Oakland: Google Bus Paint Bombed

The high tech employees riding the company shuttle buses are WORKERS. << you think the bosses ride buses? >> They might be getting paid more than you, might get a salary rather than an hourly rate (which might NOT be to their advantage -- I spent much of my working career in the cypher mines --- if it takes more than 40 hours to get the project done then you work more than 40 hours and not only no overtime rate for the extra hours, no pay for them! In THEORY you get comp time, but you don't get to take the comp time if your work's not done -- it sits and waits for you.)

By all means friends, convince the higher paid workers that you consider them along with the bosses, that they should side with the bosses. Lovely way to organize!

What a fucking joke. What if I told you to leave Oakland, and even told you the reasons why I want you to leave Oakland, and you insisted on staying? Of all the people I would expect to boss people around and police righteousness, it was not anarchists.

Look, I have no problem with direct action, but your rhetoric is fucking lame.

And to try and shame someone who's trying to make a living as a bus driver? Pathetic.

who cares if they're workers? why should that shield them from criticism? the american soldiers who devastated fallujah were workers too, in the sense they drew regular paychecks. so are the cops in ferguson and everywhere else. so are most of the people who do most of the shitty things most places in the world. that doesn't mean any of them should be allowed to get away with the nuremberg defense. "i was only following orders" or its modern equivalent "i was just doing my job" are not valid reasons for joining corporations that are ruining the planet or driving actual poor people from their homes via gentrification.

Then you really don't understand organizing.

If your idea is the organize the poor by treating everybody else above the poverty line as the enemy, if you convince all those people that they are on the same side as the rich, then they will be. And the poor MINORITY will get crushed. It won't be 99% against 1% but 20-30% against 80-70%. Even if you can redraw where you divide society so that it is 70-80% against 30-20% likely to lose, advantage in numbers compensated by disadvantage in means.

Try to understand what I am saying, which is NOT that you are wrong about "which side are they on in terms of functionality". But our job as organizers is to CHANGE than, change which side they feel they are on.

Throwing eggs at them, or rocks for that matter, isn't going to help. They AREN'T going to respond by thinking "Oooh, I'm scared. I better mend my ways so these people won't be angry with me any more." Is that what you expect? If so, I don't think you understand your fellow humans very well. Much more likely to respond, "people are attacking us, we better get more guns" (personally, or surrogate)

i understand organizing, you don't understand math.

Even with his bad math, Mike Novack has a point. The workers who work in the tech industry (techies) are selling their labor like most of the rest of us. At this point Google, Zuck (Fuck him!), Apple, and the other firms in the technological industries give perks like buses to work to these workers because they need them. They may be the house slaves as compared to the field slaves, but we're all slaves, except for the plantation owners and the slave-catchers (the police). We should unite all the slaves to fight the bosses, instead of fighting each other. Zuck, Bryn, and the other billionaires are laughing in their big houses and private jets, while some slaves attack other slaves.

They used to plan out this divide and conquer strategy. These days we do it to ourselves. Unite against the bosses, not other slaves (workers).