Zuccotti Park after Tuesday's police
assault and Wall Street
two mornings later, as OWS responds to the eviction
This movement is growing by leaps and bounds and is not going to go away quietly. Or violently. The people are waking up at an unprecedented pace and TPTB are getting scared. So they bring out their goons. Meanwhile, the Occupy protesters are becoming a true global village, traveling to each others' cities and town and sharing stories and knowledge. Meanwhile, before you get on with the article itself, here are two quotes that are quite fitting under the current circumstances and should not be forgotten.
"... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people." ~ H. G. Wells, in his book entitled The New World Order (1939)"When nations get disappointed on their governments, the population will start to clamor for a singular Government that can bring peace and harmony. This will be the moment to enthrone our sovereign" ~ Member of the Illuminati
By Dave
Lindorff
November 17,
2011
The scripted excuses provided
by mayors around the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting
peaceful occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now
stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in
wording, can be clearly seen as having been drawn up for them by some hidden
hands in Washington. The same can be said of the brutal tactics used.
If Mayor Jean Quan in
Oakland, or Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York, had been genuinely concerned
about the health and well-being of the people in the encampments in their
cities, they would not have dispatched police suited up in riot gear and armed
with pepper spray and big clubs into the camps in the dead of night, as each did,
and as other mayors are doing.
They would not have used tear
gas and guns firing projectiles like so called "bean bags" and rubber
coated bullets, as police in Oakland reportedly did on several occasions ~
weapons that can cause severe injury and even death on occasion, especially
when fired at close range.
They would not have stormed
encampments that are known to have pregnant women, children and even babies
living in them.
Rather, they would have come
in during broad daylight, peacefully, and accompanied by health inspectors and
other personnel who could to try to help solve any problems.
In Bloomberg's case, if he
really cared about the safety and well-being of the protesters, he would have
long ago had the city set up a bank of port-a-potties near Zuccotti Park, so
protesters could relieve themselves without having to foul the streets. And he
would certainly not have barred demonstrators from setting up tents, forcing
people, in increasingly harsh weather, including one heavy unseasonal
snowstorm, to survive under plastic tarps laid on the cold flagstones over
their sleeping bags.
If public safety were
seriously an issue, as Quan, Bloomberg and the other mayors have also tried to
claim, police would have been told not to direct vagrants and people with
mental problems from around the city to head for Zuccotti Square, as New York's
Police Department was caught doing.
Instead of acting like thugs
and an occupying force penning in demonstrators, police would have worked out a
coordinated system with demonstrators to help protect those in the park from
any sexual predators or mentally unbalanced persons who might have entered the
park to cause trouble.
Actually, the regions in and
around the encampments have never been safer than they are now with all those
demonstrators on hand.
Take Center City in
Philadelphia. The area on Dilworth Plaza and around City Hall has always been a
scary place to find one's self alone at night because so few people actually
live there, making lone pedestrians up on the street or down in the tunnels of
the train station or subways easy targets for muggers, rapists and thieves.
The same is certainly also
true of downtown Oakland and of New York's financial district. If there have
been crimes committed by people in the encampments, they are few and far
between and mostly minor, and it is almost a certainty that overall crime and
especially violent crime is down significantly in the areas where the protests
are being staged.
There can be
no real justification
for the
growing number of paramilitary police assaults
against the
occupation camps.
These coordinated assaults on
the Occupation Movement are clearly happening not for the reasons stated, but
because the ruling elites, particularly the powerful bankers and financiers on
Wall Street, and the Obama administration in Washington, are frightened by the
growing popularity of the protests, by the movement's rapid spread to cities
across the country, large and small, and to the resonance that chants like
"We're the 99 percent!" and "Banks got bailouts! We got sold
out!" are having among the general population of the United States.
Bloomberg and Quan, and the
mayors of other cities from Atlanta to Dallas to Portland to Seattle and back
to Boston who have been unleashing their police forces on peaceful protesters
in their jurisdictions, have been doing the movement a great favor by brutally
attacking protesters' right to demonstrate and present their grievances.
The corporate media, which at
first tried to ignore the occupations, have had to cover the assaults ~ even if
they misreport them.
And the images of idealistic
young people being thrown on the ground, hammered with batons, and sprayed in
the face with pepper spray, are deeply upsetting to most ordinary people.
Workers are increasingly
angered and aroused, and many are touched by the support for their struggles
being manifested by the young student demonstrators.
And
importantly,
the enemy of
the public is being given a face.
No longer is it just a bunch
of unidentified and overly aggressive cops. Now it's clear that it is the
mayors, and whoever it is in the background who is giving them their marching
orders, who are instructing the cops to go in and bust heads.
Mayor Bloomberg ~ a man reportedly worth $19.5 billion, up a
staggering $1.5 billion over the last year while other Americans are becoming
poorer ~ is in fact the perfect symbol of what is wrong with today's America.
Having this greedy "one percenter" issue the marching orders to the
police in New York makes it absolutely clear what this repression is about.
With this wave of assaults,
the Occupation Movement is being forced to shift gears ~ to move out of the
cramped spaces to which it has been confined and to become an uprising for
economic justice, instead of just an occupation as an act of protest.
Zuccotti has been reoccupied,
but the movement is busting out of the police barricades that surround the
square.
Perhaps a group of young
musicians standing on a street corner at 66th and Broadway just off Lincoln
Square in New York City, doing a "mic check" routine at 11 pm the
evening after the police assault on Zuccotti Plaza, said it best with their
sign, which read:
"Nostalgia for the
Student Protests of the Past Dies Here!"
The '60s are over.
It's the
'10s now and rebellion is in the air.
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