Let's face it, LBOers, Marc Cooper is a jerk and a self-important scumbag. ANy of you want to take bar bets with me on when he completely sells out and starts writing for Front Page magazine?
Ah yes, I know Marc's ilk very well. Older white guys from the Old New Left. Very likely to flag down the nearest cute activist at some activist meeting and ask them to get him a drink. All the time passing out his card to people to let them know that he is a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE. As if anybody cares.
> PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL -- AFTER SPENDING last week here with 50,000
> others at the World Social Forum -- what the press has dubbed the
> "anti-globalization summit" -- it would be easy to make fun of the
> guy who was wearing a red-and-blue Che Guevara cape.
Or the guy named Marc Cooper who was masquerading as a self-important LEFTIST WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE.
> Or the clumps of balding, middle-aged Belgians and Danes with Che
> T-shirts stretched across their paunches as they ambled about in
> short pants, black socks, and sandals. Or the little bottles of local
> rotgut booze for sale re-labeled with, yes, images of Che. Or the
> crudely drawn and even more primitively translated wall propaganda
> posters shrieking that the "Yankee state is worldwide center of
> outrage, torture, strokes, [sic] bombardments, militar [sic]
> interventions and slaughter of innocent millions." Or the scraggly
> squads of "reporters" from various "indymedia" centers, frenetically
> capturing one another on video- and audiotape that they earnestly
> post on Web sites read only by themselves.
Are we beginning to sense a trend here? After everything that has been said about Cooper and Pacifica, are his fangs not dripping with contempt for the independent media. Of course, when you are an olf left authoritarian, the existence of a vibrant, indie left press is anethma to pricks who think that being a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE has elevated them to some kind of Leftist rock star status.
> Or that the feverish rock-star welcoming rained on Noam Chomsky by an
> auditorium full of screaming fans swarming for his autograph made you
> cringe and wonder if the 73-year-old MIT professor would reciprocate
> by tossing a sweat-soaked handkerchief out to the front row.
Cooper's just jealous and he sounds just like David Horowitz here. That writer spot for Cooper at Front Page is getting warmer.
> But to focus on any of the above would be misleading. Those antics
> were strictly trivial and mostly amusing sideshows. This second
> annual World Social Forum, organized as a grassroots alternative to
> the elite World Economic Forum in New York, turned out to be a
> refreshingly serious and sober five days of discussion, debate and
> meditation over the meaning of the global-justice movement and where
> it is heading in the post-9/11 world.
It's all good to have things like the WSF, but there were people who came to New York last week to have that same discussion.
> In other words, delightfully little of that burdensome, depressing
> crapola that you could certainly expect when you lock up several
> thousand American activists in a couple of big lecture halls for five
> or six days.
Cooper doesn't get around much, does he. He obviously missed the exicting National Conference on Organized Resistance which happened at American Univeristy several weeks ago. This was their fifth annual conference, which has grown to be so big that it has 6 concurrent tracks and over 1000 attendees. All of it is run by students.
> The World Social Forum survived the entire week with
> none of the usual circular firing squads our American left has become
> so expert at organizing. No Women's Caucus, or African-American
> Caucus, or Latino Caucus, or AsianPacific Islander Caucus, or LGBT
> Caucus spontaneously formed to exhibit its "outrage" over the lack or
> excess of -- fill in the blank -- within the Forum organization.
> Mercifully, no gruesome game playing of Who's the Bigger Victim?
I'm sure that many of us get tired of these excesses, but to dismiss these concerns liek Cooper has just demonstrates that he is a loudmouth white guy who doesn't have time for other voices than his own. Perhaps he can give up his slot at The Nation for writer who is a person of color. Cooper's contempt for the concerns of women and people of color suffuse this odious piece of writing.
> No process-freak crybabies whining about too much hierarchy or too
> many experts on the dais (I don't know about you, but when I sit for
> hours at a stretch to hear a panel of speakers, they better damn well
> be experts).
What an arrogant fucker, this Cooper is. I'm sure that he thinks that having a platform filled with smart white guys is something that everybody can live with. Whining about hierarchy. Wanting more experts. I smell an authoritarian of the Old Left variety.
Open up the windows folks! We've got a big white dinosaur in the room who just happens to be a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE!
> No trust-funder Black Blocers in ski masks claiming to
> be smashing international capitalism by breaking the windows of a
> Starbucks.
Cooper should get a job with the NY Post, or perhaps as a press attache for Susan George. It's really pathetic to hear this stereotyping coming from a purported leftist.
Trust fund black blocers? They don't exist. This is a real insult to the poor working class people who participate in the black bloc. The only black bloc in Porto Alegre was the anarchists from Brazil, Aregentina, and South America. I'm sorry, but we American black bloc types could barely afford to get to New York City.
Who went to Brazil from America? Mostly the NGO folks.
> No Food Police forcing tofu lunches on you.
Oh, poor Marc, he rejects free healthy food, for what? Cheetos out of the vending machine?
> Or Nicotine
> Nazis snuffing out your ciggies. And, praise Jesus, none of that damn
> "twinkling" going on -- the infantile and wholly idiotic process now
> in vogue among American activists whereby they raise their hands and
> wiggle their fingers to show approval of what's being said in one of
> their endless, process-laden, mind-deadening meetings.
