Rally for Responsible Energy Sat. October 15

Members of Occupy Houston will rally in silent protest at Energy Day on Saturday October 15, 2011.

Energy Day is sponsored the big oil companies responsible for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and for building the Keystone XL pipeline, a potential environmental disaster running from Alberta, Canada right into our backyard. Valero and other oil refining companies are seeking a tax refund to the tune of $135 million to cover the cost of hydro-treating equipment to reduce the extensive pollution resulting from the refining of the tar sands oil transported by the pipeline.

This refund is coming from our property taxes. Money meant for schools may go to large oil companies to cover these costs! We need to educate festival goers that there are serious threats to our planet, local tax money wasted, and a serious corruption chain behind big oil.

We will march the perimeter of the festival in white shirts and red bandannas or $1 bills over our mouths. Why do we cover our mouths? Why are we silent? Because the 99% of the citizens in this country do not have a voice in this country! Why do we wear white? It’s the opposite of black, the color of oil, and a symbol of the corruption and collusion rampant in the big energy industry.

Meet at 12:00 noon on Saturday, October 15, 2011 at lower Tranquility Park. Show up in your white shirts, bandannas, and bring a $1 bill. After we gather ourselves, get organized, and settled, we march at 12:30pm one block south to Hermann Square Plaza, right outside City Hall. It’s all-right if you don’t show up in a white shirt. We’ll have you covered.

This rally comes as Secretary Clinton, despite all evidence to the contrary, claims she has "no reason to believe" that the review process of Keystone XL has been biased in favor of approval.

Let's be clear: stopping Keystone XL -- in the face of thousands of protests and the direst of warnings about its environmental impact -- is a lost cause. And that is exactly why the fight must continue. Read the comments at the links to the stories here and here, and in the link to the announcement of this protest, and keep in mind the words of Mohandas Ghandi:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Be aware also that Metro's light rail is not operating this weekend due to construction of overhead crosswalks in the Texas Medical Center. that ...

METRORail will operate its normal schedule this weekend. The previously scheduled rail interruption for Friday-Sunday, Oct. 14-16, has been canceled.

Steve Jobs was a conservative Republican.

And probably a full-blown TeaBagger as well. And I say that without bothering to research his political contributions.

A personal sidebar here: My first computer was a Macintosh, in November of '88; when I went from the Plainview Daily Herald to the Midland Reporter-Telegram it was sitting on the desk I inherited, the result of a vendor arrangement in exchange for some co-op advertising. The two geeks in what was later called IT did not have anything like it and were very envious. They were working on those old Tandy TRS-80's, typing in MS-DOS. They were also playing around with some local petroleum engineers and geologists on something called a 'bulletin board service'.

(The only computer science I had learned in college in the late '70's was FORTRAN, and we were punching Hollerith cards and turning in a stack for the dining-room sized mainframe to spend a few hours processing.)

By the time I left the newspaper business for good, in January '92, there were about ten Macs in the building, all with big monitors and the paper was paginating (composing pages online). I was giving tutorials to my manager, not to mention the rest of the advertising sales staff. The MRT, to its credit, was ahead of the industry curve with regard to electronic publishing. But I never worked on another Mac after that; I bought PCs for my home use (my first was a Gateway) because I had bought into the meme that there wasn't enough software to run on anything but PCs. And wasn't ever going to be.

I was never willing to pay Apple's premium -- when desktop systems eventually dropped in price from $2K and $3K to around $1000, Macs were still $1500 -- for something that I perceived was nothing more than an affinity brand. Even the persistent urban legend that Macs never get computer viruses didn't sway me. It's also why my first smartphone is an Android. I had originally purchased the jazziest Blackberry on the market four years earlier and could not figure out how to use it. It had the wheel on the side; I couldn't change the font to something I liked ... so I traded it back in on a Motorola RAZR -- which was also one of the trickest phones on the market at the time. But was just a phone, of course; no e-mail.

The news that Jobs was a supreme tyrant and an even more massive tightwad disappoints me greatly. His long refusal to acknowledge the child he had out of wedlock points to the darker nature of his character.

Now I get the marketing whiz part of him completely. He didn't just create an affinity brand like Tiffany, Rolex, Lexus, Neiman Marcus ... he created a culture around his products. Root word being cult.

I get that Steve Jobs was so much smarter than everybody else -- and that he fostered an environment of sophistication within his company that focused on making things as easy as possible for the end-user -- which was clearly demonstrated by the fact that it took Microsoft ten years to copy him (Windows). I totally get that his ego correspondingly dictated that he charge people more for his superior intellect (in product design, razzle-dazzle presentation, etc.) That part is absolutely praiseworthy in our capitalist system.

