Can you tell me how many people were with them? How many hundreds WERE around the people breaking windows? You seem to be assuming that the protest was happening all around them.

And, if this is where Capitalism got us, they’ve reason to be angry.

But hell, at least they represent something . 

And how does my employer, besides fueling some paranoid fantasy, have any bearing on my comments?

Find me one piece of evidence that this was encouraged by the Occupy movement.

Also, please answer my question.

“A group of protesters heading toward Oakland’s Lake Merritt Wednesday vandalized a Whole Foods store at 230 Bay Place, off of Grand AvenueWindows were smashed, objects were tossed at the store and the word “strike” was painted in large letters across the store’s front windows shortly before 3 p.m.”

Hours after the original gathering, protesters broke out some of the bank’s windows.The branch had graffiti scrawled on its wall. The messages read, “The 1 percent won’t back down” and “Who’s robbing who?”

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/11/02/oakland-general-strike-begins-with-peaceful-rally-closed-streets/

Also, citations needed.

Breaking and street furniture smashing at whole foods.
Graffiti on the walls of businesses.
Chase Bank vandalized.
East Bay Express reports that approximately 75 shoppers were barricaded inside the Whole Foods as protesters threw rocks and smashed the windows.Wells Fargo windows have also been reportedly smashed.

re: “Wish I had some examples to show you.”

If you find it – send it along. Here are a few very heavy handed posters from 2004 in London to get people to pay their TV tax.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63283251@N04/6307923184/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63283251@N04/6307923196/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63283251@N04/6307923212/  <– my favorite

Well – of course people can take it upon themselves to do something. But being an asshole isn’t illegal. But there is no way to consistently and righteously carry out justice for bad ju-ju. Case in point: Steve Jobs – wunderkind friend of humanity, or asshole 1%er? For every one idolizing him, you would have someone demonizing him.

re: “My first thought here is that this business has a problem or two.”

Yes – it was mismanaged by the young short-sighted owner. But there are other people who just have a bad month or have something happen that can result in the same thing. I had a good friend close up shop from him getting stung by $10,000 worth of fraudulent credit card purchases.

re: “Boy wouldn’t they have a fun day trying to figure out how to run a cash register”

I get what you’re saying, but FYI most of the managers at wal-mart start out as hourly workers running registers etc. They have a pretty decent program to promote within at the store level.

Socialist art – especially poster art – has a fairly recognizable look to it.  I just don’t think the WPA works had much in common with them. 

Well, I’d have to disagree.  The WPA itself came under a fair amount of criticism from the Right for being rife with leftists.  A lot of artists who benefited from the WPA Federal Art Project (including the Federal Theatre) were either actual “card-carrying Communists” like Diego Rivera, or were suspected and accused of being same.  It would be a stretch to claim that WPA posters looked like socialist posters because they were both painted by socialists, but I see several common styles and themes in both.  Take away the emphasis on the color red, and you saw echoes of this bold design in American World War II propaganda posters.  

After 9/11, when the movie studios started adopting stricter security protocols (thinking that somehow they’d be irresistibly tempting targets for al Qaeda, which was kinda cute even then), the Warner Bros studio started putting up posters with similar artwork and typography, reminding employees and vendors that it was their patriotic duty to always display their ID badge, and that we all had to pitch in and be patriotically patient with the long lines at studio security checkpoints.  Wish I had some examples to show you.  They were hilariously authoritarian.

Socialist art – especially poster art – has a fairly recognizable look to it.  I just don’t think the WPA works had much in common with them. Some of them did with their use of bold lines, simple contrasting colors, and an iconic look.  In general I think the they have way more dissimilarities than they have things in common. Thus my confusion as to the comparison and my assumption there must be some snarky undertone.

re: “But I’m sure the poster designers of Occupy Oakland will …rush right out and change things…”

Well – maybe they should. I understand that such a style plays well in SF. But the movement is greater than the sum of it’s parts. “Damage” caused in one part of the country can be used to discredit it in another. So while I don’t think it is over the top, making something for a broader audience may behoove them. Even if they keep the image exactly the same, they really miss out on a chance to educate and inform people. What – no twitter account to follow? Mailing list to join? A facebook page with scheduled events? Ok – general strike Nov 2 – what am I supposed to do now, call in sick? Wear a button? Come in but never fill up their coffee cups more than half way? etc.

