Throw A Pie In The Face Of The Chairman of The Board Today

What a day! We've been working with a coalition of online groups for 2 weeks and finally launched OccupyTheBoardRoom early this morning, after tweaking final details all last night. And then we did our live chat session with Colorado activist Joe Miklosi, who's running for the congressional seat currently held by right-wing extremist Mike Coffman. And in the middle of all that a very old pal, Steve Barton, sent me the song above, "Pie In The Face," from his Projector album.

Like the Occupy Wall Street movement, Steve's a non-violent kind of guy. No one's really advocating physical pies in anyone's faces-- not even any of the 1%-- just metaphorical pies in the face in the form of e-mails. You can send one here and you can view the ones others have sent today here. I know Steve about 30 years. He was one of the singers Translator, a band on my indie label, 415. He's one of the 99%. I hope he's read The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robins. I hope you have too. It goes a long way towards explaining why-- unlike us-- the reactionaries are decidedly not non-violent. They're uptight, viciously so and, as we saw today, they and their brutal agents are looking for a fight, for an excuse to put the 99% back in "our place." As Robin explains, there's nothing that infuriates the 1% afflicted with reactionary mind syndrome than when the rest of us try to claim equality.

During the Seattle general strike of 1919, workers went to great lengths to provide basic government services, including law and order. So successful were they that the mayor [a fascist] concluded it was this, the workers' independent capacity to limit violence and anarchy, that posed the greatest threat.

"The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact... True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet... That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt-- no matter how achieved"

...Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom, but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levellers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."

The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person-- to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.

There's an Edmund Burke Institute for American Renewal in Washington, a block up from K Street and they just love Paul Ryan, the Wall Street shill who presented plutocracy's plan for ending Medicare and gutting Social Security. Ryan has never worked an honest day in his miserable life but he's well-paid by his Wall Street overlords and he's now-- though a career politician-- a member of the 1%. If you're a Burke devotee, I'm sure Ryan is your kind of politician. For the 99%... there's Rob Zerban-- who spent this afternoon tweeting up a storm from OccupyMilwaukee.