Walking Tour of San Francisco Protests: Political tourism in the Age of Obama
OK, now it’s back up to the street and on to our next stop. Put on your walking shoes, because we have a few blocks before we get to the…
2. SEIU Immigration Amnesty Protest — 1:00pm, San Francisco Federal Building, 90 Seventh Street
The SEIU — the Service Employees International Union — has in the last couple years risen from relative obscurity to become one of the most powerful political groups in the country. Much of that rise coincided with the rise of Barack Obama: The union pinned all their hopes on him, and pulled every imaginable trick (legal or not) to help him get elected. And it worked. Now their man is in the White House, and the SEIU is not about to let this opportunity pass.
For example, SEIU’s boss Andy Stern visited Obama in the White House at least 22 times just in the first seven months of the administration — and doubtlessly many more times since then. SEIU’s goals are the president’s goals.
And what are those goals? Well, one of them was the purpose of this rally: Complete amnesty and full rights for illegal immigrants — including voting rights. If they succeed in this drive, the electoral landscape would change suddenly and drastically, theoretically adding millions of voters to the SEIU voting bloc. And with that unstoppable momentum, SEIU would press for their other demands, leading to the unionization of America.
Nervous yet?
Even though the SEIU has a good friend in the White House and an Executive Branch bureaucracy actively working to promote their cause, the protesters chose to hold their rally directly outside the San Francisco Federal Building. Because of stringent security precautions in place due to a variety of terrorist threats and actions since 9/11, Homeland Security necessarily was on hand to monitor the situation. Luckily, this event was peaceful.
As we left the rally, I noticed something which may have contributed to the anger of the protesters. See the small plaque in the center of the picture? Scroll down….
The building’s indentifying plaque still names George Bush as President. No wonder the SEIU protesters were pissed off!
(Click the next page button below for the next stop on the tour.)
Oh, no, watch that video a little longer than two minutes so you can see the ‘reporter’s’ brain cells start exploding when he can’t figure out what a woman means by ‘I’m not a Christian. I go to synagogue.”
Wow, do these folks work? They seem to have an awful lot of time on their hands.
Having lived in the national version of San Francisco, France that is, I can answer this question. My response would be “As little as cosmically necessary.” The first time I ever set foot in France I was greeted by that most French of national hobbies, the transportation strike. Jet-lagged and seriously in need of a luke-warm shower, I had to drag my bags around a kilometre to my hostel because various transportation interests thought that not working was not serious enough, so they decided to block many of the main thoroughfares to ensure that taxis were also out of the question. While I can appreciate political activism, I was astonished that there were daily events protesting almost everything imaginable complete with striking and general chaos. Vive la stupidité.
The events that always amaze me the most revolve around social welfare policies. You’ve never seen a more motley crew than the long-term unemployed marching because they were going to get their holiday benefits cut. (That’s right. Many European countries offer holiday welfare to the professionally unemployed so that not drawing a salary doesn’t inhibit them from obtaining their “rights” to binge drink abroad on a foreign sofa a couple weeks a year.)
From what I’ve seen of Zombie’s blogs, SF’s protests resemble France’s in that they tend to include various factions with completely divergent and often unrelated issues that march together in a spirit of left-lunacy. I have been an avid follower of Zombie’s posts since I first stumbled on them, but it scares me how similar to France many of the events seemed. France cured me of my leftist tendencies completely. Many of these subjects, both those documented by Zombie and the ones I saw myself in France, prove that many of these people may have a terminal case of the stupids.
Jacob, I hate saying this but regarding ‘a terminal case of the stupids’, let’s not forget that many Conservative folks send their children to schools filled with Left-Wing-Nut-Jobs. HELLO? And we wonder in wide-eyed amazement over Jews being Democrats when we send our very children to them? HELLO?
We need to overhaul OURSELVES as conservatives.
What are we FOR? If we are for self-empowerment and less government then we need to show we can govern ourselves in our innermost daily lives in a capacity that should and COULD be an EXAMPLE to all and that means being healthy, non-obese, non-smoking, non-alcoholic, non-druggie, home-schooling, house-downsizing, healthy eating UPsizing and all around general ability to exercise personal restraint and shove it in the Leftist’s whack-job ‘everything goes no matter how sleazy’ faces.