However if you can strike think about this…, just imagine that nobody showed up for work at the local mal-wart except the managers. Boy wouldn’t they have a fun day trying to figure out how to run a cash register or find where the damn milk is or even greeting a customer without giving away that they think of them as a walking cash-cow (emphasis on cow). This also works for the small-business jerk. Seriously, jerks need a good smack every once in a while.

“I have worked for a company where the last one to put their check in would have it bounce.” Okay. My first thought here is that this business has a problem or two. One could be that there are too many people on payroll. Another might be that somebody or a few somebodies are being paid too much(and the first person I would look to in this case is the manager/owner. Did he/she get their pay day? If so, then that person is a jerk). Yet another might be business feasibility. Sales in a slump? Have been for a while? What is being done about that? The product sucks. So how can that be fixed? Just getting started? Well, hunker down and work through it. Been at this a while and never have turned a profit/broke-even? Find a new gig or do something new/different. The funny thing here is that all these little consultant questions are also highly appropriate to the OWS list of complaints. It’s management’s fault that they are being grossly overpaid, the product sucks and sales are down and they, the smart powerful bosses, do nothing to fix the problem. So, if they don’t want to do anything that only leaves the workers. And I’ll bet good money that the workers can do their job and the bosses job at the same time and do it better. Sorry for the longish possibly non-applicable parts of this response.

One last thing. You said “…but there is no way to carry out justice for bad karma.” I don’t think you really mean that there is NO WAY to carry out justice but in any case; what would you propose be done? Or if you do think there is no way to do this then, well, yeah…

The internet, and so much that is on it, is an example of something whose growth owes partly to capitalism and partly to more organic forces.  The whole brouhaha over intellectual property, file sharing, DRM etc. is capitalism running headfirst into those forces.

Capitalism is not a good way to deal with other kinds of technology either.  Biotechnology has such awesome potential but it’s used for garbage like Roundup Ready because that’s where Monsanto saw the money.  Pharmacuetical companies aren’t in the business of healing and curing, but of selling drugs.  Insurance companies aren’t in the business of safeguarding people’s health and finances, but squeezing money from them while giving up as little as possible.  Banks aren’t in the business of storing money for people and putting money to work with investments that grow the economy, but with getting money for nothing from the government.  Energy companies, industry and pretty much all business is not motivated to protect the environment or worker health except when forced to.

I’m not recommending an alternative to capitalism either, because I haven’t thought of one.  But I believe we can take back democracy out from under capitalism, and subject money to people instead of the other way around.  Regulation is key… and business will never be regulated properly so long as lobbyists essentially run everything.  

None of us voted for Goldman Sachs or Monsanto or Blackwater or Enron or Halliburton or Koch Industries.  Why are they ruling?

In my case, been there, done that, much prefer the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism to standing in line with a little cardboard chit that tells me what my allowance of meat/milk/toilet paper is for the month. There is a way to get the best of both worlds, I’m sure, but pardon me for being cautious- it was too often the shelves at the other end of the line were completely empty.

Although reading the comments makes me think perhaps this is all fine- I’m just not the target audience, and have an entirely different perception of socialism vs capitalism in my mind than the target audience does. What looks to me like a much too direct reference to the bad kind of socialism I remember may be, to the average American in the 99%, only an artistic nod towards the vague ideal of any revolution.

So, please take my comments out of the equasion, including the one where I say that I don’t understand the need to refer to soviet art so heavily during this movement at all. 

