hmmm stickers all over and all you got was hundreds.
I can sigh in relief that people decided to not march in a pointless march.
Here is the thing - I didn't go to down town at all today and worked all day and then watched tv. I didn't see a single mention of this march. NOthing!

and the worldcan't wait webpage said there was 2500 people gathered. someone clearly walked out of the math class at the wrong time.

I'd estimate 1000-1200 tops. (interesting to note that the latest WCW website reports now cite 2000 - down from 2500 - this is still too high) Still, undeniably one of the largest weekay noon demos in the Loop in some time.

What was surprising was the size of the riot cop deployment today. The CPD's favorite 'Bottled Blond' Sherri Mecklinberg primped in front of the corporate media and the the entire CPD command staff were on hand with their fancy command RV shiny black mobile comm van- no doubt expecting a replay of last March.

The march was pretty sad, but what was anyone expecting, really? Me, I thought it would be bigger, given the promo and the amount of discussion it sparked. But I'm not really surprised.

The best part was hanging around afterward with anarchists. It may not have accomplished anything, but we had some terrific fun.

Thousands rally across US against Bush policies
-- Christine Kearney, Reuters

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110203149.html

RCP Chairman Bob Avakian arrived from France at 1:25 AM today. He was whisked to the White House from National Airport, after ordering that "Reagan" be dropped from the official air port moniker. The chairman said he was undecided on the issue of renaming the "Oral Office."

Whereas Mao Zedong lost thousands of his troops in the Long March, then thousands more fighting first the Japanese then the US-backed Chiang Kai-Shek gangsters before seizing state power, Chairman Bob toppled the Bush regime from Paris without firing a shot, and without losing a single fighter.

"Justice comes out of the mouth of a sloganeering cultist," declared the repatrioted Great Leader, who also announced a sale on his prophetically revolutionary DVD.

In all honesty, where do you find the time to protest? I mean, people like me - productive members of society - are working during these hours.

For a group of people who refer to themselves as "workers", they don't seem to get very much actual work done.

In the case of Kurt, this means producing pro war propaganda, and ridiculing those who don't share his privileged perch in yuppiedom.

Groups like the RCP tend to inflate the count by doubling or tripling the actual number. The well known forumula used by activists interested in honesty is to take the number claimed by the organizers and the police estimate and find the average. That's usually the actual number.

Or you can just count if the crowd is small enough.

By the way, real anarchists would not have been at a march organized by the RCP.

Real anarchists?! How dare you. How many commie marches have anarchists marched in, in the past? Dozens!ANSWER, UFPJ...ETC... ALSO if you got off your lazy ass and actually took action on wednesday you would have seen that the anarchists marching were chanting anti-rcp slogans most of the time, AND after the march we succeeded in STOPPING the after march rcp rally by starting a giant drum circle and lighting flags and signs on fire causeing the crowd to turn to us and not the rcp. SO dont judge a tactic when you have no idea what the hell you are talking about

Not enthralled by Uncle Sam,

And are we jealous today? Unlike you, I am REAL worker, because I actually WORK. That's why I don't have time to troll around the streets wearing dirty clothes and carrying idiotic signs.

Yeah I was there, I should have been at work, WORKING, but i thought the first day of a new movement was more important. It was me, with my brand new "Drive out the Bush Regime:Drivers Wanted" T-shirt that turned to the two 14 year old anarchists that were shouting anti - RCP slogans and asked why they were being so sectarian, they stopped when they asked me what "sectarian" means.

To you anarchist: I have NO respect for those (90%) that have NO idea of politics, most of you are in it to wear and pose. The few that can have a deep discussion on ideology are all busy trying to organise the future Democrats (yep, that 90% that doesn't have an ideology ARE going to be tomorows Democratic stronghold).

Get real, quit bad mouthing allies. And to those that really were chanting anti RCP slogans (the only ones I heard ended after I dressed down the teenagers) good job in alienating allies and bringing a cohesive message against the Bush Regime.

(oh yeah, i see how much the CAN group organizes mass action, besides breaking the 43rd ward Republican Party Headquarters what do you do?)

Hey -

Great photos Chris!

I especially like the way you never attempted to get a crowd shot!

Even the Tribune article states 1,200.

Well we've come to expect the Tribune to under estimate crowd numbers at our marches but IMC to be so far off.

I think some one on staff failed math 101

their estimates are closer to 1000. When you consider that the plaza is under construction and the crowd was loosely dispersed throughout it the number of 1000 seems much more plausible.

Rally and march were boring as hell and the speakers, with a few exceptions, were way over the top in their rhetoric. Did someone really say that 20 years from now people's children will ask what we did on November 2, 2005? I'd laugh if I had more of my time to waste but attending the demonstration and posting this comment have wasted enough of it already.

Why all the smiles? Because the police permitted you to march where they told you to while they surrounded you on all sides and at all times? Because the state ALLOWS you to voice your opposition to the war in a peaceful, legal and utterly non-confrontational manner?

So long as people are content to march around the loop in circles chanting "Stop Bush" and "Peace Now" the powers that be will concede nothing and history has proven this to be true time and time again.

"Feel good" demonstrations such as this are a step backward from the achievements of the past 3-4 years and rather than continue to advance the struggle most people are just going through the motions these days.

