Re: <nettime> Karl Rove: Occupy Wall Street protesters are just plain kooky (WSJ Op-ed)

[Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com>]

Of course, Rove is disingenuous. The tea party was specially created and financed to heal the split in the Republican party between it's right and far right wings. No party of their own, just recommendations of which Republican candidates to vote for in meaningless or near meaningless primaries in order to close ranks around the victor. They haven't yet called for the boycott of elections. I have to say that so far it has worked brilliantly and with the far right cash flowing in and their taste for power whetted, they aren't likely to go for 3rd party candidates any time soon. 

On the other hand, the OWS as far as I can tell from only a couple of visits was at some point a typical relatively quickly planned but intelligently symbolic and strategically done occupation to register the protest stated: the increasingly disproportionate distribution of wealth in the US and world. Marxian predictions of this nature in the abundance of the post-war period supported by social spending not surprisingly halted this process. With the withdrawal of social support structures and the favoring of unrestricted financial manipulations in a fashion directly parallel to the pre-1929 crash, the dialectical forces of the economy have swung back to something congruent with classical Marxism.

There are no Koch Bros on the left in the US, though there might be some Mensheviks with a conscience. There is evidence of the late 1990s piggybacking of the RCP at work though. They have gone from a more Maoist strategy to one more nearly akin to Bakunin's strategy of becoming "the secret pilots at the center of the storm." What remains to be seen is how soon they will come out of the closet, like Facebook when it began to accept advertising though data-mining may have been there from the beginning. 

OWS is not a pony for someone to ride. Who knows, maybe it will change the RCP or Democratic Party before either can recuperate it.

To paraphrase Debord: OWC is not a product of theory, and I wd add, nor of ideology but of shared lived experience. 

An army of unemployed college graduates and displaced workers from all sectors of the economy--the well-known North African mixture--will find their way to power by other means than those "provided" for them so far.

Right now unemployment benefits are all that stand between protests and uprisings. And for growing numbers they are already gone.

Keith Sanborn


On Oct 15, 2011, at 10:30 AM, "Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:

> 
> 
> Now you're all back from your local 'occupy' demo (I was at the
> Amsterdam one, which was fun. My favorite placard, featuring the
> famous Muppet Show character, read: "99% of all cookies are eaten by
> 1% of the monsters!"), you might want some comic relief, graciously
> provided by Karl Rove, Buba's infamous front & henchman.
 <...>


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