Leave Marching to the Marxists
tierney, john
"Leave Marching o the Marxists" BY JOHN TIERNEY A news release announced that a group of New Yorkers would be marching up Fifth Avenue on Dec. 2, to celebrate the first Capitalism Day, part of a...
...She smiled when asked if there were any out-of-town groups marching...
...Whatever the powers of capitalists, they can't compete with moralists and politicians when it comes to public protests...
...Even if it wasn't the smallest "global rally" on record, it had to be the first in which the organizers gave out honest crowd estimates ahead of time...
...she said, referring to two men from the Greater LehighValley Objectivist Club, in Pennsylvania...
...One had a sign saying "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of MY OWN Happiness...
...They were too busy doing their own walk for capitalism to notice the little group walking behind a banner...
...Reprinted with permission of The New York Tinies Company...
...It was not what you would call an angry crowd, but several marchers seemed to be jointly indignant...
...2, to celebrate the first Capitalism Day, part of a global rally in more than one hundred cities...
...We don't have any chants," Miss Jackson said...
...tLeave Marching o the Marxists BY JOHN TIERNEY A news release announced that a group of New Yorkers would be marching up Fifth Avenue on Dec...
...In the global Walk for Capitalism, organized by an Australian group, New York ranked well below Stockholm (four hundred marchers) and Porto Alegre, Brazil (three hundred), although the city did manage to beat out Bath, England (six...
...Gee, it's been so long...
...In the wake of Sept...
...The closest the marchers came to an act of civil disobedience was to tape blue ribbons and certificates of appreciation to the walls and windows of a Chase Manhattan Bank branch, Barnes & Noble, Rockefeller Center (the statue ofAtlas was reverently noted), Trump Tower, Tiffany's and EA...
...Six members of the Vassar group had come to New York to infiltrate the Walk for Capitalism, he said...
...The rest of the Columnist John Tierney works deep underground at the Metro section of The NewYork Times, where this article first appeared...
...Sure enough, all of five dozen people (and no television cameras) showed up at 42nd Street on the stipulated afternoon...
...He was a member of the Vassar College Student Activist Union and a veteran of protests against globalization...
...After the march, the capitalists were dumbfounded to hear of the infiltrators...
...Clearly a historic event...
...Fifty people...
...Uh, The Fountainhead...
...Which of her books...
...So here at the home of the World Trade Center, here at the capital of capitalism, how many defenders would be massing on Fifth Avenue...
...We're trying to represent a hyper-capitalist stance that would give the whole march a bad name," he said, pointing to the nasty signs and to two of his allies who were photographing and videotaping the event...
...11, the organizers explained, "we need to defend the values and economic systems that have produced untold wealth for the Western world and are now under attack...
...They couldn't imagine wasting a minute at someone's else march.A few wondered how the activists would feel if a corporation had sent infiltrators to an antiglobalization rally with a sign like "Keep Those Colo ful Natives in Their Quaint Villages...
...f JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 93...
...The supporters of free trade didn't hit the streets of Kabul until later, and all they did was shop, just as thousands of people were doing on Fifth Avenue on Sunday afternoon...
...Two months ago, it looked on television as if the masses in the streets ofAfghanistan and Pakistan embraced the Taliban and its extreme antiglobalization policies...
...In fact, though, the activists would probably be delighted at the corporate infiltration-another injustice to protest...
...There weren't daily violent protests for the right to buy televisions, CD's and cosmetics...
...That made them the largest group at the march...
...They were holding signs like "Privatize the Public Library," "Profits Before People" and" Get-A Job" (next to a picture of a man lying in the street...
...The local leader was Sheryl Ann Jackson, a New Zealander who has worked as a nanny since immigrating to Queens twelve years ago...
...Boydstun paused and confessed...
...At least fifty,"the organizers promised...
...march was pretty quiet...
...What's the plot of that one...
...Oh, I've read John Locke, Adam Smith, Keynes, Ayn Rand," he said...
...We're really not protest people...
...Does two qualify as a group...
...O. Schwarz...
...They hadn't even videotaped their own march...
...As the marchers headed up the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue with a police escort, another man tried leading a cheer-"Give me a C!"-but the crowd barely had enough energy to spell "capitalism...
...One of them, a bearded college student named Joshua Boydstun, said they were all devout capitalists, but he turned vague when asked about his intellectual background...
...They could devote another Sunday to a rally at the company's headquarters, complete with television cameras, angry speeches and a crowd of a lot more than fifty...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
