The news that police reaction to the Wall Street protests turned violent yesterday probably comes as no surprise to most who visit here. There’s coverage, including photos and video at The Guardian, Common Dreams and Occupy Wall Street.
The scenes are showing signs of attracting high-profile criticism. Anne-Marie Slaughter, who was director of policy planning, at the State Department from 2009 to 2011, said on Twitter: “Not the image or reality the US wants, at home or abroad,” linking to a picture of a police officer kneeling on a protester pinned to the ground.
A video posted on YouTube and NYDailyNews.com shows uniformed officers had corralled the women using orange nets when two supervisors made a beeline for the women, and at least one suddenly sprayed the women before turning and quickly walking away.
From the 99 percent at Occupy Wall Street
We stand in solidarity with homeowners across the country and the world whose homes are in the process of being stolen by faceless conglomerations motivated only by profit. We are the 99 percent. We will not let you steal our homes. We will not let you deprive us of a basic right, shelter, so that you can buy a home you do not use. We are here. We are growing. And we will not be moved.
Live stream
The US media finally begins to jump in today.
Update [2011-9-26 20:42:50 by Indianadem]: Police violence was captured by a freelance photographer during the Saturday march returning from Union Square.
The protesters were marching back to Zuccotti Park when the NYPD turned violent. Hitting, arresting and forcing protesters into a small area. At that point a NYPD supervisor yelled shut up to one of the protesters and shot pepper spray into her eyes point blank range and hitting a half dozen protesters (including 3 police officers) when they had nowhere to go.
Recommended and tweeted. It’s nice to see a substantial diary amidst all the spam.
Short and
sweetbitter, though.It makes the point quite aptly.
Also, I’m beginning to have Chicago 1968 flashbacks…
If it weren’t already bleeding obvious that the status quo for what passes for the “left” in the US is no longer acceptable, what’s going down in NYC should do it. Really, the left deserves far better representation than it has, but that will require a good deal of thinking outside the current partisan box (and an enormous amount of patience – class warfare tends stretch back a ways and will stretch forward a ways as well).
A better analogy is to the October 1967 march on the Pentagon in which police cracked heads in the middle of the night and radicalized a generation.
What is different. Livestreaming. Experience in police suppression of protests. And successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. And a process for engaging ordinary citizens of all political persuasions that did not exist in previous actions.
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Thanks for the diary and links! Another twitter @PulseOfProtest indicating support from Wisconsin.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."However, the ever-reliable Google News page…reliable in the sense that it will tell you what the mass media are considering “important” and thus also what is being non-personed by the PermaGov…has only one tepid mention of the goings on in Lower Manhattan while simultaneously breathlessly reporting about (among many other things) the drama surrounding the
selection of a Ratpublican presidential frontman, how one of the stars of a new TV drama is “opening up about his sexuality” and how some engineers are going to rappel down our oh-so-phallic Washington monument to find out why its erection is showing signs of instability.The demonstration is a non-occurrence, so far. As long as it remains small, non-violent and mostly young, white and middle class, it will stay so. If it gets larger, more violent and/or more multiracial or more working class/lower class/poverty class-inclusive, it will be quickly and mercilessly crushed by the Bloomberg police.
Bet on it.
Short of a sudden incursion on Wall Street by many thousands of people…not happening and not about to happen, apparently…this movement will simply fizzle out.
Sorry, but there it is.
Watch.
AG
As long as it is opposed, it is likely to grow.
The two methods of repressive tolerance that have worked in the past is (1) allowing it to run its course (people get tired of camping out) and (2) co-option into electoral politics and commercialization of its symbols. The fact that it is political but not electoral is what most analysts find baffling.
Add to those the third and possibly most effective option:
Disappearing it, as they are presently trying to do to Ron Paul. He is so dangerous to the PermaGov!!! Have you read his 11-point plan? It is essentially his platform and a manifesto on real revolution within the system.
