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Anti-Wall Street protesters arrested in New York
Posted by Xeno on September 26, 2011
At least 80 people have been arrested during an anti-Wall Street march in New York’s financial district.
Several hundred people took part in Saturday’s march, which was intended to draw attention to “corporate greed and corrupt politics” in the US.
Participants carried banners supporting a range of other issues, including healthcare reform, an end to US wars and the scrapping of the death penalty.
The march came after a week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street campaign.
The loosely organised group says it is defending 99% of the US population against the wealthiest 1%, and had called for 20,000 people to “flood into lower Manhattan” on 17 September and remain there for “a few months”.
Protesters, who are mostly young, initially numbered some 1,500 but their numbers had fallen to about 200 by Saturday’s march.
There was a heavy security presence in the district, with police deploying nets to block off major roads including Fifth Avenue and to protect the New York Stock Exchange.
One protester, 21-year-old Ryan Reed, said he joined in “because what I see – and what I feel most people in this country see – is an economy and a system that’s collapsing”.
“The enemy is the big business leaders of Wall Street, the big oil company leaders, the coal company leaders, the big military industrial leaders.”
A number of placards also called for “justice for Troy Davies”, the US man executed in Georgia last week amid widespread criticism.
Police said most of Saturday’s arrests were for disorderly conduct and blocking traffic, but one person was charged with assaulting a police officer. One officer also suffered a shoulder injury, said police.
They have not commented on protest organisers’ comments that there had been an “unprecedented level of police aggression” on display.
A statement on the Occupy Wall Street website said the protesters have “an interest in returning the US back into the hands of its individual citizens”.
“Our nation, our species and our world are in crisis. The US has an important role to play in the solution, but we can no longer afford to let corporate greed and corrupt politics set the policies if our nation.” …
via BBC News – Anti-Wall Street protesters arrested in New York.
Historically, when the rift between the rich and the poor becomes wide enough, there is revolution. That’s what I think, but here is a (libertarian site?) that says the current gap is a good thing:
“The number of poor people who can’t afford food for their children is a lot smaller than it used to be — thanks to capitalism. Capitalism didn’t create malnutrition, it reduced it. The globalization of capitalism from 1950 to the present has increased annual average income in the world to $7,000 from $2,000. Contrary to popular legend, poor countries grew at about the same rate as the rich ones. This growth gave us the greatest mass exit from poverty in world history.
“The parts of the world that are still poor are suffering from too little capitalism. Foreign direct investment in Africa today, although rising, amounts to only 1% of global flows. That’s because the environment for private business in Africa is still hostile. There are some industry and country success stories in Africa, but not enough.” – WILLIAM R. EASTERLY
Ann said
As we rush through the “news” to find out what’s new, we may forget that some news is more important than other news.
And, some of that news may be just left-overs after major news networks chomp down.
This is from fair.com –
Some Breaks in the Blackout of Wall Street Protests
9/29/11
After a FAIR Action Alert (9/23/11) criticized the virtual media blackout of the Occupy Wall Street protests, corporate news coverage has increased–sparked largely by the escalating police brutality at the ongoing demonstration. (See FAIR Blog, 9/23/11, for a sample of the messages sent by FAIR activists to the network nightly news shows.)
On ABC World News Sunday (9/25/11), anchor David Muir read this short item while playing footage of cops assaulting protesters:
And here in New York, protests continued against the big banks and the bailout that helped the banks, Wall Street, they say, not Main Street. It turned ugly this weekend when protesters marching through Lower Manhattan clashed with police. One man right there brought down forcefully by an officer. About 80 people were arrested, in fact. The protesters posted this video on the Internet.
NBC Nightly News aired a somewhat longer report the next day (9/26/11), with correspondent Ron Allen actually traveling downtown to the protest encampment in Liberty Plaza. His report included this “he said, she said”: “The protesters charge that the police used excessive force. The police say that anyone who resists arrest can expect to encounter some level of force, but nothing excessive.” The following morning’s Today show (9/27/11) briefly aired footage of a police official pepper-spraying nonviolent demonstrators in the face, noting that “the NYPD calls the officer’s actions appropriate.”
