#rsrh Send the bill to the Occupiers.

I see (via Instapundit) that Seattle has spent over half a million dollars to keep the Occupiers under some sort of semblence of control, or indeed behaviors consistent with human beings who wear clothes and can function in society. This is, of course, half a million dollars that cannot be spent on other things, so the city is a little aggrieved.

Now, you may say “HA! Democrats. Tough.” But that would be unfair: even in Seattle there are beleagured enclaves of Republicans, conservatives and Ordinary, Decent Democrats that have to pay for the Occupiers’ inability to get past the emptiness of their childhoods. So I propose that the city of Seattle start sending the bills to the various corporations and groups that actually run the Occupy movement – and couple that with somewhat more rigorous paperwork requirements from these people. If nobody wants to take formal responsibility for this ‘movement,’ then they are merely a bunch of unwashed, unhygenic squatters whose squalid encampments may be thus scraped away with a front-end loader without further delay.

Occupy DC: Corporate-funded, corporate-controlled, corporate-aimed.

This ABC News article is correct enough, as it goes:

On the surface, the “Occupy the Koches: Guerilla Drive-In” event looked like any other “Occupy” movement protest against the proverbial 1 percent of the population who hold the nation’s wealth.

But a confederation of long-established progressive political advocacy groups — the Campaign for America’s Future, Campaign for Community Change, Common Cause, Health Care for America Now and the aptly named Other 98% — were behind Friday’s protest.

…but there’s something here that I want to focus on. Campaign for America’s Future is a 501(c)(4) corporation set up to agitate for the true organization (The Institute for America’s Future) without having to disclose the latter’s donor lists.  The Campaign for Community Change is a 501(c)(4) corporation set up to agitate for the true organization (The Center for Community Change) without having to disclose the latter’s donor lists.  Common Cause is a 501(c)(4) corporation that has set up The Center for Community Change as a 501(c)(3) in order to avoid having to reveal its true donor lists*. Health Care for America Now is a 501(c)(4) corporation set up to agitate for the true organization (Health Care for America Education Fund; more accurately, the Tides Center) without having to disclose the latter’s donor lists.  And then there’s professional antiwar activist Mario Ceglie‘s The Other 98%, which is the latest iteration of The Other 95%, which we at RedState pointed out last year as being an organization with ties to the professional Activist Left that could best be described as ‘shadowy.’

For an explanation of what the big deal is about a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, anyway, see here.  Short version: a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, unlike a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, does not have to disclose its donor lists; contributions to it are not tax-deductible.  501(c)(4) corporations are technically not supposed to be majority politically oriented; but there’s nothing stopping one from donating heavily to, say, a Super PAC that is politically oriented (see here and here).  Shorter Moe Lane: 501(c)(4) corporations are great for legally laundering political cash.  Which is fine by me – I’m a full transparency, full disclosure, no-limit free speech absolutist when it comes to political contributions – but it’s insanely hypocritical for group who supported the DISCLOSE Act to be using this system.  And, guess what?  Most of the professional Activist Left supported the DISCLOSE Act.

Continue reading Occupy DC: Corporate-funded, corporate-controlled, corporate-aimed.

#OWS Occupy London Stock Exchange not showing up on standard thermal scans.

It’s the funniest thing.  You know Western civilization?  That patriarchal, logocentric, heteronormative collection of imperial hubris, Gaeacidal ideology, facist-capitalist-authoritarian economics, and war-worshipping mindset that continually oppresses the organizationally challenged and seeks to dismiss the concerns of the differently-paradigmed?  Yeah, those folks.  You know what their phallocentric engineer-destroyers have been doing while more enlightened people have been conducting on-street seminars on the inherent privilege found in semiotic analysis of protest communication – at least, said analysis that is insufficiently diverse so as to accept the profound meaning implied by unconstrained grammar and nonrestricted spelling*?   Can you guess?

Well, I’ll tell you: they went out and invented thermal imaging. Which is, of course, something that lets you look at a bunch of tents and determine whether they’ve got people in them or not. In fact, London’s Daily Mail sent out a person with a thermal imaging camera to Occupy London Stock Exchange late one night and discovered that the answer was mostly not: Continue reading #OWS Occupy London Stock Exchange not showing up on standard thermal scans.