Seattle Occupy group drops $5,000 from hotel to protest money in politics
The Guardian: Occupy protesters in Seattle marked the Fourth of July by throwing $5,000 out of a hotel window in a protest against the influence of money in politics.
MicCheckWallStreet, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, staged the demonstration at 5pm. The group’s website declared that it is “time we declared independence from Citizens United” – citing the supreme court case which effectively ruled that corporations can make political contributions.
A video posted to YouTube shows two people tossing the cash – which MicCheckWallStreet said was in $1 and $5 bills – out of a window above downtown Seattle.
The group had signalled its intentions on its website, asking for donations to a wepay.com account. The wepay page shows that McCheckWallStreet exactly met its $5,000 goal, collected from just 37 donors.
“Every dollar you donate is guaranteed to be thrown off a building and is tax deductible, what more could you ask for?!,” said a statement on MicCheckWallStreet’s website. “Be a part of it, donate today!”
Stating that “money is the new tea”, the statement said that the event was “as much art installation as protest”, declaring that “it sends a powerful message”.
The video posted to YouTube does not show the impact at street level, although separate footage posted to UStream showed a small crowd gathered in an alley, where some of the money appeared to have fallen.
The Seattle Times reported that “wind blew some of the money onto a bar awning and into a nearby alley, sending people hunting for cash on windowsills and Dumpster lids”.
It is the second “money drop” protest staged by the group. On Valentine’s day activists unemployed parasites hurled $500 from the top of a building in Seattle.
What more could I ask for? How about you Occuturds put that money to some actual good use and give it to a food bank? Or was it your purpose to redistribute that money to the Occupy-types that don’t have a job?
DCG
Occuturds! Luv it.
Well, at least that money is actually going back into the local economy!
A serious question for you, Edward:
Why do you keep coming here? Isn’t there a liberal blog you can hang out at? Do you have grandiose fantasies of changing us?
Hi Eowyn,
Forgive the length, but a serious question deserves a serious answer, and it won’t be short…
At first it was a “know your enemy” kind of thing. It seemed like a chance to see what folks from the “other side” were thinking. I never wanted to piss people off, but it was like poking a hornets nest to see what would happen.
What it has become is more of a “know thyself” sort of thing.
The thing that made me want to stay, and continue to engage the regulars here, was that you weren’t cookie-cutter conservatives. You griped about those you saw as “RINOs” as much as you did the liberals.
That really made me stop and think. About myself. I’ve been surprised at how often I find posts I can agree with here. What does that MEAN? That you’re all 3-dimensional after all? Horrors! That I can’t just dismiss you all as caricatures of yourselves? YIKES!
Seriously, what if EVERYONE hung out at a blog that was centered on viewpoints opposed to their own? Eowyn, I would gladly backhand ANYONE who bad-mouthed Fogie’s patriotism, Sage’s faith, or your love of personal liberty. Why? Because I know you better now. You’re not just some nameless part of “the Right” that can be written off as “one of THEM.” You’ve put a human face on “them.” What if everyone here went to my favorite Liberal blog, and learned to hate the dismissive “All conservatives…” meme as much as I hate the “All Liberals…” labels? I’ve learned to dislike “All conservatives…” and “All Christians…” and have as little patience for it from my libby friends as I have for the “All Liberals” crap here.
That doesn’t mean I’m suddenly gonna agree with most conservative viewpoints, and I have no illusions about converting any of you to join the DNC. Having said that, there’s always room for dialog on most subjects. I have to rethink MY position every time I make a comment here. Many times I wind up not posting, because what I’ve written either doesn’t sound as convincing on paper, or comes off as too confrontational.
I used to be “conservative.” I voted for Reagan in my first election in 1980. One of the things I learned here was that I really WASN’T a conservative, just another homophobic, self-obsessed, RINO. I can’t, in all honesty, ever again say, “I know conservatives are evil because I used to BE one!.” One of my prime argument points shot to hell.
I am trying to build bridges here. No, that isn’t meant to sound grandiose, because after all, this is just one tiny corner of the ‘net, not a nationally syndicated TV show, and I’m just one person. Am I wrong, however, to think that we might all be able to work better together if we all understood the “other” side better? I get mad at my own friends who have stopped in here once, then pronounced judgement and wondered at my sanity when I defend you.