Agreed. My personal philosophy with dealing with statists now can be summed up in one word: Greece. Although it hasn’t gotten much press in the American MSM on the right or the left, this should be our rallying cry when arguing for smaller government. A lot of coverage here in Germany has been extremely negative, since German taxpayers will be footing a substantial portion of the bailout money for a country that socialized itself into insolvency. A lot has been made about the constant cronyism in Greece, which is indeed part of the problem. But, as a warning to us, the country is regulated to the max, has an extremely hostile environment for private enterprise, and currently, 25% of the population works for the government. (Why wouldn’t they? They get far more money and benefits than people trying to navigate the tangles of Greek bureaucracy and work in the private sector.) As I have been telling my socialist German colleagues, this is what happens when the money runs out. Germans, who are largely social Democrats to the core, have suddenly found my arguments compelling faced with dishing out money hand over fist. Just call it the “angry ant” syndrome as government workers spread some of his harvest to the fiddling cricket justifying his play today attitude.
Just imagine this scene as the music starts to cue up. A Greek mercenary in full battle gear standing in front of the IMF shouting “THIS…IS…SPARTA! And we’re, like, totally broke man. Do you think you could front us a few billion or sum’n?”
I’m not really sure people understood the “crash the tea-party” idea at all. The idea was as brilliant as devious: to go to rallies and blend in with extremist or confused messages to help push the idea that tea-parties are a hotbed of racism and radicalism that don’t represent the American mainstream. As you have pointed out, it was a failure of epic, Milli-Vanilli-esque proportions. The video is perhaps one of the least credible attempts at “infiltrate and discredit” guerilla political warfare imaginable.
For example, I know of almost no one, either conservative or liberal, that is in real life so radically gay obsessed. Pretending not to understand that the woman in question was Jewish was perhaps some of the worst slapstick in the history of slapstickery. Odel? Seriously. That’s just perhaps the most obvious failed attempt at infiltration in the history of failed infiltrations. He sticks out as violently from the crowd as a 400 kilo ape in a burka riding a segway by Orange Julius in the mall food court.
Unfortunately, I don’t think “Odel” got the irony at all. He tried a failed infiltration to elicit radical hate speech, but to do this, he obviously made sincere tea-partiers uncomfortable with his failed gay-bashing. The only radicalism there was brought by crashers. There must be a country song stuck in all that irony just waiting to be written.
The new ‘Leftists’ have all lived comfortable lives. It’s hard to be angry and radical when someone else is paying your expenses. Non? Oui!
That’s the trick involved in socialism. Everyone thinks someone else will be picking up the tab!
But you have a very valid point. I live in Hamburg now in a lovely little neighbourhood located a mile or two from a festering sewer of outright communist agitation. There are some “occupied buildings” as they are called that belong to someone else but have been taken over by radicals and the state generally refuses to enforce the owners property rights. As the 1st of May is rolling around, take a couple of seconds to think of poor me living next to what will be effectively a war zone for a couple of days. Of the many sad facets to the story is that most of these so called autonomous radicals are from comfy, middle class backgrounds. I just hope they don’t firebomb any of the cars on our street. There have been spates of arsons on luxury vehicles for some time, but they have recently turned to smaller cars. I thought about putting a sticker on the back temporarily that says “I brake for the proletariate” to avoid any trouble.
It is always interesting to see this mindset in Zombie’s posts. The cognitive dissonance created by groups like “Queers for Palestine” could replace fossil fuels if we had a way to extract and bottle it.
Death by a (what are we Americans up to now…) a million/trillion little cuts?
We are a sorry excuse for a country and our founders should bitch slap us all.
Boy oh boy. Whatta trip. This was a lot to digest.
(And, what is that SMELL)?
Loved snarky the enders.
okay…at least now we understand who votes Pelosi in and why…clowns drawn to the circus.
Grossi Pelosi is the perfect image of ‘jet-setting Elitist de jour’.
Pelosi is an old ‘skool’ fool tool. Don’t insult clowns who often come from horrible backgrounds and hide their inner sorrow and misery behind a face of happiness. Speaking of which, Jim Carrey suffers from horrible depression as do many folks of great comedic talent.
I of course, never ever never ever cover up my personal pain with comedy. Nope. Not me. lol
Great material for a future tour-guide book: Zombie’s Lonely Planet…or maybe, Looney Planet!
Ahem. The tea-party folks have proven time and time again that they ARE the middle-class, tax-paying, SUCKER Americans who clean up after they leave a place and are decent, upstanding folks who more represent our Aunties/Uncles rather than the basement dwelling internet/sexting, lazy youth of today (Alinsky didn’t count on children just being plain lazy). Spread the worth ethic? It seems teachers who sit in ‘teacher jail’ can’t really teach our youth any ‘work ethic’.
