The Well Orchestrated Protest

Protests just aren't what they used to be. Now they're carefully staged media events where even the arrests are scripted in advance.

Such was the case yesterday near LAX when hotel workers (who are probably overwhelmingly illegal immigrants) tried to shut down access to the airport to "protest working conditions", which translated means they want to unionize all airport-area hotels. According to news reports this morning, this particular protest had been planned months in advance, coordinated with the police department even to the extend of preregistering those who were going to be arrested, and timed to start during the evening news shows.

Because of the advance planning, they had little effect on traffic in and out of LAX. The cops simply routed people around (there are plenty of ways to get in there). There were some inconvenienced folks (and of course the LA Times managed to find them to make it look like the protest was effective), but overall this was nothing more than a staged media event, and given the sarcastic TV reporting I heard this morning, I don't think the protest organizers really did themselves that much good.