THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW AGAINST YOU COMING AROUND

THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW AGAINST YOU COMING AROUND: It gets old quick.

You check in at your activist organization’s web site and there, one of those gullible ninnies has posted comments regarding the conspiracy of the week of the month of the year... chem trails, smart meters, aspartame.

One of the favorites is the contention that all the top corporate media execs and anchors get together every weekend to agree on the spin they will give the news this week. Noam Chomsky laughs off the concept saying basically that these people don't need to be told how to conspire because years of working their way to the top has given them all the required corporate perspective they need.

But last Monday morning even we were startled at how everywhere we turned, TV and print media moved on a dime from a somewhat sympathetic if confused take on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) takeovers of city centers across the nation, to a sort of "get a job you dirty smelly hippies and stop blocking those of us with a job from getting to it" slant on the movement.

We had a feeling this didn't bode well for the integrity of the skulls of the OWS denizens and sure enough, by the next morning, as though directed by the invisible hand of totalitarian oppression, cities across the country had let loose their police to perpetrate violent, head-cracking crackdowns, throwing those in the streets out into the streets- so to speak.

But the oddest thing happened Tuesday. Reports started to trickle in that, in fact, 11 mayors across the nation had held a conference call to discuss the planned removal of those pesky whiners, according to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan- many of whom, including Quan, acted Monday night.

Although many like Portland Mayor Sam Adams denied the call was a strategy session, none denied it was the topic de jour of their confab.

We had a feeling it was only going to get worse but we had council meetings to watch and local buffoons to skewer. So Saturday, when we began to see the inklings of some kind of viral video of protesters getting pepper sprayed we paid little attention- we'd seen plenty all week already and were all too aware of the all-out effort to all-but-kill-off OWS movement.

But they kept coming... emails... Facebook postings... tweets. Until by halftime of the big Kapa`a High School football game it all got so obtrusive upon our little sports cocoon that we had to watch that which had become the object of all the 'lookie-here" finger pointing.

And it didn't take long to see that the video was- if anything was- going to be a game changer.

So much so that we posted the following to those who had inundated us with links to the quickly and virally-spinning-out-of-control YouTube clip:

This has to be one of the most bizarre things (we)'ve ever seen.

The line of seated protesters had quite obviously been trained in non-violent, passive resistance, yet the cops apparently have not. In fact the officer nonchalantly sprays the whole line of arm-linked dissidents like he's spraying a mound of termites with insecticide while dozens of fellow officers stand there looking on with acquiescence indicating that this was approved if not directed by higher-ups.

But even more distressing is the fact that this is Davis, California, known as one of the most progressive city governments in the country where one would assume that there had been communication and police training in responses to non-violent civil disobedience... (It's) unfathomable that this could happen in this location.

By the evening the clip remained the sole domain of the internet where you couldn't click a clack without finding a link to yet another shot angle or someone else virtually scratching their head in a "is this what it's come to" manner.

Yet the point is- and we do have one- that the deafening nature of the on-line attention paid was apparently inversely proportional to the national TV news coverage.

Saturday brought nothing. Sunday there were a couple of broadcast notes on a "viral video" of a UC Davis pepper spraying event and a couple of outlets even played the most egregious 10 or 15 seconds.

It wasn't until late Sunday night our time (Monday morning on the east coast) that the clip broke through and began running in rotation on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Bloomberg and the rest.

Seems that the Monday through Friday regulars were back on the job and after some confusion by the weekend crew over whether to actually "cover" the event, the big bosses settled on a spin of "look at what went viral over the weekend" rather than "look what actually happened Friday."

Though the difference may seem like one without a differentiation, the two divergent views of the event point out how any story line that challenges the preconceived and previously broadcast notions of the corporate shills has to be presented with a "we didn't miss this but had to show it to you because so many people were watching it" caveat.

It becomes understandable sometimes how those who see conspiracies everywhere miss the simpler explanations. Because when the herd moves in unison, their eyes in their pocket and their noses on the ground, you got to figure they know something is happening here- they just don't quite know what it is.

