This is the first time I’ve ever heard “Mic check!” “Mic check!” “Mic check!” “Mic check!” and been filled with happiness—look how effective it can be in the right circumstance.

Good work, guys.

Christopher Frizzelle was The Stranger's print editor, and first joined the staff in 2003. He was the editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2016, and edited the story by Eli Sanders that won a 2012 Pulitzer...

44 replies on “Required Viewing: The Occupy Movement Occupies a Fancy Breakfast Where Union-Busting Shitbag Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin Is Trying to Speak”

  5. Of course it’s interesting to note that a majority of Wisconsin voters elected Walker as their Governor, so Occupy isn’t even 99% is Wisconsin.

  9. While in general I approve, since anything that pisses off that dipshit Walker is okay with me. But it’s too long winded and muddled. Without subtitles you wouldn’t know what the hell they we saying. They really need better copy writers.

  13. @5 & @10 Those are the best complaints you can muster? Gripes don’t get much more petty. You marginalize yourselves with those comments.

  15. @10 i think the length is somewhat crucial. if it were much shorter, the assholes would have thought they had won with their infantile noisemaking, trying to drown them out. as it is, their audience runs out of steam and is forced to listen. that’s the real power there.

  16. OH NO! I AM MARGINALIZED! What is this, a half inch margin? Looks pretty good. I guess all that stuff about white space is true… BUT, OH NO! I BE MARGINALIZED!

  17. Look at how uncomfortable those suits are getting! Oh, and it’s so easy to pick out the Sloggers who only see the situation from the comfort and safety of their own living rooms, spending so much time thinking up “clever” comebacks while the 99% goes out into the world and bravely confronts those assholes face-to-face.

  18. @16, I see your point, but I doubt very seriously more than one or two people there were “listening.” They were forced to hear, but you can’t force people to listen.

    And while I’m all for fun group protest events, it’s silly to think this kind of activity has any power to accomplish anything of substance.

  20. @18

    Like I said I approve. However the tactic could stand improvement and refinement. I’m not gona be a blind cheerleader just because this my team.

    Admit it. If there were no subtitles you would have very little notion what they were saying. If the point is to make a bunch of stuffed shirts uncomfortable for an extended period of time, mission accomplished. If the point is to get a specific message across to those people in that room, other than we’re pissed off, then it doesn’t work all that well.

    I think the REAL message attempted here is “we can infiltrate you and you can’t hide.”

    But they, the 1%, can hide. Next time there will be much better vetting or Free Speech zones or some shit like that.

  22. @10, @21 I seriously doubted anyone in the room needed subtitles. It was loud and clear. When you record it with the microphone in a pocket device, the sound is going to be awful. That’s just the nature of tiny omnidirectional mics and room echo. That’s not how it sounded in person.

  23. It’s good to make the 1% uncomfortable, nothing is going to change unless they’re uncomfortable. Direct action: I stand on your foot hard enough, and long enough that you finally pay me to get off. The beauty of this action is that no one saw it coming, and it was carried out with discipline. Yeah, maybe the theatrics could have been cleaned up, but that’s directing the show from the audience. I don’t think the point was to convert anyone with the message, and it won’t change anything but security, but what this action broadcast was that trouble could come from anywhere, and it gives the active occupiers a shot of energy. Those are both good things.

  24. I think this does have power. If for no other reason than to let people like Walker know that we’re everywhere, that we won’t back down, and that we’re going to win.

    Maybe this wasn’t the perfect idea, or the perfect execution, but we need to continue to have ideas, and to execute them. We need to continue to DO.

    The longer we persist, the more varied ways we can come at this, the more press we get, the more people will get the message.

    Maybe the people in that room will never get the message, but their friends, their neighbors will – as they read the papers, as they watch their tvs.

    We’re everywhere, and we have a message that you cannot ignore.

  25. @24: Thus proving my point that complainers haven’t actually gone out to see what their communities are up to. GO OUTSIDE. They’re RIGHT THERE.