People need to get serious about ending the war and all forms of exploitation if we're ever going to see a change. People like Cindy Sheehan and Juan Torres have been putting themselves on the line and others are beginning to up the stakes as well. What's ironic, and sad frankly, is that they're taking things further than the so-called radicals and militants. Where are all of the direct action advocates these days? I'm not a fan of the kind of passive civil disobedience that some groups advocate but they too are silent and MIA these days. So WTF?

first off, i thought it was a very good protest. great attendance (for chicago), good spirits throughout, too much police control, plenty of other things to criticize, but overall, im happy with how it turned out. but on the other hand....

indymedia is just upsetting. sometimes we act like college yuppies coming home late from the bars. and anarcho-testosterone competitions, name calling, and other mierda ruin nice posts.

lets get to it. the numbers were 1100-1400. i did overhead pictures and got lots of different POVs. thats a pretty damn good number for chicago regardless of being in the middle of a workday- a city where we should regularly have tens of thousands but we're lucky if we can break into quadruple digits. and part of the turn-off to people? our sectarianism, angrier-than-thou self-righteousness, and authoritarian organizing.

hee heee, a, kludge, counter, REAL ANARCHIST, In Living Color: you guys should be ashamed of your posts. pathetic. we are in a struggle against global systemic oppression, some of us incessantly harassed by police, FBI, DHS. we are fighting a system that commits genocides every day of the world's poor (30k children die every day of malnutrition and cureable causes), that wages wars, and all u can do is lash out at those around you.

please, help make both protests AND our forums (be they alternative press or indymedia) safe places where we can be open and respectful. let the PWs, the cops, rightmarch.com, and other rightists do the spamming and trolling. i was also offended (as a known critic of both the RCP and phony anarcho-hoodlumism) when, after two US flags, some kids decided to burn a World Cant Wait sign. what does that accomplish.

as for WTF? we have got to remember that demonstrations are one tool in the arsenal. we cannot step on each other's toes or attack the tactics of our allies when we are on the same side. if you dont think yesterday's protest was your style of resistance, do something else. but perhaps we can try to support each other in our efforts. does it take that much?

no amount of distasteful spamming or sectarian hoodlumism can turn me off of the struggles i am committed to, but many others are hurt by it. please, cant we all just get along?

man, has no one here got a sense of humor or an ear for irony?

seriously, congrats to the RCP for organizing *anything*, but it's true that the rhetoric of the speakers far out-stripped the numbers on display. we could have a serious debate about the utility of the marches as tactics, but that's not what i was trying do above, b/c, frankly, i don't think that can happen here on indymedia.

the internet is an amazing tool for breaking away the barriers of information disemination, but since we're talking a two-way flow, it also tends to dilute the level of discussion by giving time-wasting mongoloids serious, thoughtful debaters the same weight. Or, to quote the tagline of another very popular site, "The Internets make you stupid."

I don't know why I even bother scrolling past the stories anymore, much less offering my own contribution. If you're upset about the level of discourse you find here, try finding it somewhere else.

burning us flag is cool by me but the protest sign that was dumb

Yeah ya know its nice to hear commies talk about sectarian Anarchists... Why don't they talk about what Lennin did in St. Petersburg.

&&&
Did this protest represent a clear choice?

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Did it attain a mass character?

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Among which people?

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To what extent?

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On what terms?

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Who did the work to organize this?

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What does it say about them?

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Who has opposed this action?

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Been Malign or Benevolent?

***
To what effect was this day of actions?

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What is standing?

***
What else is standing?

+++
What are we doing to obstruct the system, resist the right, bring people into struggle, engage social disobedience?

Say word.

burning the flags and money was amazing... as for the rcp sign...so what? we were starting a fucking bonfire in fed plaza, who cares what burned? as long as it fucking burned...in miami people were burning their own signs...it really is not that big of a deal, all of those signs were dumpstered anyway.

It was great to see the US flag burning in the Sun Times yesterday. Nice job guys.

Starting fires at peaceful rallies downtown has pig provo tracks all over it. Why else do something that invites the Fire Dept to come an put it out? Unless someone is too dumb to give a shit.

Sorry Commie Militant but I started to write something three different times and it's just not coming together in a way that I can feel good about. I have more important things to do at this point and really don't give a fuck about Chicago's pathetic, backward, divisive and poisonous antiwar movement anyway.

So the largest Downtown Protest in months or a year isn't worthy of a center spread??

Thank GOD Indymedia isn't full of this sectarianisn CRAP!

Chairman Bob Avakian told assembled reporters in the Rose Garden of the White House that he would not go to Argentina for the Summit of the Americas. "I've been out of the country too f*****g long, already, you know?" said the Harried Helmsman.

Chairman Avakian has described himself as liking to pig-out on French cuisine due to his long exile in Paris, and is eager to get the White House chef cracking on some of his favorite recipes.

The Chairman chided Hugo Chavez for spending time organizing the workers and turning idle plants over to them. "Its done by selecting just the right slogan, and then willing the leap to state power to happen," intoned the Chairman.

Without criticism and analysis of our events and our "allies" events we won't get anywhere. The numbers were pretty pathetic for the amount of work put into them. The turnout was exagerated and you people have to stop toting Avakian like some sort of messiah.

burning the flags in downtown federal plaza surrounded by cops was quite a thrill and a powerful symbolic message -- completely unmentioned in any RCP or WCW analysis (of course)

I am getting tired of these generalized events. they only serve to demoralise people (with the intent to manipulate them into radicalising as a result which always fails). Less watered down fall-in-line protests and more street theater, DA, aggressive actions.

It's our job to pull chicago up to the level of other cities. Lets start doing that and wasting our efforts on what we know hasn't worked in the past.