As many readers know, particularly in the US, the Occupy (as in Occupy Wall Street) protests have been taking place over the past three weeks.

They have spread across the nation and are planned for other cities in the world this coming weekend, from Hong Kong to Paris to London.

At the weekend, I read the following on MSNBC’s World Blog, ‘Occupy Wall Street-style protests spread to Britain’ (emphases mine):

LONDON — A young woman spray-paints the final letter on a floral-patterned sheet. Unfurled it reads: “Occupy London, 15 Oct, occupylsx.org” …

Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests on the other side of the Atlantic, demonstrators plan to establish a tent city in London’s City financial district next weekend.

“The Wall Street protests sort of inspired everything,” said Kai Wargalla, who co-created the Occupy London Facebook group. “It was just time to start here. We need people to step up and speak out.”

This movement aims to unite the United Kingdom’s far-flung activist communities in addressing “the inequality of the financial system,” Wargalla said.

A ‘General Assembly’ — a meeting of the groups involved — took place on Sunday, October 9 at Westminster Bridge in London, near the Houses of Parliament.

Next Saturday, the group’s ‘occupation’ of the Stock Exchange in the City of London (financial district) will begin at noon:

On October 15th we will be Occupying the London Stock Exchange. At the same time thousands continue to occupy Wall Street and hundreds of cities from Paris and Madrid to Buenos Aires and Caracas are staging actions and occupations together for a global day of action …

By reclaiming space in the face of the economic systems that have caused terrible injustices across the world, we can open up and engage our communities into public discussions. These assemblies will allow people to voice their ideas for how we can work towards a better future and help us create concrete demands to be met. A future free from austerity within a context of growing inequality, unemployment, tax injustice and a political elite who ignores its citizens. So it’s time for citizens to represent themselves. To work together to resist the government’s plans and to do this in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of others around the world on the same day …

October 15th will be a global day of action calling for global change.

‘O-15: Unite for Global Change’ has been called by the ‘indignants’ movement in Spain, where thousands camped out in the squares for weeks, building massive popular pressure on the government. It inspired the current Wall Street occupation in New York, providing a space for the majority to resist the wishes of the greedy minority.

This makes the link to Spain, about which I wondered after the Madrid protests started earlier this year.

Yes, a lot of people — myself included — are hacked off.  However, are these the colours we should be fixing to our mast?

This is a list of organisations involved with Occupy Wall Street (OWS).  Have a good look at it.  Code Pink, CAIR  and US Uncut (no doubt related to UK Uncut) are there along with a variety of ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ groups.

Those organising a pecking order of speakers operate what they call a ‘progressive stack’: the mic goes to women and underprivileged.  Just a bit of reverse discrimination to redress the status quo:

… A normal “stack” means those who wish to speak get in line. A progressive stack encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups speak before men, especially white men. This is something that has been in place since the beginning, it is necessary, and it is important.

“Step up, step back” was a common phrase of the first week, encouraging white men to acknowledge the privilege they have lived in their entire lives and to step back from continually speaking. This progressive stack has been inspiring and mind-boggling in its effectiveness …

More here:

… I had heard the “Declaration of the Occupation” read at the General Assembly the night before but I didn’t realize that it was going to be finalized as THE declaration of the movement right then and there …

Which is how after the meeting ended we ended up finding the man who had written the document and telling him that he needed to take out the part about us all being “one race, the human race.” But its “scientifically true” he told us. He thought that maybe we were advocating for there being different races? No we needed to tell him about privilege and racism and oppression and how these things still existed, both in the world and someplace like Occupy Wall Street …

The following video features an organiser associated with the Working Family Party (see around the 2:20 mark):

The interview reinforces the involvement of the SEIU (purple shirt unionists, whose UK counterparts Unison were active in the March demonstration in London) and ACORN.  The video, as its description states:

How They All Tie To The Obama Administration, DNC, Democratic Socialists of America, Tides, and George Soros.

Indeed, Nancy Pelosi has endorsed OWS, which should tell us something:

And some blasts from the past are also involved, including Frances Fox Piven of the Cloward-Piven Strategy of the late 1960s.  Here she describes the varied nature of people who have participated in marches and demonstrations from the Civil Rights movement which started in the 1950s.  An interesting review of history from 1955 (around the 2:00 mark):

However, let us recall that Piven has been pushing for worldwide demonstrations since January 2011.