That he had no measurable record of charitable giving despite a personal fortune estimated to be $8 billion, I admit, shocked me. Steve Jobs was a TeaBagger in at least one respect: he had that classic "I got mine, now you go get yours" attitude. "You don't need/won't get any help from me. I did it all by myself." Herman Cain as recently as this past Thursday espoused this same philosophy with respect to his lack of participation in the civil rights movement.

I find that mentality -- "No handouts, you lazy bums!" -- to be as abhorrent as any other pestilence on the land.

Bill Gates suddenly went up several notches in my estimation by comparison. And that is a crying-ass shame. Because Gates and Microsoft represent the culture of American corporate domination translated into soul-killing mediocrity as much as do the oil and gas companies, the newspaper and automobile companies I worked for once upon a time, et cetera (slow-to-no innovation in new technologies despite massive profit margins being just one hallmark).  I'm sure you can think of other industries that fit this description.

But at least they've given some back to those less fortunate.

It's true what Robert Fulgham wrote: everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten. Steve Jobs was way smarter in business than most people who have ever walked the Earth, and without having finished college. He also apparently did not absorb much from K.

The Weekly Wet (!) Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is occupying your browser as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff took a look at demographic change in one of Houston's historic neighborhoods.

Harold Cook at Letters From Texas takes a look back at old friend Molly Ivins, when he reviews a new book just released about her. His conclusion: "if you ever spent evenings with Molly, reading the book will give you the gift of spending one more. Even better, if you never got to spend that evening with Molly, you're in luck - after reading the book, you'll feel just like you did."

Bay Area Houston has an interesting audio clip of Teabag darling Galveston County tax assessor/collector Cheryl Johnson.

Justice finally arrives for a man falsely convicted 25 yreas ago in Williamson County. WCNews at Eye On Williamson has the story: Michael Morton walks free after 25 years behind bars.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme observes that Texas Republicans hate the elderly, workers, children and women.

Occupy Houston, the solidarity march and protest which grew out of the continuing Occupy Wall Street action, was covered by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Neil at Texas Liberal also reported on the first day of Occupy Houston. It is great that something hopeful is finally taking place in our politics. The Occupy Wall Street movement gets the idea that the work of freedom and democracy is up to each of us.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw writes: "Poor Rick Perry thought he could easily preen, charm and tall-tale his way through the 2012 Republican presidential primary cycle. Unfortunately for the governor, he has not been outside of his impenetrable Texas GOP bubble much. Perry, in fact, spends so much time with his crony donors that he obviously has no clue what the other 99% of the population believes." Read more: Rick Perry: Razzle, Dazzle, Snap, Crackle and Flop.

Sunday Occupied Territory Funnies

Historical comparisons to Occupy Wall Street and the Bonus Army March of 1932

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's comments -- as well as House Minority Leader Eric Cantor's -- prompt this post*, with the history-repeats-itself aspects left to you to interpret.

Hard economic times always incur a certain amount of social dislocation and consequently create opportunities for politically extreme movements.

There were many instances of labor unrest and strikes that turned violent, incidents that prompted temporary mobilizations of state National Guards.

There were also instances where regular Army troops were called out in aid of the civil power. The worst incident of this type was the Bonus Army March in Washington in the summer of 1932.

At the end of World War One, as the American Expeditionary Force was being demobilized, a grateful U.S. government passed legislation that authorized the payment of cash bonuses to war veterans, adjusted for length of service; a bond that matured 20 years later, in 1945.

However, the Crash of 1929 wiped out many veterans' savings and jobs, forcing them out into the streets. Groups of veterans began to organize and petition the government to pay them their cash bonus immediately.

In the spring of 1932, during the worst part of the Great Depression, a group of 300 veterans in Portland, Oregon organized by an ex-sergeant named Walter W. Walters named itself the 'Bonus Expeditionary Force' or 'Bonus Army', and began traveling across the country to Washington to lobby the government personally.

By the end of May over 3,000 veterans and their families had made their way to Washington, D.C. Most of them lived in a collection of makeshift huts and tents on the mud flats by the Anacostia River outside the city limits. Similar encampments could be found sheltering the migrant unemployed and poor outside any large city in the United States and were called 'Hoovervilles'. By July, almost 25,000 people lived in Anacostia, making it the largest one in the country.

There are over 1000 Occupy protests in cities across the world, with the largest one in the United States outside of New York in Portland, Oregon. Ten thousand people -- ten thousand! -- turned out in the Rose City this past Thursday. By contrast, Houston had at most 500.

