I personally liked Boots' take on it: Yo! Calm down. No one's talking about how much more property damage was done by shutting down businesses. Why doesn't anyone care about the paltry amount spent on windows, when you could report on the profits losts due to the march. What up with that?
He was pitching that at media more than anything else. Why are the media focusing on spray paint clean up and not the lost profits.
as for stopping it, you could set up a system where you prove your street cred or party ID or charge a price for admission. Unless you've proven you're one of us and agreed to all we're about, then you can't be here. If they won't go away, call the cops. Or, you can hire your own cops and have the cops take them down. You can be your own cops and do same. There are problems with doing those things which will be more troubling to a budding movement (or an organization for that matter) than just putting up with the nutters, the conspiracy theorists, the folks smashing windows and using their interference in ways that can be productive. Setting up ways to think through the inevitable fall out is more productive. After all, between us, we've all seen this happen with every fucking demo, protest, whatever for decades. We know all the issues up one side and down the other. We know they happen. Better to prepare people for how to think through the issues such events raise, so pepole can remain solidaristic through disagreement.
The fact is, even if the group ran according to Roberts Rules of Order, it would still happen because the costs of preventing such a thing would be greater than anyone wants to bear in an alternatively organized group as well.
Black Blocs, if that's what this was, aren't always violent, but when they target a march like this, it's almost always as a point of protest targeted *at* the movement itself. They purposefully want to break it up, cause dissension within the group, so that radical elements will move toward Anarchist approaches. (Not all A's agree with this naturally, but it is one of the reasons for running a BB) I bring this up because there have been BBs associated with even the well organized penned-in, permitted marches run by ANSWER and the like.
Carrol: There will always be a Black Bloc or equivalent. There will always be provocaterus There will always be Democrats in the leadership (though they won't always know it themselves) Name it (anything counter-productive) and you will have named what will ALWAYS be 'there'
Such elements, tendencies, etc are simply part of the world in which leftists have to operate the best they can. A couple weeks ago I wondered if anyone could supply a one-sentence blast at Anti-Fed sentiments. (Or something like that.) Then I decided fuck it. We just have to accept such nonsense as part of the weather and ignore it.
A world in which left actions could be pure is a world that woudn't need a left.
Carrol -- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)