Some journalists seemed strikingly reluctant to take videotaped evidence of police violence at face value. CNN anchor Ali Velshi (9/26/11) introduced footage of a police assault by dismissively saying that protesters were “now screaming abuse after they were arrested over the weekend.” After the footage of a cop violently subduing a protester, co-anchor Carol Costello noted, “Of course, what you can’t see is what came before the fight”–a disclaimer that could be made of every single piece of videotape that CNN runs.
A September 27 New York Times piece (FAIR Blog, 9/28/11) seemed to defend the police force’s brutal response, with reporter Joseph Goldstein depicting a police department concerned about “terrorism” and the “destruction and violence” that supposedly accompany “anticapitalist demonstrations.” Such police worries, according to Goldstein, “came up against a perhaps milder reality on Saturday, when their efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated”–an oddly passive way to introduce the use of pepper spray and body slams against nonviolent demonstrators.
“Even as the members of Occupy Wall Street seem unorganized and, at times, uninformed, their continued presence creates a vexing problem for the Police Department,” Goldstein wrote–though his acceptance of media myths about violent demonstrators (Extra!, 1-2/00, 3-4/00; FAIR Action Alert, 7/25/00) makes the reporter seem less informed than the protesters he patronizes.
Similar condescension was on display in another New York Times piece (“Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim,” 9/25/11), with reporter Ginia Bellafonte deriding the “intellectual vacuum” of the protests, with “its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it.” Bellafante described one protester as a “half-naked woman… with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968.”
The Times did, however, print a column by Jim Dwyer (9/28/11) that grappled seriously with the police brutality on display in the videos of the march. “If a nightstick were substituted for pepper spray, a conventional weapon instead of an exotic one, the events on 12th Street would bear a strong resemblance to simple assault,” Dwyer noted straightforwardly.
Perhaps the harshest critic of police violence in corporate media was MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who devoted a remarkable segment to the issue on September 26. Pointing to footage of police tackling a person carrying a video camera, O’Donnell noted:
The reason that man is being assaulted by the police is because of what he has in his hand. He’s holding a professional grade video camera. Since the Rodney King beating was caught on an amateur video camera, American police officers have known video cameras are their worst enemy. They will do anything they can to stop you from legally videotaping how they handle their responsibility to serve and protect you.
Another outstanding moment in corporate media coverage was filmmaker Michael Moore’s appearance on CNN (9/26/11). Host Piers Morgan gave Moore a rare opportunity to actually articulate some of the grievances that have prompted the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in the first place:
The main thing is, number one, is that the rich are getting away with a huge crime. Nobody has been arrested on Wall Street for the crash of 2008. They’re not paying their fair share of the taxes. And now with the Citizens United case of the Supreme Court, they get to buy politicians up out in the open….
It all points to, are we going to live in a democracy that’s run by the majority of the people, or are we going to be living in a kleptocracy, where the kleptomaniacs down on Wall Street, who have stolen people’s pension funds, they’ve wrecked people’s lives, millions have been thrown out of their homes, millions are without health insurance, millions have lost their jobs?
Still, as late as this week, some in the media establishment were continuing to debate whether the Occupy Wall Street protests were worth covering at all. NPR ombud Edward Schumacher-Matos devoted a column (9/26/11) to the network’s decision not to air any reports on the demonstration:
We asked the newsroom to explain their editorial decision. Executive editor for news Dick Meyer came back: “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”
The next day, the previously unimportant non-news was worth covering after all, as Schumacher-Matos wrote (9/27/11):
The Occupy Wall Street protests have persisted into this week, so the newsroom has decided to include a segment on tonight’s All Things Considered.
FAIR thanks all media activists who wrote to news outlets and helped to change their minds about the newsworthiness of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. There’s still a long way to go.
Xeno said
Thanks Ann, Good write up. These attacks by “the man” on protesters are a consequence of our collective complacency. I am guilty, for my part. For example, I heard about the 2.3 trillion dollars that disappeared and all I did is blog about it. I did not march. I did not make phone calls. I did not do everything possible to find out who ripped us off. Yes, this is just one tiny protrusion of the flaming giant squid that is our dissolving economy … we can’t keep it under the rug much longer
Ann said
In the length of that report – 2.5 minutes – that you link to, Xeno, the Pentagon spent $2,000,000. Every two and a half minutes the Pentagon spends $2,000,000.
