UPDATE 10:00am CST 10/02/11 There is video of the NYPD actually leading the marchers into the Brooklyn Bridge roadway.
From multiple sources, it seems clear that yesterday's mass arrests of at least 700 people who marched on the Brooklyn Bridge as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement was an event engineered by law enforcement rather than the result of intentional violations of ordinances.
The image below shows that this narrative was squashed almost from the beginning.
Indeed. The supposedly "liberal" NY Times altered already reported and published content, shifting it to an official version which is provably untrue.
At the nine minute mark in the video below, one witness describes the events as they unfolded.
"The police did not stop us from walking on the lower portion, which was the roadway, as opposed to the walking deck. I assumed that what we were doing when we were approaching the bridge and going up it was what the police wanted us to do."
Of course it was.
HuffPo's Jason Cherkis interviewed another eyewitness, 33 year old New York resident Joshua Stevens. Stevens makes a damning observation.
"The interesting thing is the cops could have stopped people from getting on the motorway at any point. You had thousands of people in that march--easily two or three thousand -- and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge is not wide. It's narrow. It's the width of a walkway. You can't just rush it. The march slowed to almost a stop. The police would have had plenty of opportunity to prevent people [from going] down to the motorway."
This is an old trick. It is exactly the kind of tactic law enforcement used to split and arrest protesters in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The participants were essentially guided into their arrests. The New York Times editorial staff should be ashamed of themselves. Somehow, I doubt they are.
It is up to all of us to set the record straight.
Sorry... I'm about to disagree with you and most of this protest's approach. I'm a liberal, and I'm just as infuriated by how Wall Street acts as the rest of you. Where I can, I avoid giving my money to corporations and investors altogether by buying local.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it seems to me that many in this protest are exaggerating the opposition they've seen and it has become the topic instead of the initial reasons for the protest. In over a week, the only damning thing I've seen is the pepper spray incident. If after a week, your biggest complaint is police arresting you for essentially jaywalking, then you need to re-asses what you are spending your time "reporting" about. Did you ever think that they led you onto the bridge because it was clearly a trap? And you fell right into it. It's easier to make arrests for disturbance on a bridge than in the open city blocks. They didn't coax you so that they COULD arrest, they were already planning on it. This is not the fault of the police. They are doing their job. If you plan to go out into the street to protest, you need to arm yourself with knowledge of the law. Print it out if you have to. If they knew the law, they would have known they were subject to arrest.
Now, complaints about "police brutality" are probably 90% of what I've seen protestors talking about. That frankly makes me sad, because if you bother looking at the news and revolutions worldwide, the brutality others face is real and trying to magnify the "struggles" in this protest for comparison purposes is insensitive (not attributing that to your blog, but it has been common on social media).
Now, instead of feeding into this diverted narrative that has become about police rather than Wall Street, I would far more like to see people talking about how this movement needs to change to actually get somewhere. As you previously posted, I fully agree that the message is incoherent, scattered, and therefore lacks any meaning. A bunch of people running into the street screaming different demands is not a revolution, it's a mob. I'd hope that these people could take a lesson from our American History and learn to organize and present a list of grievances. Even if Wall Street did want to listen, they wouldn't be able to comprehend the mess. Right now, Occupy Wall Street is a bunch of "rabble! rabble! rabble!", whereas if a common voice were adopted, the message would be that much louder. If the organizers of this event are too stubborn to take the advice of many fellow liberals like you and I, then we need to see better leaders out there. How do we find them now?
I wrote at length last weekend about just these concerns. There has been progress.
ReplyDeletehttp://handthatfeedsyou.blogspot.com/2011/10/demands-of-occupy-wall-street.html
I think it important to back this movement for the reason that the unions and more experienced activists are now joining and taking a role. This will bring specifically targeted goals and initiatives to the fore.
Sally Kohn wrote splendidly today:
"I stand by my original points that optics matter and that movements leadership should prioritize those who are most often harmed by the status quo and locked out of the process of creating solutions. Millions of individuals and communities beaten down by economic mismanagement are finding their soul and voice in Occupy Wall Street, and the movement is open and wise enough to stretch and grow in response. And yesterday, peacefully marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, the mobilization went from a picture of a few ragtag protesters occupying the financial sector to a portrait of humanity being occupied by the most powerful police force in the nation defending the interests of capital."
http://movementvision.org/rants-polemics/in-praise-of-occupywallstreet-an-apology/?fb_ref=.TohgC0q5Ncc.like&fb_source=profile_multiline
I think the people who should have been marching and organizing LONG ago weren't doing what they know how to do. If the Occupation movement gets them back in the game? It is an inherently positive action.