In June, the Patman Bonus Bill, which proposed immediate payment of the veterans' cash bonuses, was debated in the House of Representatives. There was stiff resistance from Republicans loyal to President Hoover, as the estimated cost of the bill was over $2 billion and the Hoover Administration was adamant about maintaining a balanced budget. The bill passed in the Congress on June 15, but was defeated in the Senate only two days later. In response, almost 20,000 veterans slowly shuffled up and down Pennsylvania Avenue for three days in a protest local newspapers titled the 'Death March.'

As the weather and the rhetoric grew hotter, concern grew that the Bonus Army Marchers could cause widespread civil disorder and violence. There were scuffles with the police and some Senators' cars were stoned by unruly crowds of veterans.

Retired Marine General Smedley Butler, an immensely popular figure among veterans and who had become a vocal opponent of the Hoover Administration, participated in Bonus Army demonstrations and made inflammatory speeches.

He would be approached in 1933 by Fascist sympathizers in the American Legion, who would try to involve him in an actual plot to seize power in a coup d'etat. It was alleged at the time that the March was directed by the Communist Party of the USA in pursuit of a genuine revolution, but it has since been established that the Party's only actual involvement was sending a small number of agitators and speakers.

Nevertheless, President Hoover considered the Bonus Army Marchers a threat to public order and his personal safety. After the closing ceremonies for that session of Congress on July 16, many members left the Capitol building through underground tunnels to avoid facing the demonstrators outside.

Many of the Marchers left Washington then, but there were still over 10,000 angry, restless veterans in the streets. On July 28, 1932, two veterans were shot and killed by panicked policemen in a riot at the bottom of Capitol Hill.

Care to guess what happened next? Emphasis in the next excerpt is mine.

Hoover told Ralph Furley, the Secretary of War, to tell General Douglas MacArthur, then the Army Chief of Staff, that he wished the Bonus Army Marchers evicted from Washington. Troops from nearby Forts Myer and Washington were ordered in to remove the Bonus Army Marchers from the streets by force.

One battalion from the 12th Infantry Regiment and two squadrons of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, under the command of Major George S. Patton, who had taken over as second in command of the Regiment less than three weeks earlier, concentrated at the Ellipse just west of the White House. At 4:00 p.m. the infantrymen donned gas masks and fixed bayonets, the cavalry drew sabers, and the whole force, followed by several light tanks, moved down Pennsylvania Avenue to clear it of people.

Against the advice of his assistant, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, MacArthur had taken personal command of the operation. President Hoover had ordered MacArthur to clear Pennsylvania Avenue only, but MacArthur immediately began to clear all of downtown Washington, herding the Marchers out and torching their huts and tents. Tear gas was used liberally and many bricks were thrown, but no shots were fired during the entire operation. By 8:00 p.m. the downtown area had been cleared and the bridge across the Anacostia River -- leading to the Hooverville where most of the Marchers lived -- was blocked by several tanks.

That evening Hoover sent duplicate orders via two officers to MacArthur forbidding him to cross the Anacostia to clear the Marchers' camp, but MacArthur flatly ignored the President's orders, saying that he was 'too busy' and could not be 'bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders'.

MacArthur crossed the Anacostia at 11:00 p.m., routed the marchers along with 600 of their wives and children out of the camp, and burned it to the ground. Then, incredibly, he called a press conference at midnight where he praised Hoover for taking the responsibility for giving the order to clear the camp.

He said: "Had the President not acted within 24 hours, he would have been faced with a very grave situation, which would have caused a real battle. Had he waited another week, I believe the institutions of our government would have been threatened."

Secretary of War Furley was present at this conference and praised MacArthur for his action in clearing the camp, even though he too was aware that Hoover had given directly contrary orders.

You're not really sitting there with your mouth agape, are you? What's that you say? "Posse Comitatus"?

The Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the U.S. military from being used for general law enforcement purposes in most instances, did not apply to Washington DC because it is one of several pieces of federal property under the direct governance of the U.S. Congress (United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8).

Hmmm. It's starting to make sense now why so many critics of Occupy Together are squalling, "Why don't these people march on Washington?" Wikipedia:

Fifty-five veterans were injured and 135 arrested. A veteran's wife miscarried. When 12-week-old Bernard Myers died in the hospital after being caught in the tear gas attack, a government investigation reported he died of enteritis, while a hospital spokesman said the tear gas "didn't do it any good."

Back to the original for the end.

The last of the Bonus Army Marchers left Washington by the end of the following day.

Be reminded about who (nearly) always wins when a revolution turns violent. And it's not the rebels. Or democracy. And the question -- if that happens -- then becomes: what do we do now?

A Google cache of Bonus Army images.

"Conflicting Versions of the Battle of Anacostia" (.pdf)

Socioeconomic and Political Context of the Plot

*With sincerest thanks to my mother for the history lesson.