And, the fact that the Pentagon lost, cannot account for $2,300,000,000,000, which is $8,000 for every person in the United States …. is, according the report, old news, even before 9-10-2001
Our government spent how many billions in corporate bailouts? I read somewhere it’s over a trillion dollars, altogether in just the last few years.
Try to convince we couldn’t have free medicine, free education and much greater opportunities for jobs in the United States, if the government and its industry collaborators weren’t more …. shall we say, democratic?
“Tell me over and over again, my friend, we’re not on the eve of fascism” – a modification of Barry McGuire’s hit, long ago.
Xeno said
But did you hear that one of the 9/11 planes supposedly crashed into and destroyed all of the records for the investigation into the missing $2.3 trillion which Rumsfeld announced would be investigated…the day before 9/11?
Ann said
Yes, but I seriously doubt “all the records” have been destroyed. It might well be just another “cover-up.” The video you link to says that a guy tried to investigate the missing money, but he was bascially ridiculed and in the end transfered to another department. If “all the records” were destroyed, why would he try to investigate? If “all the records” were destroyed why was he stone-walled?
What I’m saying is $2.3 trillion dollars is just a drop in the bucket. That money was lost over a matter of how many years?
At $2 million dollars per ever 2.5 minutes (365 days in a year x 24 hours/day x 60 min/hour = all divided by 2.5 min, then x $2 million) that’s almost 1/2 trillion dollars in one year. And, that is the amount we know about used to create, not elimenate by all sensible accounts (not media pundits, and pentagaon and militarism advocates), even more terrorism. That’s the amount we can do something about … if we were vocal enough. After all, we’re still living in a “democracy” … so far.
Ann said
Has the revolution grown?
“Similar protests are sprouting in other cities, including Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.”
From Reuters:
More than 700 arrested in Wall Street protest
By Ray Sanchez
NEW YORK | Sun Oct 2, 2011 2:57am EDT
(Reuters) – Police reopened the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday evening after more than 700 anti-Wall Street protesters were arrested for blocking traffic lanes and attempting an unauthorized march across the span.
The arrests took place when a large group of marchers, participating in a second week of protests by the Occupy Wall Street movement, broke off from others on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway and headed across the Brooklyn-bound lanes.
“Over 700 summonses and desk appearance tickets have been issued in connection with a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge late this afternoon after multiple warnings by police were given to protesters to stay on the pedestrian walkway, and that if they took roadway they would be arrested,” a police spokesman said.
“Some complied and took the walkway without being arrested. Others proceeded on the Brooklyn-bound vehicular roadway and were. The bridge was re-opened to traffic at 8:05 p.m. (0005 GMT Sunday).”
Most of those who were arrested were taken into custody off the bridge, issued summonses and released.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene on the famous suspension bridge as a sea of police officers surrounded the protesters using orange mesh netting.
Some protesters tried to get away as officers started handcuffing members of the group. Dozens of protesters were seen handcuffed and sitting on the span as three buses were called in to take them away, witnesses and organizers said.
The march started about 3:30 p.m. from the protesters’ camp in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan near the former World Trade Center. Members of the group have vowed to stay at the park through the winter.
CELEBRITY SUPPORT
In addition to what they view as excessive force and unfair treatment of minorities, including Muslims, the movement is also protesting against home foreclosures, high unemployment and the 2008 bailouts.
Filmmaker Michael Moore and actress Susan Sarandon have stopped by the protesters’ camp, which is plastered with posters with anti-Wall Street slogans and has a kitchen and library, to offer their support.
Friday evening, more than 1,000 demonstrators, including representatives of labor organizations, held a peaceful march to police headquarters a few blocks north of City Hall to protest what they said was a heavy-handed police response the previous week. No arrests were reported.
A week ago, police arrested about 80 members of Occupy Wall Street near the Union Square shopping district as the marchers swarmed onto oncoming traffic.
A police commander doused a handful of women with pepper spray in an incident captured on video and spread via the Internet, galvanizing the loosely organized protest movement.
The group has gained support among some union members. The United Federation of Teachers and the Transport Workers Union Local 100, which has 38,000 members, are among those pledging solidarity.
The unions could provide important organizational and financial support for the largely leaderless movement.
Similar protests are sprouting in other cities, including Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.