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I won't speak for any other of the Occupy camps, but the camp in DC made me feel as if I were back in college, at the kind of party my roommate would invite me along to where he insisted I'd have a great time even though I didn't know a soul in the place — the crowd would already be off in their own cliques, their own circles, their own conversations, oozing that "we don't care to know you" vibe all over the place. Not a single person I knew or worked with in nearly 20 years of activism and activist media was there. It was as if a bunch of total strangers just parachuted into DC, set up their insular little space and did their insular little thing without making any effort to reach out and connect with the DC local activist community who'd have been more than happy to pitch in.

I was still with DC Indymedia at the time; swung by the press tent, introduced myself, slipped 'em a card, let 'em know who I was and who I was with, told 'em who I could hook 'em up with if they needed help with media, offered to donate some DVD's to the camp library... and nobody at DC IMC ever heard from 'em. Like the folks at the Occupy camp didn't even give a shit; like they just ignored me and every other activist in DC who'd been working on antiwar shit, antiglobalization, setting up the IMC, the whole 9 yards. Was like they wanted nothing to do with any activists who were actually FROM WASHINGTON DC.

The Occupy DC camp made me feel as if I were a total stranger, as if totally devoid of any kind of welcoming vibe of any kind, and it made covering their events a total drag — y'know, as if I were crashing somebody else's party. The fact that the whole scene was basically astroturfed by Adbusters Magazine didn't help things any.

Even inasmuch as the Boss Media were 101% tone-deaf and full of shit about Occupy, I had to agree — after covering Occupy for a while — that their No. 1 problem was that they issued no clear set of demands and had no clear goals other than camp out and raise hell until the cops ran them outta the place.

When we were organizing for Seattle/WTO and the IMF/World Bank, we had clear, publicly-stated goals, objectives and demands — none of this loosey-goosey "bring your own goals" horseshit.