32BJ

I was on the way to Willow yesterday afternoon to spend some quality time and avoid packing for what I now have to do this morning. I stepped out of The Madison, where I talked briefly to my pal Mac and dropped off a book I borrowed from him.

When I emerged, I could hear the chanting and the bullhorn up the block, and took out my camera and ran to the sound.

It was a peaceful demonstration by 32BJ, which is the Brotherhood of Janitors, a component of the Service Employees International Union, which has been flexing its muscles lately. There were a couple dozen folks there, and the rally did not last long. The Arlington Cops looked on. I don’t know if they thought about organizing or not.

I don’t have any particular opinions about the janitors. I want dignity for everyone, but the SEIU has been particularly prominent in an alliance with ACORN and the American Family Party. It feels a little different than the Iron Workers, or the UAW. It feels political more than a union, but what do I know?

That was where things started to get all confused in the stream of demonstrations, The story yesterday- Deep Green- is one of the ones that started as one thing, went in a whole new direction and kinda lost the connective tissue. I got an inquiry from a pal in Detroit, who said: “I don’t get it. Vegans are OK. Who is the crazy woman and why the pie? You are not in favor of eating meat, are you?”

From Colorado came the admonition that I ought to slow down and make myself clear, and get the recipes in line with a sustainable philosophy.

Fine- I was processing too much stuff. I don’t want to do what I am going to do this weekend, and jammed some strands together.

One strand was about the Occupy Wall Street, and the thought I was trying to get out was that the Administration is at least tacitly supporting the effort, even though what is being protested is exactly what Clinton-Bush-Obama have cemented: private bank control of the Treasury and monetary policy- and bailouts.

Not a Republican or Democrat issue- they are both complicit and they are both guilty as sin, regardless of the periodic and feeble efforts to reform things and the valiant rhetoric by those who are continuing to milk the Wall Street cash machine.

The OWS crowd is comprised of True Believers, in my mind, and a bunch of kids like us who just like to be where it is happening. The True Believers who created the framework for the current protest in New York are the American Family Party, an offshoot of the ACORN organization and headed by a former VP of a SIEU local.

But like, so what? I am not opposed to janitors having some dignity, are you? It is just sort of mystifying about how well organized they are. Like the professionally-produced signs at the 32BJ demonstration yesterday afternoon.

The OWS movement is as big as it is because people are pissed, and there are (to remember some ancient terminology) plenty of fellow travelers to go on the journey, just as we went along with the Yippies and some of the wilder elements of the anti-war left back in the day.

The first guy convicted in any of these was sentenced to 13 years just today. We need some more people to do time for what they did, undermining the very basis of the market in which you trade for part of your livelihood.

Anyway, as you know, the OWS is all things to all people, one part of which is the Climate Change True Believers.

I am a bit of a skeptic- I do not think that there is consistent and unambiguous evidence of warming directly as a result of Man release of CO2. There has been a measurable increase of a degree or so over the last century- and I do not think the “science is settled” as Dr. Michael Mann and the Hockey Stick Graphic claims.

There is a pretty robust group of real scientists who feel the same way- but note, please, this does not mean I think everything is fine, and that something fairly dramatic doesn’t need to be done to protect the bio-mass of the world ocean, or that pollution is bad, or that green energy cannot be a valuable adjunct to more reliable conventional/nuclear technology that is getting better.

See, that is what I think is getting lost here- reason. And the ability to compromise and do some mildly unpleasant things in order to avoid some really bad ones.

The President’s people use a solar panel company owned (coincidently, I am sure) by Rep. Pelosi’s brother-in-law as an example of the shining future, just before it declares bankruptcy on a half billion in Federal loans. Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt.

The Right has been bitching about the EPA, but the Agency is not doing anything in issuing the blizzard of regulations that the President didn’t say he was going to do. If the Congress won’t pass his sweeping cap-and-trade legislation, he said he would do it by regulation, and that is precisely what happened.

Based on the staggering cost of implementation, those CO2 regulations have been deferred until after the election, or the economic turn-around.

Which is where I get around to Deep Green Resistance. It is worth going to their site; they put the darker moments of the Weather Underground into positive sunshine in comparison: I spent an hour yesterday morning rooting around there:  deepgreenresistance.org/

They honestly want to shut down commercial power generation; organized agriculture, finance and move back to subsistence farming. The fact that this would, if their asymmetric attacks on the infrastructure were successful, kill millions is irrelevant. It would “save the planet.”

The young lady who got pied (Lierre Keith) is one of their thought leads. She most recently wrote a scathing indictment of Vegans (she was one, of course, before becoming even more enlightened) and a proposal to destroy global agriculture.

Her book is “The Vegan Myth.” I read the first fourteen pages and believe she is rational but quite deranged.

Thus, she was hit by the pie by pro-Vegan forces.

What seems sort of a light-hearted prank was actually was an attack, if you believe what some of the activists are saying, that the cream pie was laced with cayenne pepper and was the equivalent of Macing her.

I can’t make this stuff up.

I have to drive. Maybe there will be more in the morning, or maybe the next installment will have to come from the Little Village By the Bay.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra,com