The 99%: Should We Be Aligned with Killers and Bigots?

With the exception of a tendency toward reformism, I support the general idea of Occupy movements; that is, I don’t oppose it, but many potential participants would like to see a better, more cogent analysis of class from the movement. The analysis of the 99% of society vs 1% of the top owners and controllers of wealth and resources is a start, but it begins with a flaw: much, much more than the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the U.S. are a part of “the problem.” (Corporatism cannot be fixed by reforms, as capitalism itself is the problem, and is the perpetual crisis, but that is a subject for another post.) To begin with, if I remember correctly about 90% of the wealth in the U.S. belongs to about the top 5% of the population.

In addition to this issue, when you say “We Are the 99%” you are including the following groups and individuals. But, do we really want to be aligned with:

• Cops who have killed people? Done terrible things to people on a daily basis, because it’s part of State policing? Police departments are composed of people who have systematically assaulted, intimidated, harassed, stolen from, framed, sexually assaulted and committed any other number of degrading, traumatic and immoral things to us. They’ve squashed our freedom of speech, preyed upon people of color and poor people, and protected each other against accountability for their actions. According to the Occupy analysis, they are the 99% and therefore “one of us.”
• White supremacists? White nationalists, racist civil-libertarians, members of the Ku Klux Klan, racists who are not part of a group, Minutemen border patrollers and other nativists, citizen groups that seek to oppress groups because of racist viewpoints, anti-immigrant groups, well-connected bloggers who call for violence against Muslims and other people they oppose. There are Holocaust deniers and historical revisionists like Mark Weber and followers of David Irving. They are all part of this 99% category.
• Religious groups and their members which advance an agenda of oppression? Groups like the Family Research Council, Abiding Truth Ministries. There’s “gay conversion therapists,” the Heritage Foundation, the 700 Club, and plenty more anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and otherwise xenophobic religious groups, members and followers falling into the 99%.
• Individuals who promote hate? I doubt Glenn Beck falls into the top 1% of all wealth-owners in the U.S. There’s Tony Perkins, Bryan Fischer, Robert Spencer, Pam Geller, Mat Staver, Harry Jackson, Jerry Boykin. Are these our allies?

Here I have provided just a handful of examples of groups and individuals who Occupiers may want to reconsider being aligned with. There’s plenty more, and I’d like to hear your examples, as well as rebuttals and ideas about the 99% class analysis. Please leave your comment below.

Letter from an Abortion Clinic Escort: Pt 1- A Day in the Life of an Escort

Warning: contains strong language, sexual content and violent imagery. Real names are changed but nicknames remain the same.
A Day in the Life of an Abortion Clinic Escort
I am an abortion clinic escort. Two Saturdays a month, I walk with girls and women, as well as their companions of any gender, from their vehicles to the clinic entrance. I and my escort partner occupy the attention of the patients on the way to the door, which I often hold open for them in a more-than-symbolic gesture: I literally support your access to a safe abortion. For any reason. On demand. Should be free of charge. No apologies to the antis or anyone else.

The antis [anti-abortion protesters]? The antis are present and accounted for. They are men and women of varying ages, standing on the sidewalks, terrifying the holy fuck out of our patients.

A young girl in her car will see us coming to escort her and get a terrified look on her face. She thinks we’re with the protesters. We assure her that we’re not with them, we’re with the clinic, and we’re going to walk her inside. They always sigh with relief, but still look disoriented by the cries of the antis. We tell the girls and women the antis aren’t allowed on the property, but they are going to yell a lot of nasty stuff. She doesn’t have to talk to them. (Some do. It can be awesome when a patient just rips into those bastards. Fuck and yes.)

We keep talking to the girls and women as they walk inside, because we are trying to distract them from and drown out stuff like this:

Hijack This Anti-gay/Anti-trans OneMillionMoms Website Petition to Send a Pro-gay/Pro-trans Message to ABC Network

OneMillionMoms.com has a petition for the television network ABC which can be found at the bottom of this anti-transgendered article. It features an unattributed rant railing against the existence of Chaz Bono and gay people, due to Chaz and a gay man participating on the inane Dancing with the Stars. You can utilize this petition-system to send ABC a pro-gay, pro-trans message, thereby contributing to the irritation of anti-trans gasbags. I’ll show you how:

Anti-Abortion Lawyer “anything but competent” for “self-serving entreaties of attention-seekers”

Legislators in Texas, Dan Patrick and Sid Miller, recently filed a motion to appeal a ruling regarding their manipulative and senseless ultrasound-before-abortion legislature. Federal District Judge Sam Sparks has ruled against the motion, made by an unsavory anti-abortion sideshow lawyer in Texas named Allan Parker,  whose sloppy tactics did not go unrecognized by the Judge:

[T]he Court is forced to conclude Allan E. Parker, Jr., the attorney whose signature appears on this motion, is anything but competent. A competent attorney would not have filed this motion in the first place; if he did, he certainly would not have attached exhibits that are both highly prejudicial and legally irrelevant; and if he foolishly did both things, he surely would not be so unprofessional as to file such exhibits unsealed. A competent attorney who did those things would be deliberately disrespecting this Court and knowingly shirking his professional responsibilities, offenses for which he would be lucky to retain his bar card, much less an intact bank balance.
For Mr. Parker’s sake, and because the Court has no time to hold a sanctions hearing –- in part because it must take time out of deciding the actual legal issues in this case to address the self-serving entreaties of attention-seekers like Mr. Parker –- the Court assumes Mr. Parker is as incompetent as he appears. Rather than sanction him, the Court simply does what Mr. Parker would have done if he was a competent professional, and seals attachment 7 to his motion.

Anti-evolution and Intelligent Design lawyers also tend to strategize in the same way: they mistake spectacle for substance.

Flip Benham: “We will become like the God we worship.”

I recently stumbled across this post verbally masturbating about military Jesusness on Flip Benham’s regrettable organization Operation Save America’s website. It is ultimately creepy to read the decidedly telling quote that I used as the title for this post, even in context, so forget seeing Red State and go check for yourself (screw it, go see the movie.) Among the other gems in the post:

God bless our troops.  There is something about a Marine that makes other countries listen to reason.

Now, OSA–which opposes a woman’s right not to bleed to death from abortion by getting a safe, consensual one–is certainly no nexus of reason. But unless the quote is just tongue-in-cheek promotion of use of force and US exceptionalism (probably is), then I really can’t figure out where the hell they got the impression that the job of a US Marine is primarily one of diplomacy. My grandpa didn’t have dialogue with Nazis. He shot their asses out of the sky.