Santa Cruz McDonalds Attacked

The Beijing Olympics have ended, but the repressive apparatus set up for the Games remains in place: some 300,000 surveillance cameras, 400,000 informants, and a general tightening of government control. This is always the result of these multinational spectacles. McDonalds, one of the major sponsors of the Olympics, also remains omnipresent and continues to reaps its profits with four new restaurants and a large share of the advertising spectacle. This, too, is business as usual.

McDonalds will also gladly sponsor the 2010 Winter Olympics on stolen indigenous land in British Columbia and the 2012 Summer Olympics in the most surveilled metropolis in the world (London). They will continue to be attacked for their role in perpetuating the Olympics and all the repression, surveillance, development and profiteering that accompany the Games.

In the early morning of August 25, three windows were broken and a surveillance camera knocked off the roof of the Ocean Street McDonalds in Santa Cruz, California. Here, as in Beijing and everywhere else in the world, the cameras are the bosses' eyes pointed at the workers being exploited and the homeless and impoverished who congregate outside this unfortunate venue.

People the world over hate McDonalds as a foremost symbol of American capitalism, and its franchises are targeted in almost every uprising and riot that erupts these days. Here in California too, we revolt against everything McDonalds is and represents. We know that the crap that they pass off as "food" is "cheap" in dollars, but is the direct result of worker exploitation, rainforest deforestation, etc. We're sick of the bullshit that is McDonalds, just as we are disgusted with the spectacle of the Olympics and enraged by the constant presence of surveillance cameras everywhere. We're sure that many others share our distaste, and we encourage them to articulate their negativity through action.