I caught this item on Buzzfeed last week, about the near-total silence from the antiwar “movement” about President Sparkle Pony’s desire to intervene militarily in Syria. Almost all the quotes from organizers and activists are full of weak rationalizing about fundraising and contorted tap-dancing around the fact that most of the people who filled the streets in the early ’00s were just pissed-off Democrats who promptly put away their signs and banners and went home when the ’08 Presidential freak circus kicked off, leaving those of us who really cared about ending militarism — no matter which wing of the Party was doing the bombing, murdering and torturing — high and dry.

The most gobsmacking quote in the whole article — the quote which inspired this cartoon — comes from our old pal, Code Pink founder Medea “Media” Benjamin:

“Those of us still working on this have been mobilizing. The online protests are proliferating. There’s petitions to Obama, there’s calls for Congress to get involved — so many groups from Code Pink to Win Without War to Just Foreign Policy — all have put out calls saying no war in Syria.”

Dear god, what a great, steamy slab of thumbsucking. This makes me want to just bang my head on the desk. Medea Benjamin thinks we’re going to have an effect on policy by “protesting” on the Internet, sending petitions (which will be promptly ignored) to President Sparkle Pony, and beseeching a bunch of greedy-assed sociopathic politicians to act against their own interests. You’d think Medea Benjamin, of all people, would understand that real movements are built — and real change brought about — by real, live, honest-to-god, in-person “street heat”, not by sitting on one’s pasty ass in front of a computer, signing useless Internet petitions, bitching on Farcebook, and remaining essentially invisible to the public and the media.

Christ, I need a drink… or perhaps several drinks. Actually, on second thought — screw the drinks, just give me some friggin’ heroin.

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Well, folks, it looks like MoveOn and the Democratic Party are at it again. These two have had a long and dirty history of co-opting, subverting and destroying popular democratic movements in this country, and their latest campaign to infiltrate the Occupy Movement, “The 99% Spring”, continues in that sordid traditon.

Here’s Charles M. Young, writing in Counterpunch last week:

…The meeting was a few blocks from where I live. The spam said it was “inspired by Occupy Wall Street.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was vaguely hoping that whatever The 99% Spring was, it would start a chapter of Occupy Wall Street on the Upper West Side, conveniently near my abode, and agitate for the Democrats and MoveOn to move left.

The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling…

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So, a couple of weeks into the Wall Street occupation, I read that Michael Moore and Roseanne Barr had stopped by, and immediately I thought oh, great, here come the goddamn’ celebrities to glom onto the movement. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a little while after that, I read where MoveOn and the Working Families Party had both glommed on at the same time, and my first thought was holy shit, here comes real trouble!

For those of you who’ve been living in a cave for the past decade or so, MoveOn is the liberal astroturf outfit formed in 1999 to shill for Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial for personal malfeasance, under the banal slogan “Censure, And Move On”. Since then, they’ve been responsible for the co-opting, bloodsucking and destruction of more popular peoples’ movements in this country than you can shake a stick at — such as the antiglobalization movement and the peace movement, just to name a couple. Now these vampires have set their sights on the “Occupy” Movement, no doubt claiming all up and down that they’re there to “support” them.

Luckily, most of the folks in the movement are hip to MoveOn’s bullshit, as we can see in the vast majority of comments in this discussion on Facebook:

The other evening, I stuck my head into the bedroom — where my wife was camped in front of the TV, as usual — for a moment, just in time to hear Chris Matthews (aka The Baby Eater) asking if the Occupy Movement could be “harnessed” to help Obama win re-election? Luckily, I hadn’t eaten yet, or else I’d have been projectile vomiting all over the carpet. Seriously, these TV howlers just kill my ass dead. I swear, they couldn’t find a clue with a goddamn’ map. Sometimes I think the news networks could just bring in an ape and let it howl and fling its own shit around the studio for an hour, and it would still be better-informed commentary than that of Baby Eater Matthews.

The Occupy Movement isn’t here to be “harnessed”, it’s here to give a voice to the 99% of the people in this country who’ve lost their homes and jobs, who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and feed their families if they do have jobs, and pay most of the taxes while the 1% doesn’t contribute jack shit and gets away with thievery and murder. The Occupy Movement is about social and economic justice and freedom — not about helping to prop up the Democratic Party and re-elect Barack Fucking Obama.

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“We Tread On Thee”, more like.

In light of the recent incident at a Rand Paul appearance in Kentucky, in which a couple of his goons assaulted and stomped on the head of a woman counterdemonstrator from MoveOn, we thought it was time to update the design of the historic Gadsden Flag — a.k.a. “Don’t Tread On Me” flag.

Downloadable in three glorious revolutionary sizes:
Letter-size, high resolution, 600kb
Tabloid size, medium resolution, 468kb
34 x 22.527 inches, medium resolution, 1mb

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