The Death of Occupy Wall Street? - Guy Horton

[WillyT]

The Death of Occupy Wall Street?
Guy Horton - HuffPo
Posted: 11/15/11 06:22 AM ET

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Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg and Brookfield Office Properties green-lighting the midnight raid on Occupy Wall Street's "Liberty Square," I am now an insomniac. That will teach me to check Twitter in the wee hours. The revolution will not be televised but it will be Tweeted and YouTubed and Facebooked and emailed and smartphoned. Upon opening, I stumbled into a torrent of urgent calls for help and alerts of an NYPD raid taking place. Then Michael Moore appeared and he was blocked from reaching Zuccotti by, of all things, barricades. Imagine that! Barricades in New York City.

The park was surrounded. Streets were shut down for blocks in all directions. The airspace was controlled by NYPD helicopters with search lights and infrared scanners and other expensive gadgetry. As Richard Kim of The Nation Tweeted, "How much is this costing taxpayers?" Then there was news of something ominously called "the sound cannon." This was being turned on our own citizens. When did the NYPD get one of those? People were being dragged, beaten, pushed, yelled at. Tear gassed. There was this: "LRADs used on #OccupyWallstreet in suprise RAID, confirmed. Live feed: http://ow.ly/7tJSg." I have no idea what an LRAD is but it doesn't sound good and I wouldn't want one used on me. The police knew there were families with children at Zuccotti Park, right? I hope they remembered to use child-doses of tear gas for the little ones.

The most surreal Tweet came from The New York City Mayor's Office: "Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protestors can return after the Park is cleared. #ows." Of course by this time, the tents and belongings of the peaceful assembly had already been broken apart and chucked into dumpsters that were brought in as part of the raid. 5,000 books from the #OWS Library were thrown away. Are these possessions going to be returned? Remember when the city was stealing their generators? What happened to those?

Now I'm still up, unable to sleep as I watch my country fall further into a para-military paranoia about peaceful protestors. The excuse is always the same, whether it's Oakland or any of the multitude of cities where Occupy movements have emerged, authorities always say they must unleash the police because of "unsanitary conditions." This tactic has been used throughout our history to clear undesirable people away. At various times in our history it has been Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Muslims, Women, now it is the 99%. But, it's always been the 99%, whatever race, level of education, religion. All these divisions, but the most significant one is the one voiced by #OWS: the division between the 99% and the 1%, the top and the bottom-to-nearly-non-existent middle.

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/guy-horton/the-death-of-occupy-wall-_b_1094358.html

:kick:

[tblue]

1. I remember during the Bush years

we were told that police or the military (I forget which) were gearing up in preparation for mass public actions, not unlike OWS. It was a scary thought. I thought and hoped it was just a rumor. Turns out, not so much.