Daniel Guérin. “The moral prejudices inculcated by Christianity have an especially strong hold on the masses of the people.”
It is therefore necessary to liberate individuals from their social and sexual mores. “The family will no longer be the exclusive unit, as it is in civilization,” wrote Talmon. At Brook Farm in Massachusetts, which lasted from 1841 to 1847, men and women were encouraged to interact as complete social, political, and sexual equals. Residents of the Oneida Community (1848-1880) in upstate New York engaged in “complex marriage,” in which older members of the commune “introduced” younger members to sex. The Oneidans engaged in selective breeding. These practices, radical at the time, have been characteristic of left-wing movements ever since. The free love associated with the New Left and student rebellion in the 1960s, for instance, is today so deeply embedded in American culture that only social conservatives pay it any mind.

The persistence of certain features of utopian socialism over 200 years is impressive. Only the dress codes and gadgets change. If Charles Fourier emerged from a wormhole at the Occupy Wall Street D.C. tent city in McPherson Square in Washington, he’d feel right at home. The very term “occupy” or “occupation” is an attack on private property. So are the theft and vandalism widely reported at Occupy Wall Street locations. The smells, the assaults, the rejection of the conventional in favor of the subversive, and the embrace of pantheistic spirituality flow logically from the utopian rejection of middle-class norms. The things that Mayor Bloomberg found objectionable about the encampment in Zuccotti Park​—​that it “was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community”​—​are not accidental. They are baked into the utopian cake.

Over the course of the nineteenth century the quest for the ideal society took many directions that can be clustered in two broad categories. There were the Marxian attempts at “scientific socialism,” in which the proletarian vanguard sought to overthrow the bourgeoisie to bring about the classless society as ordained by the laws of history. And there was the revolutionary anarchist project of achieving utopia by leveling hierarchies and abolishing authorities.

The two overlapped on certain points. But for the most part the Marxists looked at the anarchists as boobs and the anarchists looked at the Marxists as totalitarians​—​which of course they were. Scientific socialism is more famous than revolutionary anarchism, if only because in the twentieth century it succeeded in taking over much of the world. The incalculable human cost of communism has obscured the destructive activities of the anarchists, but they were considerable.

Anarchism is often dismissed as merely the rationalization of hooligans. But that is a mistake. Anarchism has a theory and even a canon: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, and others. Anarchism’s purpose is to turn the whole world into one big Fourierist phalanx. “At every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to​—​rather than alleviate​—​material and cultural deficit,” writes Noam Chomsky in an introduction to Daniel Guérin’s classic, Anarchism. Dismantle “the system.” Then we’ll be free.

The anarchist sees no distinction between free enterprise and state socialism. He cannot be happy as long as anyone has more property or power than someone else. “Any consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system,” Chomsky writes, “as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.” What Chomsky is saying is that you can justly grow your own tomato, but you can never hire anyone else to pick it.

An anarchist does not distinguish between types of government. Democracy to him is just another form of control. Here is Chomsky again: “Democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a ‘vanguard’ party, or a state bureaucracy.” (Or bankers!) The ballot, wrote Guérin, is “a cunning swindle benefiting only the united barons of industry, trade, and property.”

This permanent rebellion leads to some predictable outcomes. By denying the legitimacy of democratic politics, the anarchists undermine their ability to affect people’s lives. No living wage movement for them. No debate over the Bush tax rates. Anarchists don’t believe in wages, and they certainly don’t believe in taxes. David Graeber, an anthropologist and a leading figure in Occupy Wall Street, puts it this way: “By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.” The reason that Occupy Wall Street has no agenda is that anarchism allows for no agenda. All the anarchist can do is set an example​—​or tear down the existing order through violence.

Just as hostility to property is inextricably linked to utopian socialism, violence is tightly bound to anarchism. “Anarchists reject states and all those systematic forms of inequality states make possible,” writes Graeber. “They do not seek to pressure the government to institute reforms. Neither do they seek to seize state power for themselves. Rather, they wish to destroy that power, using means that are​—​so far as possible​—​consistent with their ends, that embody them.” What seems aimless and chaotic is in fact purposeful. By means of “direct action”​—​marches, occupations, blockades, sit-ins​—​the anarchist “proceeds as if the state does not exist.” But one who behaves as if the government has no reality and the laws do not apply is an outlaw, not to say a criminal.