It seems to cynical ol’ me that America’s social contract was broken not when the income gap first began growing embarrassingly wide over thirty years ago, but when we started to realize that maybe we couldn’t actually afford a new iPhone this summer.  This fall has been a long time coming, and during that time of growing inequality some people grumbled, but most people did not.  We have, in fact, been a largely comfortable and relatively spoiled middle class.  We didn’t get protest on this level until this year, because until this year the 1% deigned to allow us just enough stuff for us to be confident in our status as The World’s Best Possible Society.  Until pretty recently, most of us could afford to buy a house on fewer than three incomes, and those of us to whom the news media paid any attention whatsoever could still get an education and have some reasonable hope of finding decent employment.   We had cheap gasoline for a few decades, and cheap food, and iPods and American Idol and Nike shoes and the NFL and plenty of red meat, and who could have asked for anything more?  The plutocrats had too much, we’d mutter to ourselves, but at least they didn’t seem to be taking it all.  And when that changed after the bank bailouts, the muttering became grumbling, and then grew into bitching, and now it’s perfectly-justified yelling.

But if the plutocrats have any sense of self-preservation at all, they’re not going to cede power and permit a wholesale upending of the capitalist social order.  All they need do in the vaguest sense is return the middle class’ prosperity levels to something approaching where they were ten years ago (hell, even six years ago), and I fear all this discomfort would evaporate for them.  Personally, I’d much prefer a genuine top-to-bottom overhaul of the social contract just as many of the OWS kids do, but I think it’ll require a lengthy and violent revolution to take place, and frankly America doesn’t have the stomach for it.  The plutocrats can continue to hoard the vast majority of the nation’s wealth and influence as long as the middle and lower classes are kept even slightly more comfortable than they are right now.

Dear God, I hope I’m wrong, but I greatly fear I am not.

Note that I didn’t say “Soviet themes” or “Soviet motifs”.  I was talking about the style, which was widely used in many places and for many purposes – other themes, other motifs – that had nothing to do with Soviets, or communism, or any single ideology.

(And as Antinous notes, the Bay Area – the intended audience for these – isn’t exactly a hotbed of anti-commie hysteria.)

But I’m sure the poster designers of Occupy Oakland will be deeply concerned about the undefinable ‘vibe’ you experience, and will rush right out and change things so you that won’t feel quite so… ummm… vibey.

A general strike to inconvenience one percent is like setting oneself on fire to scorch the fleas…

And yet, they’ve been a successful tool for change for centuries.

But don’t ignore the sentence before that, it has more in common with the motif and theme of Soviet posters than it does with WPA posters.

I was just in a conference call with a vendor who is staying in an Oakland hotel.  The company they are currently working with made them switch hotels.  The local Oakland company said something about a police crackdown to end the rioting was coming and wanted the vedor staff to be safe.

Well, never mind, then.  Carry on.

Well, I would disagree. Yes there are asshole small business owners (there are also nice/cool 1%ers) – but there is no way to carry out justice for bad karma.

If a small business is struggling, one lost day could mean not making payroll that week. I have worked for a company where the last one to put their check in would have it bounce. McDonalds would take a hit – but one they could totally absorb and over come. A small restaurant may not be able to.  This is similar to the whole silly, “Don’t buy gas for a day!.”  It would do NOTHING. People need gas, they would just fill up the day before or the day after. Also consider there is a huge number of unemployed. If you are easily replaced, you just might be.

As an anecdote of sorts, I have in the past worked for ‘small businesses’ and it’s about a fifty-fifty proposition whether the proprietor is a decent person or not. I’ve worked for over-bearing, angry, republitards that were all bluster and no bite and I’ve worked for hard-working, intelligent mentor-type business owners that really do treat their people right. The former are in my mind just as bad as the 1% because not only are they asses but they are unrealistic and ignorant asses to boot. The latter are people that the world needs a whole lot more of. At the end though, I think most people that would go in for a general strike must be aware of what is best for them firstly, and secondly able to judge whether or not their presence at work would be positive or negative for the movement in general.

And as a last point. I suppose there are people in the US today that would have trouble understanding the in-general concept of  a ‘general strike’. The designers here certainly missed a good chance to educate lots of people about something that they should all know about and maybe even consider doing every once in a while. You know just to let all the stuffed-shirt swaggering peacock 1% douches know who hauls their trash, delivers their stuff, who stocks their groceries, who prepare their meals, who cleans up their shit, and who it is that does nearly everything for them. Which also needs appended to it this quote, “…do not fuck with us!”