A number of readers no doubt wondered why I devoted my summer posts to Marxism and Communism. Having read the above, we can perhaps better understand what Bella Dodd detailed in her 1954 book, School of Darkness.

In chapter 9, she described how the Communist Party USA, of which she had been a member for many years, turned legitimate concerns to their advantage.  Here, she describes the work the Party did with regard to state schools in New York in the 1930s:

In a move to … bring people other than teachers into the fight, we organized a committee called “Friends of the Free Public Schools.” Under its aegis we collected funds, more than $150,000 the first year. We published attractive booklets which we sent to teacher organizations, to trade unions, to women’s clubs, to public officials …

We got free time on dozens of radio programs. We put on interesting programs over a radio station in New York. We organized “Save Our Schools” community clubs, made up of teachers, parents, trade unionists, students, and young people. We were a well-trained army and by our well-organized action we gave people a feeling that in the long run we would win.

In Chapter 14, she describes the Party’s activities in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War:

Late in 1945 word had come … that it was important that American women be organized into an international movement, ostensibly for peace. An international federation was to be established with Russian and French Party women as leaders. So during the next months I helped organize the United States branch. A combination of wealthy women and Party members established and maintained what was called the Congress of American Women.

Since it was supposedly a movement for peace, it attracted many women. But it was really only a renewed offensive to control American women, a matter of deep importance to the communist movement, for American women do 80 per cent of the family spending. In the upper brackets they own a preponderance of capital stock and bonds. They are important in the making of political decisions. Like youth and minority groups, they are regarded as a reserve force of the revolution because they are more easily moved by emotional appeals. So the Soviet campaign for peace was especially geared to gain support of the women.

And what about the very real plight of blacks in the American South? The Party also turned that to its advantage.  Dodd writes:

It was a theory not for the benefit of the Negroes but to spur strife, and to use the American Negro in the world communist propaganda campaign to win over the colored people of the world. Ultimately, the Communists proposed to use them as instruments in the revolution to come in the United States …

Now, relate this back to the rhetoric used upthread from the Occupy participants.

Notice that, even today, people who would like to lend a voice and a hand aren’t always sure of the objective.  This from one of my Obamacare posts citing an article in California Catholic Daily about a meeting among PICO — a Saul Alinsky offshoot — and Catholics in the Alliance for the Common Good:

In 2000, my parish signed up with the Bay Area Organizing Committee. They are an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, another Alinskyite umbrella organization. We held some meetings. Some other more active parishioners and I were invited. At the first meeting I asked the Bay Area Organizing Committee representative what we were going to try to accomplish. The answer was that we were going to join together for common action. But for what aim? I asked…

I received no answer … because the technique of Alinskyite organizations is to avoid concrete issues whenever possible. Issues such as abortion or same sex-marriage are to be avoided because they are ‘divisive’, and divisiveness would inhibit the growth of the organization. For the Alinskyite organizer, as for any political organizer, growth equals power…

If this protest still speaks to you — and I fully realise that we are all affected by machinations by the elite and the high financiers — then, by all means, sign up.

However, if you can get past the emotion and rhetoric used here (e.g. oppression, solidarity, global change, injustice), you might just think differently.

In closing, let’s recall what a commenter at the Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF) wrote back in March:

panpies 27 March 2011 10:10PM: Only 1% of the working population earn more than £150,000. Yet even before the 50% rate came in they contributed 24% of all income tax revenues (source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8417205.stm), while owning 21% of the wealth (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom) …

Government spending in the UK is £700 billion. About 50% of that is raised through income tax and NI. That’s equivalent to £12,000 for every working person in the country. In other words, if you are earning less than £45,000 per year, you are being subsidised by someone else …

If nobody in the country earned over £50,000 (and there are always a lot of posts on CiF suggesting that no-one needs to earn any more), tax rates would have to soar if government spending as to be maintained …

So to all those who say good riddance to bankers…remember that if they do go, you’ll be paying for it for the rest of your lives …

Indeed.

A final word from Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet expert in propaganda who later defected to the US:

Actually, there are no grassroots revolutions, period. Any revolution is a byproduct of a highly organized group of conscientious and professional organizers but there’s nothing to do with grassroots.