Sunday, October 02, 2011

99%



Gotta love #occupywallstreet as the anti-Tea Party protest with real truth behind it -- that an unbridled Wall Street serving the 1% at the top got us into the current financial mess and they have paid no real price for it, not one that counts. Not one that will keep them from doing this again.

This weekend it spread to other cities and also intensified in NYC, with 700 arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge. People of all ages are represented and one has to wonder if the cops really want to be doing this where there's real crime going on all the time in NYC, and not just in the those towers being protested. Not to mention that those cops are the ones who get hurt when those big money-backed Republicans like those in Wisconsin start taking away public union rights. And how come 700 people have been arrested for protesting, yet not one indictment has been handed down to the high finance crooks themselves.

In the age of online social media, there is a huge amount to look at, to learn from, to help connect with the organizing. The Facebook page, the Twitter handle, the Tumblr. Here's some great pics at The Atlantic showing the sweep of the protest. Help pay the movement's media costs here.

Most importantly, the grievances. Peaceful and damning. We have yet to see if it lasts or fizzles, if it leads to change or fractures, if the authorities start sending in undercover thugs to turn things violent as they did regularly in the 1960's and the repressive Middle East regimes have done during Arab Spring, to discredit the movement.

If nothing else, it does the heart good to see there are protesters in America who aren't carrying posters of President Obama with a black toothbrush mustache.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

btw: I haven't seen much comment anywhere that, in our land of free and open dissent, OWS has been penned in about 1/4 mile from *actual* Wall Street. (No doubt to avoid offending the tender sensibilities of our heroic and patriotic investment banking sector.)

slick said...

The 3 cycles/facts of history per John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath:
"... when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed." As relevant during the Great Depression as it is now, during the Great Recession.