But I think it is better that people do not focus on what we want. Chaos,  confusion, and the pure assertion of power through our rights of speech and assembly are enough for now.

We are unstoppable because they don’t know what we want. We don’t know what we want. It does not matter.

We assemble, we petition, and sometimes we fight. The mere fact that ordinary Americans would stand and fight in accord with their Constitutional rights is itself the message.

Occupy is not about goals and demands, it is about the pure assertion of the power of the people.

Sans subtlety: The small business owners, while more or less in the same boat, still have it a little bit to a lot better than people out there that don’t own a damn thing let alone a small business. Now I’m not saying we need to take their shit to make our omelet (they should be happy to lend us a hand in making it any way) but most of these ‘small business owners’ will be fine for now and will likely continue to be fine. Sure there will be a few that don’t do so well but then again any sort of business endeavour has failure written in as an option from day one. And if you can’t handle a little hiccup every now and then maybe running a business just isn’t your thing anyway. And at the end of the line, when the govt, economy and all the other bits and bobs that go into making this world work are aligned more towards the benefit of people (not profit) then everybody will be more secure, happy and motivated. Which in turn will make everybody even more happy, secure and motivated. That’s how the system is supposed to work. It doesn’t now. And in order to fix it we will need to crack a few eggs.

OK. Those reasons are mostly idiotic.

Which reasons and why?  Or did you even bother to actually read the linked content?

What’s the point of your rhetoric?  Why are you here?  Your message seems muddled.

We are trying to liberate the government.
This will occasionally require the application of some “Tough Love”. 

When Rosa Parks refused to get up, there were probably some hard working, honest, poor people that were late to their second jobs.  And some of them probably thought, “Right the fuck on,” when they saw her do it.

If you want to protest someone undercutting the port workers, protest against the port that opened near Vancouver (Prince Rupert) and some of the port facilities being developed in Mexico.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IO6QU16l4kw#%21

I don’t know the extent to which this is true in other chapters but I was hearing that there were splits between ILWU members and their leaders over not taking Longview’s stance. I know Occupy Boston has no plans to do any port shutdowns without being invited by labour.

Oh yeah, it’s because port workers have demonstrated the capacity to bring commerce to a standstill by shutting down the ports!  Workers get decent wages when they have a strong negotiating position.  A strong negotiating position derives from being able to make a threat that is both serious and credible.  “We will shut down your ports, causing disruption to your supply chain” is a serious threat.  Actions like just happened make it a credible threat.

If you inconsiderate Occupiers have their way, they’ll all be out of a job!  Oh, and need I remind you that my friends are part of the 99%?  And that they have families to feed?  With lots of cute little children and puppies, all of whom have cancer and are orphans?  Didn’t think of that, did you?  To busy fighting for economic justice and democracy to think about some cherry-picked examples, eh?

Lower class people are held hostage by the economic elite.  “If anything happens to us” they threaten, “All these poor people are gonna suffer!”.  They are like terrorists, using our fear of what might happen to one of us to keep us all obedient to their demands.  But as any red-blooded American knows, that’s no way to deal with terrorists.  You don’t shrug and grant their demands, you don’t negotiate with them and hope for mercy.  That just makes them stronger, emboldens them for their next plot.  You destroy them, or at least their capacity to threaten anybody ever again.  And economic terrorists are less scary, because they don’t kill the hostages, they just rob them.  So even if some people get robbed, we can still take care of them and make sure they’re ok.  Especially if we win.

* not really, but you get the idea

LOL – if it won’t do much to a shipping company, how is it going to do much to Goldman Sachs??????

Blocking a port doesn’t make sense. It sorta screws the people running the port, but it really screws the people down the line waiting for the materials and goods they are importing (or exporting). The small to medium sized businesses rely on said goods to either sell or materials to make new items.  Disrupting the distribution chain too much is going to lead to repercussions felt by those small businesses and their employees.

I’m a regular listerner to KPFA here in san francsico which has very good protest movement and union contacts and spends a lot of time covering the various protest movements and I heard half a dozen fairly tenuous explanations for why the protestors were shutting down ports.

Solidarity with longshoremen (who seem very tepid toward this action, though it won’t hit them economically much as the same amount of cargo will still eventually be transferred).
Solidarity with the truckers (who seem more supportive).
Punishing goldman sachs through some oakland port company the own (a 1-2 day shutdown won’t do much to the shipping company).
Punishing job off-shorers (ok if you made just in time shipping less reliable over the long term or shut it down for a week… maybe).

I think there were a couple more too.

Oakland trying to hit the shipping company owned partly by goldman sachs makes some sense, but san francisco with big banks and hedge fund offices is just a BART ride away.  Why not surround those if you want to irritate “wall street”?  Or just go wander around in a neighborhood of $5 million dollar houses (berkley hills, various SF neighborhoods)?

Here’s a taste :

“Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.

There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.

The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.”

So there’s more to it than the occupiers screwing with blue-collar livelihoods and interfering with commerce.

http://westcoastportshutdown.org/content/wall-street-waterfront
http://westcoastportshutdown.org/content/why-shut-down-west-coast-ports

I don’t see a clear cause>effect relationship between shutting down ports and holding plutocrats accountable for hijacking government and wrecking the economy. Neither will most people who hear of this action, particularly headline skimmers, regardless of whether there’s some hidden link there that I’m missing. I don’t think that there is, and this action will do more damage to the movement than any external force has been able to so far. Such is my prediction.

Like a lot of OWS supporters, I’m overeducated and unemployed through no fault of my own, and my future feels more precarious than it ever has. I’m as angry as anyone. But this action leaves a bad taste in my mouth.