When you see occupiers clash with the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge, or masked teenagers destroying shop windows and lighting fires in downtown Oakland, you are seeing anarchism in action. Apologists for Occupy Wall Street may say that these “black bloc” tactics are deployed solely by fringe elements. But the apologists miss the point. The young men in black wearing keffiyehs and causing mayhem are simply following the logic of revolutionary anarchism to its violent conclusion. The fringe isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. The exception would be “direct action” that took care to respect the law.

The unstable nature of revolutionary anarchism has meant that movements based on these tactics quickly flame out. Consider the case of the International Working People’s Association, an anarchist group in 1880s Chicago. As Michael Kazin details in American Dreamers, his history of the U.S. left, the IWPA held an adversarial attitude toward government, markets, and elections. They didn’t run candidates for office. They blew things up. “Men and women could organize their affairs quite well, they believed, without the aid of any boss or master, even that of a workers’ state.” But rejecting democratic politics was a dead end. And violence was the natural consequence: In 1887, four IWPA leaders were executed for the murder of eight policemen in the Haymarket Square bombing. The organization collapsed soon after.

Attempts to establish a socialist utopia through revolutionary anarchism tend to be short-lived. The last great outbreak in America was in the late 1960s and early ’70s, with the urban riots, terrorism, and street actions of the New Left and the Weathermen. The tide turned with the rise of conservatism in American politics and the end of the Soviet empire. The utopian ideal seemed discredited. The teachings of Fourier and Chomsky seemed confined to the academy. Little did we realize that the stage was being set for a new anarchism​—​the variety that confronts us today.

David Graeber identifies January 1, 1994, as the birth of the antiglobalization movement. That was the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, and the Zapatistas launched their revolt in Chiapas, Mexico. The model for twenty-first century anarchism was established. “The Zapatistas,” Graeber writes, “with their rejection of the old-fashioned guerrilla strategy of seizing state control through armed struggle, with their call instead for the creation of autonomous, democratic, self-governing communities, in alliance with a global network of like-minded democratic revolutionaries, managed to crystallize, often in beautiful poetic language, all the strains of opposition that had been slowly coalescing in the years before.” In a “flat” world, where borders and national governments counted for less and less, the new anarchism would reject the idea of seizing state power by force. Anarchist forms of organization, Graeber wrote, “would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t.”

The engine powering the new anarchism was economic and political globalization. A worldwide movement devoted to undermining the institutions of “neoliberalism”​—​the IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU, NAFTA, G20, central banks​—​gathered force. Anarchists appeared at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999, at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 2000, at the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, and in bankrupt Argentina in 2001, at the World Economic Forum meeting in New York City in 2002, and at the Republican conventions in New York City in 2004 and St. Paul 2008. For a time during the George W. Bush years, the “global justice” movement was intertwined with the antiwar movement. But, as President Obama has said, “the tide of war is receding” (or so it seems). With the Great Recession and financial panic of 2008, with the onset of austerity policies and the crisis in sovereign debt, economics has returned to the foreground of political life.

Long-term joblessness, especially among the college-educated, and subpar economic growth not only created a pool from which the new anarchists drew recruits, but also made it harder to distinguish the radicals from their anguished fellow travelers. The technological advances that allowed information and capital to travel between continents at the speed of light also provided the means by which the anarchists could disrupt markets and governments. The black bloc tactics of riot and destruction had their Internet equivalent in the denial of service attacks on government and industry computer servers by the hackers collective Anonymous and the unauthorized release of classified information by WikiLeaks. As we saw in the urban riots in England last summer and elsewhere, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow people to mobilize quickly and stay one step ahead of the police. The new anarchism finds no contradiction between its critique of property and capitalism and its embrace of technology created by capitalist corporations. How can there be contradiction, after all, when there are no rules of order or logic in the first place?

Unsurprisingly, the call to occupy Zuccotti Park went out over Twitter, and the masked spokesmen of Anonymous publicized the movement on YouTube. An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation. Occupy Wall Street’s global encampments are exactly the sort of communities David Graeber had in mind when he wrote about the Zapatistas. The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities.

There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist “agendas” and “policies.” They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear​—​next year’s party conventions will no doubt be a flashpoint​—​and it is wrong to coddle, appropriate, or dismiss them. They must be confronted, not only by law but by ideas. The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on the earth.

Matthew Continetti is opinion editor of The Weekly Standard.

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

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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 statusfor 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
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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.

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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.

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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
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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.

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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.

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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!

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 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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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 Full-time commune resident

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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 Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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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.

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 We are Legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
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