  26. The Union League Club in Chicago does a few of these public affairs breakfasts every year – they’re open to the public and schedule a range of speakers, Walker being further right (and dumber) than the usual invitees. Make no mistake, it’s still an old school club (Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan were members) but less hidebound than one might expect: they won state funding for social services support to released mentally ill prisoners, and the capital punishment moratorium Governor Ryan signed.

  27. The 99% is doing good work, and this does have an effect. It causes people to talk about it. It is affecting the conversation. It is getting into the news. Many issues that are normally ignored are starting to be discussed, which is the first step toward dealing with them. First, the nation must admit it has a problem. Admitting you have a problem is always the first step. And this is helping people learn about, see, and understand the problem.

  28. To all the commenters who disparaged the occupiers in this video, you’re getting a little uncomfortable, huh? Well that’s how you should very well feel, along with Scott Walker. And it’s about time.

  29. Point of order with regard to nomenclature-

    It sounds good to say ‘we’ and ‘the 99%’ but you folks do know that isn’t true, right?

    Even on this far left fringe blog you can’t command more than about half the commenters in support of your disruptions and childish temper tantrums. How do you think this is playing in homes where people are paying their bills, not whining about them? How do you think the incoherent ‘we aren’t demanding anything but action’ mantra plays with rational people? In short, how do think this is playing in America?

    You don’t represent me, or most of the people in my community. They work. They pay their bills, and for their kids and their college loans. They aren’t asking others to shoulder that burden simply because those others happen to make a bit more money. They aren’t camping in parks, blocking streets, harrassing the police or disrupting others ability to make a living or attend to their errands, nor do they wish to do so.

    You are at best the 5%, pathetic whining babies who refuse to grow up. Good luck with that. But don’t try to sell the falsehood that you’re representing anything but other whining babies.

  30. “Union busting shit bag”? Does that mean The Stranger is going to form a union for it’s staff?

    You know what the best way you can support a union is? Join a union or start a union. Unions need members now more than ever.

  31. Oh thank heavens Seattleboob showed up! I was afraid this thread would go un-trolled.

    I seriously watched this video like five times already. It makes me giggle when I see how uncomfortable all the old white men get in their fancy suits. Well played!

  32. @31: My dad is an honest hard-working American. He was the first in his family to go to college, and neither of his parents had graduated high school. He pretty much put himself through college and grad school, and is currently one of the most-demanded engineers where he works.
    And you know what? When he fell on hard times a few years back due to the fluctuations of the market, he collected unemployment benefits because he had a family to feed. And he got right back out there, working two or three odd jobs at a time, jobs beneath his level of skill. But even that wasn’t enough, and he had to take on a little debt. And because of the deregulation of the financial industries, the banks he did business with were allowed to screw him over, squeezing every cent they could out of him.
    Seattleblues, you do not speak for the artisans and professionals in our country. You don’t even speak for the wage slaves, those without higher education or advanced training who must work less-fulfilling jobs, and whom you assume to be slackers mooching off the rest of us. You speak for the wealthy, those who have benefited from the circumstances of their birth or from the spin of Lady Luck’s wheel.

  33. That was cool and it gave me a huge smile. Yep, best use of the mic check (and I am almost always annoyed at long mic checking especially at concerts).

    I really hope this make the news. Hell, shouldn’t PBS News Hour talk about this instead of the exact same thing that other stations report on.

  34. I think this is the next stage of the Occupy Movement, for good or ill (I think it’s for the good–I hope someone else does this somewhere else). We’ve gotten their attention, now we need to literally speak truth to power

  36. Speaking of that mofo Walker, my 49-year-old friend, a professional educator and a foster mom, etc., got arrested & handcuffed on Wednesday BY SIX COPS because she sat in the WI senate chamber and silently held an 8×12 piece of paper with an excerpt from the Wisconsin constitution on it. Six of her friends also got arrested later that night for silently holding paper on their laps. One had a picture of apple pie, one Mother Teresa, etc. They too were handcuffed, etc.

