Occupy group ushers in May Day with disturbing image threatening violence against…Rebecca Black?

Why any American of goodwill, much less the political party currently occupying the White House, would want to support or be affiliated with the violent, anti-capitalist occupy movement in any way is beyond me. But this…now this has to be the last straw.

A global economic crisis has brought a new Great Depression to the doorsteps of working class families. While the corporations, government officials, and bureaucracies are experiencing record profits and compensation, those who are least able to pay are expected to shoulder the majority of the burden. This collapse is placed upon the backs of workers, and even more to the most oppressed in working class communities, for example: working class women, immigrants, blacks, and latinos. Despite the promises of a Democratic congress and presidency, deportations of undocumented immigrants have dramatically increased since Obama took office, tearing communities apart and criminalizing whole populations. If we don’t fight back, the crisis may drive a permanent decline in our standard of living, deepen the domination over the oppressed, and widen the gaps in American society.

But people are coming together and finding ways to support and struggle alongside each other in ways that haven’t been seen in generations. The potential of a mobilized, conscious, and active movement frightens those in power, and they are pouring money, resources, and repression into diverting potential movements. People all over the world are building new struggles: turning vacant foreclosures into homes, resisting tuition hikes and worsening education in universities, fighting cuts and injustice at work, resisting ICE deportations and challenging second class status for immigrants, launching fare strikes on transit against service cuts and fare hikes, and resisting racialized police brutality and violence against oppressed communities. Attempts to coopt these potential movements are coming out of the unions who fear changes in the comfortable relationships they have with management, from the NGOs who are funded by and keep their jobs through all those who profit off our suffering, and from the political machinery that wants to channel our anger into their careers.

Most of this rhetoric is right out of President Obama’s re-election playbook even if the anarchist group which published this resents the attempt by mainstream Democratic organizations to co-opt their movement. And they are. Organizations such as Rebuild the Dream, founded by former White House adviser Van Jones and supported by MoveOn, the SEIU, and seemingly every other major progressive organization which backed Obama in 2008. You know Van Jones says he doesn’t speak for the occupy movement, he is only “speaking up” for them in response to “right-wing attacks”.

Will he speak up for them now?

There is no caption or any direct explanation for the presence of this image on the site linked above (and I’ll update with a screen shot if they take it down). But it requires no explanation: it’s just sick. Using economic grievances as a pretense for rallying for the political overthrow of the United States is contemptible enough, but the individual(s) responsible for this are truly disturbed. Rebecca Black is 14 years old and has absolutely nothing to do with the occupy movement, the election, or any of this.

Just when I think no future display of violence or depravity from a member of the occupy movement would surprise me, they somehow manage to sink to a new low. Unbelievable.

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