Utterly fascinating read.
Patient Zero for OWS turns out to be a 69-year-old anarchist, Kalle Lasn along with his collaborator Micah White, and Phase II is about to begin.
Lasn and White quickly hammered out a post-Zuccotti plan. White would draft a new memorandum, suggesting that Phase I—signs, meetings, camps, marches—was now over. Phase II would involve a swarming strategy of “surprise attacks against business as usual,” with the potential to be “more intense and visceral, depending on how the Bloombergs of the world react.” White could hear the excitement in Lasn’s voice. Even as Lasn vented about the morning’s counterrevolution, he was doing what he could not to splash.
By the way, Lasn and White's magazine, Adbusters, promoted a boycott of The Huffington Post. Hmm.
Meanwhile, targeting President Obama is the wrong idea. If they're going to focus on lawmakers, their first priority ought to be congressional Republicans and K Street lobbyists who are blocking job creation and economic stimulus, and who are preventing a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, etc.
I'm not sure where, exactly, all of this will lead, but I'm very concerned that OWS is slipping off the rails. Worse, I'm concerned that there aren't any rails at all. If the movement doesn't plan to work within the system by pushing a legislative agenda and they simply want to disrupt the system from the outside with some kind of diffuse neo-anarchist attempt at revolution, they're going to lose. Spectacularly.
(via @ifnotwinter)