Occupy Des Moines Occupied?

Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee

UPDATE: Paul Deaton has more: "Desultory demonstrations, like the one at the Des Moines Obama for America office, do little to advance the cause of any of the groups involved, and there is real work to be done in advancing the cause of social justice."

A split in the Occupy Des Moines movement seems to have boiled over this wekend, in the wake of a Saturday blockade at the Des Moines Obama headquarters.

Why Obama, instead of a GOP candidate? Maybe that's the issue, but it's not directly stated in a fascinating series of tweets Sunday morning from the @OccupyIowa account.

The Des Moines group has from the beginning been more confrontational than other occupiers in the state, and the series of tweets is worth a read:

@DMRegister how about you get one of those fine journalists to investigate how Occupy Des Moines was co-opted by CCI and Catholic worker?

@ABC5_WOI How about some real investigative journalism into how Occupy Des Moines was co-opted by CCI and Catholic Worker?

@KCCINews how about some real investigative journalism into how Occupy Des Moines was co-opted by CCI and Catholic Worker?

CO-OPTED: @occupydsm succumbed to top-down authoritarian model of Catholic Worker and CCI.

Those formerly and currently a part of @occupydsm deserve to know the truth. Time for individuals in charge to come clean with intentions.

Puppet on a string - @occupydsm controlled by a former catholic priest, a paid activist, and a paid organizer for the Democratic Party.

It isn't really consensus when less than a dozen people make up General Assembly. Awfully easy to ram through personal agendas @occupydsm

CO-OPTED: @occupydsm should have a caveat. *Occupy Des Moines - wholy owned subsidiary of Catholic Worker.

CO-OPTED: @occupydsm should have a caveat. *Occupy Des Moines - wholy owned subsidiary of CCI.

#CO-OPTED Dissenting voices have been pushed out of @occupydsm;now two or three authoritarians call the shots.

#CO-OPTED: with latest move, it's now obvious that @occupydsm is nothing more than an extension of CCI and Catholic Worker.

It's unclear which "a paid organizer for the Democratic Party" is being referenced; I suspect any Democratic staffer involved in blockading Obama HQ would already be an ex-staffer.

Also worth a read, the self-congratulatory quotes from the AP/Register article

DES MOINES, Iowa — Occupy Des Moines activists on Saturday vowed to shut down President Barack Obama’s campaign offices and set up a camp outside they plan to maintain around the clock.

“We have every intention to keep this place closed down until we are satisfied,” said Frank Cordaro, an activist and founder of the Catholic Worker group in Des Moines.

A handful of activists went to Obama’s nondescript office in a downtown strip mall after larger rallies to mark the three-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. They had hoped to read a statement demanding Obama cut military spending by half and “dismantle our U.S. military empire ... so we can create jobs, balance the budget, meet our peoples’ needs here and help the human community to heal our dying planet.”

Not that I'm against military cuts, but this sounds like the platform that elected President Kucinich.

When they arrived, they found the doors locked.

“You wouldn’t even have known this was a campaign office,” said Julie Brown, an activist who recently moved to Des Moines.

To highlight its tenets, the protesters put up a hand-written sign on cardboard: “Obama’s Former Headquarters.”

Don't forget: one of the C's is for counterproductive.