It occurred on Sunday Sep 16 during the Occupy Wall Street march to protest the proposed Spectra fracking gas line in NYC. CodePink sought to connect environmental and economic destruction by highlighting the big banks that back fracking, coal mountaintop removal, deforestation, and other disastrous projects.
See what a threat she is? She is opposed to destroying the environment for profit.
Mainstream media outlets spent the weekend minimizing and trivializing the accomplishments of the Occupy movement (I refuse to link to any such articles -- you will have to find them yourself, which should be easy, since those who follow 1% communication marching orders own most all the airwaves, newspapers and magazines). But they will have to work extra hard today to ignore the massive street presence (detailed here in Business Insider!) that will attempt to shut down Wall St. for #S17.
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| "Let me see your papers..." photo fromOccupy Tampa tweet: People who works in the Wall St area being asked for ID #ows #S17 twitter.yfrog.com/h057412... |
#S17 and #OWS already trending on twitter this anniversary morning at 6:50am Eastern time -- check there for more livestreams as events unfold. "Riot police donning gear" was just tweeted out by Allison Kilkenny, a good one to follow on Twitter.
Hooray for the citizen journalists who do the unglamorous and undercompensated work of bringing us the real news of our day! Kevin Gosztola has become a favorite of mine because of his coverage of the trial of truth-teller Bradley Manning. Here's his coverage in Firedoglake of Pre Anniversary Arrests by NYPD.
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| Crowd at Spokescouncil meeting Sun afternoon in NYC. My prediction: you ain't seen nothing yet. |
A more outstanding case of news media nervousness, via trivialization, was laid on Clint Eastwood at the Republican convention. The word "bizarre" was thrown around a lot, and some previouisly unheard-of media academic said it was a shame that a dithering old senior citizen was allowed to embarrass himself in public. So I tuned in for five minutes or so and he was knocking them dead, even in the face of the same timidity that the news media was seeking to reinforce, as it turned out, against him. He got that crowd going, like with the question, "The President made a big deal about setting 2014 as the draw-down in Afghanistan--so, Mr. President [addressing the empty chair--the symbol of a non-responsive President--remember Doonesbury's invisible President?], why don't you just bring them all home now?"
ReplyDeleteThe truth has a ring to it in these situations. You either laugh it away, try to get people to figure it doens't matter (bumper sticker handed out at the Democratic convention: bin Laden is dead; GM is alive), or you say it, and watch them run, like pigs from a gun, see how they run, I'm crying. People know when other people are serious.
Rae was arrested for blocking a sidewalk. It's hard to tell if they left a clear lane for pedestrians to bypass their demonstration. If the cops see a bunch of people breaking the law, it's fair that they can arrest whom they want--like speeders on the road--and even just to arrest the leader of a group of law-breakers. If this was civil disobedience, then getting arrested is the goal.
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