Anybody who says that he will “get the troops home as soon as the ships could get there” is a terrible danger to the PermaGov and its permanent war policy, and the corporate media are blatantly non-personing him in a desperate effort to avoid having to deal with him on a political level. How many followers does he have already? Well, considering the kind of grassroots money that he is collecting, they already number well into the millions.
If the media can disappear him they can disappear anything that is not in-your-face violent. As long as a couple of hundred middle class white student types pose no real, physical threat to the workings of Wall Street, they simply do not exist in the media compared to say bisexual actors or wardrobe malfunctions.
So it goes.
AG
I know a lot of his rhetoric about the War on Terra excited a few folks, but really there’s a reason why he’s a poster boy for the Tea Party. He may say a few things that are threatening to the military-industrial complex etc., but at the end of the day if he had any real access to power, he’d be a champion of the same cultural backwardness and white supremacism that we’d be best off avoiding altogether.
I do not read that off of him, Don. I really don’t. I went in skeptical but the more I hear him and the more I examine both his statements and his history, the more I think that he just flat-out believes in the Constitution and further believes that it…and its basic aims…have been totally circumvented by the Permanent Government that has been in power here for well over 45 or 50 years.
He is no kind of white supremacist, for sure. He has been tagged with that accusation because his strict constructionist approach says that the Civil Rights acts were unconstitutional and that a better result would have been achieved by the use of more local means. I am not at all sure that “the Civil Rights” period was really very effective, to tell you the truth. 50 years later, what has happened? There is still a permanent, poverty-stricken underclass of color in the United States and the stable and thriving black urban working class communities that provided not only real shelter for their residents but also made a huge positive impact on the general culture as a whole have been almost totally decimated.
As a young white jazz and latin musician I was privileged to live and function in the role of a not-the-enemy-because-he-understands-the-music guest in a number of those communities before they were destroyed…Harlem, Boston’s Roxbury, the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of NYC and Atlantic City’s pre-casino black community primary among them…and I mourn their loss.
I really do.
Perhaps things would have turned out differently…maybe better…had the constitution been followed rather than circumvented during the Civil Rights era. I am damned sure that things would be better for all Americans if the illegal…in a strict constitutional sense, let alone a moral one…”wars” in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan had not been allowed to happen. But they were allowed to happen.
This is Ron Paul’s main point. When he is “covered’ by the media, the covering usually consists of tar and feathers as he is regularly branded a racist, an isolationist and/or a flakey, far right wing kook.
He is none of those things.
On the evidence.
He is an ideologue and a strict Constitutional constructionist. Nothing more and nothing less. Certainly not totally “correct”, but he does keep trying, and he appears to keep evolving as well. As of today he has my vote, and Barack Obama would have to pull off some kind of miracle to get that vote back. Like…arrest and effectively prosecute Dick Cheney and the heads of most of the institutions that have been guilty of causing the ongoing collapse of the economy of his country. (Never happen. Also on the evidence.)
I have a principle regarding the mainstream media that has worked out very well for me over the years since the JFK assassination.
All mass media content is disinformation.
All of it.
Sports, entertainment, politics, economic coverage, world affairs…the works. Whatever the media says, look immediately in another direction for the truth of the matter. Or, in the case of bread-and-circuses content like sports, simply look away. Look elsewhere.
Ron Paul’s non-coverage by the media has so far resembled the dog that didn’t bark in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze.
Paul has consistently gotten by far the most enthusiastic responses from the audience during the debates; he has amassed a considerable political war chest from grass roots contributions and he has consistently moved up in the polls as well, yet until this week it was all “Romney/Perry!!!” or “Perry/Romney!!!” with a “Bachmann is a freak” sideshow as comic relief over and over again in the media. Not even a mention of Ron Paul, most times.
Hmmmmm…
Precisely, my dear Watson.
Precisely.
Do not watch the media magician’s featured hand. Instead, watch the one that appears to be doing nothing. That is where the action lies most of the time. That is where the lies are most plainly to be seen in action, as well.
Bet on it.
I am.
Later…
AG