What’s in your wallet?
Or, better, what’s in you heart and soul?
Ruled by the senses, we have lost our defenses.
I certainly felt like a sucker today. I’ve lived in Germany coming up on 4 years and I’m a small business owner. (I’ll be forced to leave due to business regulations, but that is another story.) Since I’ve been here, I have ploughed a lot of my money back into the business, and additionally, I have payed every cent of my taxes. I’m still limping.) I have worked overtime, I have worked nights, and I have worked weekends. In order to save on cash, I bought the necessary software and learnt how to build and maintain my own website as well as design my own advertising. I was watching t.v. today during lunch, and a show that helps arrange some form of work for the professionally unemployed came on. One women, a single mother of 40, was trying to “ease” back into the working market after a 5 year hiatus. Read that last part again. 5 years. She really didn’t look unemployed though. She had on new clothes, styled and dyed hair, and a couple of visible tattoos that looked relatively new. She managed to arrange a job interview at a nightclub, and even though she failed to impress, the manager offered her a trial period in which she could either prove herself worthy of the job or be fired without negative repercussions for the business. She didn’t last one night. The manager immediately sent her to the back to help clean up and restock the kitchen. She worked for under one hour before asking if there wasn’t something else she could do, and said the job just wasn’t what she had imagined. She left. When asked why, her response was “Just didn’t feel like it.” No negative consequences. Her cheque will be in the mail. I looked at my computer, waiting for me to jump back into preparing more training materials and thought just one thing.
I am a sucker.
Socialism rewards sloth.
In a socialistic system there is no such thing as ‘getting ahead’ or building a ‘nest-egg’. No, you live and die by the labour of your neighbor and you hope you don’t have to work as hard or harder for the same gravy as the shmuck in line behind or ahead of you.
Socialism: Master/Slave
A single mother of 40? That’s a lot of welfare benefits.
Even better when you see she’s passed the half-decade mark and is just getting into her stride!
Zombie:
Frankly, I think that you’re crazier than a bed-bug in a sleeping bag for seeking out these weirds and freaks of your own volition, but God bless you for your work…
…and damn your eyes for that pic of the Scrotal Inflation geezers a few years back.
My therapist and I are STILL working through the trauma of seeing that!
Great post as always! One bone to pick:
The Abraham Lincoln quote was actually a misattribution: it was actually from “The Ten Cannots” by William J. H. Boetcker. At one conservative rally, a pamphlet was distributed that had an actual Lincoln speech on one side and the Ten Cannots on the other — and some people misremembered everything as having been by Lincoln. See:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Misattributed
I briefly lived in San Francisco in the late nineteen-eighties. The experience turned me BACK into a Conservative Republican. San Francisco…what a vast collection of ???????????.
fags right? you were gonna say fags weren’t you. right on man, right on.
Zombie, I WISH you DID do walking tours like that, that would be a great, fun day, loaded with pictures to impress and amuse the folks back home!
I think I would take part. I would especially love to get a good look at the Arabic signs. If people aren’t afraid of writing “All Jews are terroist (sic)” in English, then I imagine the Arabic signs must be chock-a-block full of calls for genocide.
I read an article a couple of years back that I think about every time I look at a Zombie post. Specifically, the article mentioned how SF’s years of homeless friendly policies had made large parts of the city a dumping ground for junkies. The article specifically mentioned one person complaining about finding used needles and the occasional squat next to his car, in the bushes outside of his house, as well as local parks where his children played. The theme of the article was the shifting views of SF residents who had begun to take a harder stance on the homeless, in addition to other social issues traditionally supported by the left-leaning city. Does anybody know if this is still valid, or was this article just misinformed? I want to think that not only do these people fall far outside of the mainstream of American politics, but that they also don’t represent a large section of CA’s citizens either. More specifically, I have to add something to what Bilgeman said. The scrotal inflation thing left me scarred as well and I don’t want to think that the person next to me on the bus may be sitting on a watermelon. Even as a libertarian, those people just gave me the creeps.
San Francisco became a colony of Berkeley. Those are bad places to be when our economic house of cards comes down. Zombie, I hope you have an escape plan.
Excellent work Zombie
A real tour de farce. I have never been to SF and now realize why – I would need hazmat training and clothing to enter.
I am with Gary #11 on this one – pack your sanity and plan your escape.