That's because those meetings are democratic and strive towards an egalitarian, non-hierarchical movement. Not exactly something that an old authoritarian dinosaur like Cooper would appreciate.
> Maybe this World Social Forum conducted itself with such studious
> maturity because it was organized and dominated not by Americans, but
> by Latin Americans and Europeans.
This group probably included some of the Latin Americans that we were trying to bring to Washington last September for our counter-summit. It was a big fight to get some of the leftist men to realize that panels and plenaries filled with famous white American leftist men was hardly representative of the global movement. Of course, Cooper rejects this as he has explained above.
> The history of both groups has
> taught them that politics is a deadly serious business and that you
> better get it right. For when you screw up, the consequences can be
> devastating and include getting tied to an iron mattress with an
> electrode connected to your scrotum, or becoming one more number in,
> say, the Holocaust. That sort of experience leaves little time for
> sloshing around in the preferred American sandbox of identity
> politics or fancying yourself as some sort of historic martyr because
> the Seattle Police Department made you cry with a whiff of tear gas,
> or confusing some dimwitted, mildly dangerous, yick-yack like John
> Ashcroft for a real, live "fascist."
Yeah, and some of us were taking a real risk last weekend by organizing a protest that the WEF was hoping would be unpopular. The police had made plans to use wtaer cannons against us if we got rowdy.
The WEF and the ruling class set down a challenge to the American wing of the anti-globalization movement by holding the meeting in New York. Who stepped up to that challenge? The anarchists, socialists, and many other folks in the movement. Who jet-setted off to Brazil for the nice summer weather of the WSF? The NGOs, the liberals, and future Front Page Magazine writers like Marc Cooper.
> Writing in last week's The Nation magazine, one of the Forum
> organizers, Paris-based author Susan George, confessed that after
> September 11 she had hoped that the leadership of the wealthy
> countries of the world would begin taking global inequity more
> seriously. But, she wrote, that was naive. "Those who hold our
> futures in their hands are not serious. They see no farther than the
> noses of their bombers," George wrote. "Frightening though the
> prospect may seem, citizens must accept the risk of being serious in
> their place."
>
> WOW, WHAT A GREAT LINE: THE RISK OF BEING serious. That challenge was
> bravely assumed this past week here in Porto Alegre. Some 15,000
> "delegates," and an equal number or more of "guests," filled one
> Forum venue after another, from 8 in the morning until late into the
> night, listening, learning, reflecting, taking notes and asking smart
> questions.
Attending a big conference is a low risk activity which can either be serious, boring, funny, educational or whatever. I have no problems with those who attended the conference, but scumbags like Cooper are beyond the pale. For him to make fun of American leftists who managed to organize 20,000 people on short notice to brave water cannons in New York City is pretty sick.
> The intellectual menu offered up was simply staggering. Hundreds of
> seminars, conferences, workshops and panel discussions held
> throughout the city filled a 155-page tabloid-size guide. Some
> overflowed university auditoriums with 3,000 seats. Others took place
> in small classrooms. If you didn't want to join the throngs
> worshiping Chomsky,
Again with the worries about Chomsky being worshipped. Marc Cooper, meet your new boss, David Horowitz.
>you could go next door and hear from Indian
> activist Vandana Shiva; or Philippine economist Walden Bello, who
> dared to sketch a new, alternative international financial
> architecture; or a panel of Argentine trade unionists; or Asian
> water-rights activists; or some stunningly well-prepared
> presentations from the Americans who did show up -- a wonderful
> deconstruction of the WTO by Public Citizen's Lori Wallach or a
> detailed critique of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas by
> Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Ah so Marc is confirming that the chickens in the American NGO community did go down to Brazil. Well, at least Michael Dolan made it to New York.
> Five times as many people attended this year's Forum as did last
> year. The U.S. delegation was the fifth biggest, with more than 400
> representatives; last year, only a few showed up. And labor-backed
> groups, such as Jobs With Justice, went out of their way to bring
> along some of the more engaged U.S. activists and leave behind, well
> . . . the more self-absorbed wankers.
The self-absorbed wankers who managed to organize a weekend of protest that drew 20,000 people. A group of self-absorbed wankers who stood up to the bullshit that our movement had gone away and organized something that belied that crap.
Yes, the U.S. delegation was big. It was filled with moral cowards who are more worried about losing their funding than in taking any political risks.
> "I'm here because I've seen that our more successful campaigns happen
> when we tie into what's called 'common rights,'" said Tracy Yassini,
> associate director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, one
> of the few Angeleno delegates. Her group has been effective in
> fighting for a living wage in L.A. and Santa Monica. "Up to now I
> haven't been involved in the anti-globalization campaigns," she said.
> "But coming out of this Forum now, I feel I have an obligation to get
> linked up."
>
> No blueprints or battle plans came out of the Forum. Everyone takes
> back with them whatever they can from a week of intellectual
> engagement. And the overall lesson that we always do better when we
> stress what unites us rather than what divides us.
>
> This week's World Social Forum reminded me of what, in the first
> place, attracted me to the left as a teenager in the '60s -- the
> notion that you were connected to something much bigger and more
> important than yourself. And for the first time in a long stretch,
> this week's World Social Forum made it feel good again to still be
> part of that.
By the way, Marc Cooper is a WRITER FOR THE NATION MAGAZINE.
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