photos from anti-g8 AA march

As an observer to Friday night's march... I was lost on the critical message and am concerned it was lost on most who watched it. An anarchist critique of the G8 Summit? A movement to end captalistm? Folks looking to the battle with hankerchiefs around their mouths trying to emulate the WTO protests is what it looked like. It seems more like the crowd thinks its cool to yell at police officers in the Mission District. Why the Mission? If you're going to go after the SFPD... criticize specific things about them... their coverups, their acts of police brutality. But, why yell at San Francisco police over the war in Iraq, the focus of the G8 summit, and the capitalist oppression. The message... which is valid... needs to be more clear. Image isn't everything.

so i just want to point out that the issues are local. look at what happened at doten honda in berkeley. a bunch of workers were laid off, the union busted, when a new owner bought the business. this story is repeated all over the world, here in the us as well as through the developing world.

this is the local face of what happens when you hear about opening markets and removing barriers to investment. people lose their jobs. families starve. communities get sick. there is a real ugly side that noone thinks of as violent. and its the cops who are right there making sure that the person who gets laid off, evicted, or sick has no recourse to what any of us would consider a just helping hand from greater society.

anyway, my main point is that all of these corporate businesses that get attacked are the local face of a brutal and violent corporate capitalism, and a few broken windows pale in comparison to that violence... though i do wish there was a more substantive anarchist program for resistance to capitalism

Setting fire to a public trash can! The powers that be must be quaking in their boots!! Soon they will be awash in litter that has piled up in the streets because all the trash cans have been destroyed and society will be brought to its knees! Hooray for anarchy, the most intelligent social movement since fraternity hazing and football riots!

Like Skateboarders, Anarchist love to take pictures of themselves in "action" with their camera phones from Cingular, AT&T or Sprint -- all Mom and Pop stores.

"Why yell at the police in the Mission?" good question. My answer: The police are not out there to protect anyone; they are one of the fists of the state. Police brutality is at epidmeic proportion in this country. So much so that you can't say it is a few rotten apples. It comes from the top and every cop is responsible, even if he or she doesn't do it themselves. Thhey don't know how to clean themselves up even in "liberal San Francisco." and even in the very bohemian Mission district.

The right-wingers who have been posting to this sight seem to have a contradiction which shows that their agenda is not to support social change but to stop it in all of its manifestations. When people go aropudn thee world protestignthe big corporations and the big goverments they tell us that that won't sovle anythiong becuase there are still problems in evewyr city. When we take it to hte streets locallly to shwo the lccla manifestatiosn fo the global systme, they tell usa we're not doign aything important that we should be going after the big guys.
Well for anysocial change for any revolution, you need both and anarchists and other rebels are attempting to do both. No breaking the windows in two of the largest banks in the world (B of A and Wells Fargo), in one of largest oil companies in ther world (Shell), in a major global fast-food corporation (KFC), and in a second level down but still major national footwear chain (Skeechers-makers of expensive sneeks and exploiter of the "youth masrket") and in several police cars is not a revolution but is a good start. What have you done to get rid of the oppression of the state and corporations lately?

yeah - almost all of the targeted businesses did have some bad association. It was interesting how Vanguard property had a force field which repelled the vandal's silly tools.
I would say that Shoe Biz was the biggest mistake that I've seen photos of. I can't pictures what or where that store is, but it is just a fact that working class people are more interested in buying and wearing nice clothes than other sectors of society. I don't think that the working class of the Mission just wants to buy utilitarian communist clothes, while only yuppies drive into the neighborhood to buy the nice shoes. Look around, and if you aren't african american, go talk to your black friends (who weren't adopted by middle class euro-americans) about this. When lower-middle class people get any money at all, they are much faster to spend on nice clothes and shoes they want, while upper middle class people would blow it at Whole Foods, and it is tasteful for 'old rich' people to drive a Toyota, while it is the signature of new rich (or people with credit cards) to buy Cadillacs and Mercedes.
With my family, my parents are pretty old with my father near 80, and in the postwar, my mother and her family literally went whole years with just one dress to wear and nothing to eat (people were starving to low weights), and so they both have this economic attitude of thrift and coupon usage, and not being willing to waste money on the latest toy instead of a savings account, had an economical american car with no radio and only 5 digits on the odometer, finally got a color TV and VCR in 1990 - yet my mother in particular *hates* the 'slumming' dress style of countercultural liberal kids. She gets *angry* when me or my artistic sister shop at Thrifttown, where we don't have the 'first generation immigrant/college student' attitude but instead have more the middle-class bohemian culture that characterizes most of the march participants. So I have to conceal it. Instead she goes to halfpriced sales at Sears and Lamonts and always sends me new sweaters and coats and will sneak in and throw out my old clothes so that I won't have an urge to buy used clothes.

rich people don't "blow" their money at Whole Foods.

they wouldn't be rich if they did.

stop setting up silly counterpositions that lead nowhere.

it's been referenced several times in various news reports about the poor old mom and pop store, shoebiz, but it isn't really that mom and pop unless you mean hip and shitty: http://www.shoebizsf.com/

Shoebiz sells goods produced by sweatshop labor. So screw 'em.

How much destruction to the ozone layer did that uncontrolled trash fire cause?