Courtesy of The Guardian
If 2,000 Tea Party activists descended on Wall Street, you would probably have an equal number of reporters there covering them. Yet 2,000 people did occupy Wall Street last Saturday. They weren't carrying the banner of the Tea Party, the Gadsden flag with its coiled snake and the threat "Don't Tread on Me". Yet their message was clear: "We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%." They were there, mostly young, protesting the virtually unregulated speculation of Wall Street that caused the global financial meltdown.
Good point. For a group of mostly elderly, mostly white Americans with a distinct dislike of anything "liberal" or "Kenyan," they do know how to grab the mainstream media by the balls and lead them around like Katt Williams leading Terry Crews around with a pair of pliers on "Friday After Next".
But when it comes to a young and diverse group of Americans fed up with what they see as the hijacking (yet again) of America's wealth and well-being by extraordinarily wealthy and well-connected individuals and groups, the mainstream media didn't take much notice. Most Americans were blissfully unaware of what was going down. At least until the arrests and abuses started happening. "If it bleeds, it leads," indeed.
At least this was all over the social media outlets from the get-go. Just take a look at the #occupywallstreet Twitter feed. People keep saying this event, which started on the 17th this month (and there's no telling how long it will last), has the potential of becoming America's very own "Arab Spring."
And to that end, the police have been very eager to move off and arrest protesters, despite little to no threats of violence on their end.
Just to be clear, it was the police who turned violent. Protesters were dancing, singing, chanting. No reports of violence from any source that I have. I know many of those people. I would be there if I were still living in NYC. I watched quite a bit of the live feed (up until the police confiscated the video and computer equipment, arrested the media team). I saw nothing even approaching violence from the protesters...
Think about damn-near every G-8, G-11 and G-20 summit held, where protesters were pushed off, beaten down and locked up on orders from the higher-ups. Nothing different here. It's all designed to make people so afraid of the idea of protesting that they'd be loath to do it, plus it inoculates a "healthy" amount of fear-dressed-up-as-"respect" for the LEOs. Some of them relish the opportunity to swing the baton every once in a while.
There's a live feed of the protests, provided by AnonOps. Take a look.