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A note on the performance by "Makana" for the APEC leaders. Despite notes we received that it was "neither the time or place" for a protest song, in a NY Times editorial on how bad the wealth gap is in Hawai`i- and about our horrific homelessness problems- they note that:

The divide in Hawaii between haves and have-nots is grotesque. So is the reluctance to challenge it. A Hawaiian musician, Makana, recently got a chance and blew it. He was invited to play at an APEC dinner, where he quietly sang a protest song, “We Are the Many,” for 45 minutes. Too quietly: world leaders, including President Obama, kept chatting and chewing, undisturbed.

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We'll be light posting this week- so much college basketball, so little time.

INSIDE OUTSIDE USA

INSIDE OUTSIDE USA: It's hard to imagine how the "Occupy Honolulu" and "APEC Sucks" folks must feel seeing the viral nature and international news coverage of Honolulu entertainer Makana's guerrilla performance of his song "We Are The Many" from the belly of the beast on Saturday night.

For those who spent yesterday in a cave (or outside at the protests) it seems that the singer was invited to play "background music" at the big finale dinner for all the world leaders- the most secure of all ultra-secure events of the week- and instead played a 45-minute version of his latest song containing the decidedly Marxist first stanza of:

Ye come here, gather ’round the stage
The time has come for us to voice our rage
Against the ones who’ve trapped us in a cage
To steal from us the value of our wage

The irony can't be lost on those who have spent months fighting for the right to scream protestations at APEC delegates and assorted mucky mucks from environs so far from the action that they might as well have been in Kailua. Or on those camped out in Honolulu's Thomas Square Park since Nov. 5 who have received scant notice in the local media and certainly none nationally, probably because there haven't been any violent police actions to clear them out as continued to occur this weekend in places like Oakland and Portland.

The fact that one lone man wearing an "Occupy With Aloha" tee shirt under his jacket and singing what many would like to say to the exploitative elite could not only get inside but garner big time media notice while those who worked for a year to pull off their protests got bupkis, is discouraging to the many to say the least.

But the reality is that Makana didn't really get his message through to those attending the event either as reports are that most were so entangled in their own little worlds they didn't even realize what his song was saying. And those who did kind of shrugged.

APEC and all these other global free trade and investment organizations symbolize all that's wrong with the way so-called developed countries arrogantly think that by throwing around their investment capital they're doing people in lesser developed countries a favor by stealing their labor and natural resources and driving them into slum ridden cites and away from their often subsistence-farming-based villages until they so become dependent on ever-expanding industrialization they can't ever find their way back.

But even though our cries from the streets go unheeded in the world's ivory towers, it's nice to see someone get in their faces every once in a while.

For those who missed them here are the words of Makana's song We Are the Many

We Are The Many Lyrics & Music by Makana Makana Music LLC © 2011

Ye come here, gather ’round the stage
The time has come for us to voice our rage
Against the ones who’ve trapped us in a cage
To steal from us the value of our wage
From underneath the vestiture of law
The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw
At liberty, the bureaucrats guffaw
And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw
We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few
Our nation was built upon the right
Of every person to improve their plight
But laws of this Republic they rewrite
And now a few own everything in sight
They own it free of liability
They own, but they are not like you and me
Their influence dictates legality
And until they are stopped we are not free
We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few
You enforce your monopolies with guns
While sacrificing our daughters and sons
But certain things belong to everyone
Your thievery has left the people none
So take heed of our notice to redress
We have little to lose, we must confess
Your empty words do leave us unimpressed
A growing number join us in protest
We occupy the streets
We occupy the courts
We occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few
You can’t divide us into sides
And from our gaze, you cannot hide
Denial serves to amplify
And our allegiance you can’t buy
Our government is not for sale
The banks do not deserve a bail
We will not reward those who fail
We will not move till we prevail
We’ll occupy the streets
We’ll occupy the courts
We’ll occupy the offices of you
Till you do
The bidding of the many, not the few
We are the many
You are the few