Salt City Sinner

Posted on 5/1/2012 by the Salt City Sinner It was a glorious spring day in Salt City today.So why not get some exercise in the form of a protest march celebrating May Day ? Our goal was to meet at the City County Building and march to the capitol. The crowd started to gather at the City County building at 3:00 PM, MST. The big news on the street was that the Black Bloc would be in attendance ( my views on the Bloc are mixed at best). Were there Black Bloc comrades* at today's march? Yes, there were: The real  story here is that we had an ally far more lovable (but I would argue less flexible) than the Bloc on our side. Gumby. My favorite sign by far: And we marched! At one point the protesters were too many to stay on the sidewalk and spilled into the street, effectively stopping traffic. The cops (who were already on scene) blared their sirens and ominously intoned "STAY OFF THE STREET" through bullhorns. The response? Protes...

posted on 5/1/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Walking the young master this morning, I was struck by how beautiful this spring has been. Plenty of rain, mild temperatures, and so forth. I was also struck by the dual (but inseparable) nature of May Day, the first of May by the post-Julian calendar. Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and Orrin Hatch was running for his first Senate term, May Day was a complicated springtime celebration of fertility and rebirth , and for good reason. Check out the awesome new growth surrounding a tree stump I encountered on the aforementioned excursion with my little dog: On the other hand, May Day has also been celebrated as  International Worker's Day since the 19th century, in part in memory of the Haymarket Massacre . On May the fourth, 1886, a dynamite bombing (long the traditional caliber of anarchist radicals) was followed by a full-on, "open fire" retaliation by the police. The Haymarket Affair led to one ...

The #Occupy movement is still going strong both nationally and internationally. The protests have now lasted much, much longer than I assumed they would, and weird wrinkles have begun to emerge in the usually sadly predictable fabric of protester-police relations. For example: in Albany, city police and New York State Troopers refused to comply with Governor Cuomo's request for mass arrests: In a tense battle of wills, state troopers and Albany police held off making arrests of dozens of protesters near the Capitol over the weekend even as Albany's mayor, under pressure from Governor Andrew Cuomo's administration, had urged his police chief to enforce a city curfew.  Since New York has proven itself the #Occupy innovator so far, I can only express my fondest hopes that this development spreads nationwide. Meanwhile, in a less heartening developmen t, #OccupyMaine in Portland was attacked by wingnuts with a chemical weapon : Portland police Sgt. Glen McGary sa...

If you ever wonder if the business and finance community might view reality in a way that is subtly... different from you and I, do something fun and Google "general strike definition," then look at the top two results that come up. The first is Google's no-nonsense definition: "A strike of workers in all or most industries." Result number two, on the other hand, is the definition from BusinessDictionary.com, which reads "Widespread withdrawal of labor from most or all industries, aimed at exacting concessions by paralyzing the economy of a country or region." My stars, look at those word choices. A "withdrawal of labor" sounds like a problem with a belt fan, not a decision by human beings to put their personal welfare at risk (by giving up their income) to better the welfare of their fellow workers. And look how terrible and vindictive those fellow workers are! They EXACT things - CONCESSIONS, even! - by PARALYZING the economy. ...

It's Labor Day! From the "Doomed to Repeat It" desk, we have this bulletin. California, 1911 : In 1912, [Joe] Hill apparently was active in a "Free Speech" coalition of Wobblies, socialists, single taxers, suffragists and AFL members in San Diego that protested a police decision to close the downtown area to street meetings. He also put in an appearance at a railroad construction crew strike in British Columbia, writing several songs before returning to San Pedro, where he lent musical support to a strike of Italian dockworkers. California, one hundred years later : A protest of recent fatal shootings by BART police had been planned for Thursday, but failed to materialize when BART officials — hoping to prevent protesters from communicating about police locations — shut down cellphone service in stations for about three hours. That action has been criticized by politicians and free-speech advocates. Joe Hill was executed by firing squad right here in Utah. His f...

Happy May Day everyone