    Yet that same senate voted recently to allow citizens wearing concealed weapons into the capitol.

  37. @31 We’re not asking people who make “a bit more money” to shoulder more of the burden. We’re telling people who make orders of magnitude more money they need to share more of the burden. If you have enough money to buy a politician you damn well have enough money to spare for the sick and the poor and what’s more, you’re morally obligated to do so.

  39. @ 31, I’m everything you describe your “community” to be, and I endorse this action 100%. Well, we drew unemployment when we were out of work, but that’s because we love our children, and aren’t the kind to abuse them by refusing money to help keep them fed and clothed just to prove a point. But we paid all our bills, our loans including college, and everything else ourselves, and always worked when the economy that Republicans wrecked allowed us.

    Man, it’s great when the protective bubble around these people is popped.

  40. I fully support this type of humorous civil disobedience that, as #25 said above, makes people uncomfortable. It seems like a good direction for the movement to go. Completely non-violent, but shaking up everyone’s regular routine.

  41. @VL and Matt

    You two do realize unemployment is a form of insurance that your employer and to a much less extent you, pay into?

    I have no difficulty with someone collecting Social Security who’s paid into it for decades. I have no issue with someone collecting Medicare they’ve paid for all their working lives. Why would I cavil at someone collecting unemployment insurance for a brief time when they’re unemployed? (Brief not defined as 99 months. If you can’t get off your ass and get a job in nearly 2 years I have little sympathy.)

    Last I checked, the childrens crusade you folks call Occupy this or that isn’t really apeaking to unemployment insurance. They want gauranteed jobs at ridiculous salaries, certainly, even though they have no marketable skills to bring to those jobs. They want their college loans modified or forgiven, though they want to keep the degree it paid for. They want lawfully signed contracts like mortgages illegally altered by a third party, the government. They want a tiny percent of the population to pay the bills for government and even personal choices for everyone else.

    If those are the goals you agree with, fine. But the red herring of unemployment insurance has nothing to do with those goals.

  42. @39

    With the moral imperative to help my fellow men less fortuntate I whole-heartedly agree.

    That I or you or the folks camping in parks and on college campuses (campii?)
    have the right to enshrine our particular moral code in government policy I do not. (As opposed to cultural values informed by those moral codes, which we have every right to express in law, pursuant to electoral pressure to do so. Sounds like splitting hairs, but there really is a difference.)

    That a few percent at the top owe the cost of living to everyone else, I do not agree.

    Nor can I agree that by making poverty easy we make it less endemic. If I help my nephew once or twice when he runs out of gas, I’m helping him out of a tough spot. If every time he needs gas he calls me, or eventually demands his right to be put on my credit card so that he can buy it at his convenience I’m not helping him. I’m enabling him to live a lifestyle he can’t afford. I’m re-enforcing his poor decisions rather than helping him make better ones.

    This is my problem with the nanny state. It’s attractive in theory, no doubt. The statements are often factually accurate in their limited contexts. In a country with the kind of wealth the US has, why should anyone worry about whether the rent will be paid this month, for instance?

    The answer is that we create a smaller and a lesser nation by making it one of perennial adolescents unable to negotiate their own financial realities. The answer is that in the name of compassion we cripple the maturity of a generation of people grown accustomed to lving off of others work and effort.

    Look, the income disparity throughout the Western democracies is a problem, a big one. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic in saying that eventually this disparity could bring the whole system down, as we saw with revolutionary France. I just don’t see the favored policies of the left, or the temper tantrums of the Occupy people doing a blind thing to address that problem.

  43. @44: That’s funny!
    Previously you’ve derided unemployment benefits as paying people not to work and as an unconstitutional theft of your tax dollars. Now you come around, eh? By the way, benefits expire after 99 weeks, not months, and you have to demonstrate that you are devoting your time to a job search in order to receive them.
    I’m not really sure where you get your information about the Occupy movement. Last time I checked, they were about tougher regulation of financial markets, increased funding for social programs (such as student loans), and support for the bargaining rights of unions.

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