Which leads to the final part of this hog… Yes, I have LOTS of nice and friendly liberal blogs to hang out on. I get tons of “likes” on my posts there. BFD. What good does that do? Even before I came here, I knew that it was pointless to sit around saying “tsk, tsk, the world is going to hell in a handbasket” with my libby friends. We all piss and moan at each other about how the Right is taking over and America is going Fascist, and how it’s all George Bush’s fault, and our blood pressures go sky-high, as we all head toward self-martyrdom. BORING and useless at the same time. The one exception is the blog “Making Light” which is mostly Liberal, but has it’s own regular cadre of gadflies, and a fair number of people that are impossible to cubbyhole.
Shorter version: I take a lot of snark and a lot of verbal abuse here. I’ve been called a hypocrite, sick, a retard, scary and stupid. I’ve been sniped at, then refused the chance to defend myself. To balance that out, I learn a LOT here, about my “opponents” and myself. Enough to make the cost worth it. I also genuinely LIKE it when we can agree on some issues. I love it when we can engage each other, and I really love it when someone really takes the time to tell me what they believe.
Sorry this rambled on so much… i knew it would. It’s hard to put emotion on paper, and leads to a lot of misunderstandings, so I try to overcome that with sheer weight of words. Hoped that helped explain why I not only stay, but enjoy doing so.
~ed
Thanks, Edward, for answering my question.
I’ve never thought of myself (or other conservatives) as one-dimensional, nor do I stereotype the Left as one-dimensional. It is precisely their many attributes — about which I so vehemently disagree — which frighten me about the future of this country.
While I would like to think, as you do, that the gap is bridgeable, on some very important issues I truly believe it is unbridgeable. I’m actually late to that realization, as the Left have known that all along. See a post I wrote on a previous blog: http://giovanniworld.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/no-longer-one-nation-under-god/
Wow, thank you, Eowyn… What a precious thing it is to see into someone’s heart, and I appreciate that…
I really, really, REALLY hope it’s not as bleak as all that. Where I see some hope is right here, in the trenches, at the bottom of the pecking order. Our leaders, on both sides, have to take very extreme views. You don’t *become* a leader by being wishy-washy. Buchanan and Prager want to rally their base as much as Michael Moore and Rachel Maddow want to rally theirs, and NOTHING works as well as igniting fear of the monolithic, marching juggernaut of the “other.” Doom, gloom, and the hopelessness of working together are their bread and butter, and they want us to eat it.
I read your post from 9/11/09, and the B & P links as well. Gods, Eowyn, it almost made me cry! Such desolation of the spirit! I can’t send a concept, or a philosophy to jail for mental abuse, but I wish I could. Maybe the whole point of our talking together should be to combat just one iota of that. And it’s NOT you, and your personal philosophy that I’m indicting here, not at all… It is the *process* that got us here, mostly in our own lifetimes (especially the Clinton and Bush(43) years), and equally wrought from both camps. Do you really believe there are 150 million Americans spitting on the Founding Fathers and rejecting any value in the effort they went through to create this country? I can’t believe that. Do most of the Left see the Right as 150 million people who want to rewrite American history to meet some Christofascist-Rockwellian ideal that never was? I don’t believe that either.
The married couple Buchanan compares Americans to was a poor choice. A couple that has hurt each other that badly has more options than we the people do. They could get counseling, see a therapist, try a trial separation. They could be like my own In-Laws, who divorced, but realized that life apart sucked. After a year, they remarried and were happy until separated by his death.
You can’t send 300 million people to therapy, so maybe we have to put ourselves through, a few at a time. We have to, because NEITHER side is ever going to totally and permanently dominate the American powerscape. It hasn’t happened in 236 years, and it ISN’T going to happen.
And that’s the basic point. Only those willing to listen as well as talk will get to have a say in what comes next. This is nothing new, I’m just restating the obvious. Those who talk only to themselves will be shut out of the conversation and marginalized, on both the Left and the Right. You can choose to have only the say your single vote gets you, or you can join the larger conversation (again, by “you” I mean all of us!). In order to participate we ALL have to have our priorities, and a list of things we can compromise on, and the willingness to live and let live, because that’s how the real world works. When a Socialist and a Fundamentalist Christian both their breath until they turn blue, they wind up with identical headaches and nothing to show for it…
It can’t be too late. Every generation has said they same things we do, that it’s the worst it’s ever been, there’s no hope, and we’re on the brink of civil collapse or war. We survived a real civil war. We can survive this… Sorry I rambled on again, but it’s in lieu of the thousand words a simple touch might contain…