Monday, September 26, 2011

#OccupyWallStreet Continues

Posted By on Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 4:00 PM

The amount of information coming from the protests on Wall Street is a little difficult to sort through and make sense of, but Anthony DeRosa makes an excellent case for the event's relevance for Reuters:

Are they a mob of over-privileged, unemployed trustafarians? Many of them likely are. Does it matter? Dismiss them if you will, they’re motivated and mobilized. An apathetic population asked to foot the bill for the fallout from credit default swaps is exactly what the 1% ordered. The last few years the country has been told to fear an economic collapse if the masses fail to fork over what amounts to corporate welfare, and more recently, that more jobs will be lost if we close tax loopholes. Many claim that these protesters are anti-capitalist, but most are simply disillusioned by a form of capitalism they suggest is so far out of whack that the opportunity for bootstrap pulling is nearly non-existent. They propose that the current environment unapologetically favors the richest of the rich.

The Village Voice's news blog, Runnin' