Re: [Marxism] Organizers and NYC cop agree: 500,000 marched

["Eli Stephens" <elishastephens@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The NY Times may have found "one officer in touch with the police command
center" who agrees that a half million is about right, but most media
outlets are still reporting the absurd "unofficial" police estimate of
120,000. Both the Times and the Post started their coverage with initial
stories claiming "tens of thousands", but both were forced (I suspect by
complaints and not by events, since they already knew the truth) to revise
their headlines to "hundreds of thousands" later in the day. None willing to
go with the even more accurate, and more impressive, "half million."

I watched, off and on, the entire march on C-SPAN. Here on the West Coast,
it passed by MSG starting at 9 a.m. and didn't end until 1:30 p.m., a full 4
1/2 hours, and it was SOLIDLY packed the entire time. There was a brief
period when the march was halted at the beginning as Jesse Jackson prayed
(or whatever he does), and another brief period (maybe 10-15 minutes) while
firefighters put out the fire of the blazing dragon, but other than that the
march moved steadily past MSG the entire time.

For those who didn't see the C-SPAN coverage, the most amusing part was that
the main camera (there were several) was right in front of a large Fox News
billboard, and BY FAR the most popular chant heard during the day, for 4 1/2
hours, was "Fox News sucks." Signs, by contrast, clearly were overwhelmingly
antiwar. There were several people with Kerry T-shirts and buttons, but none
with signs as far as I saw. The Nader-Camejo contingent was audibly booed,
with their most prominent sign reading "Bush-Kerry=War, Nader-Camejo=Peace"
(or something like that). The only other significant "issue" contingent that
I caught was a pro-Palestinian contingent.

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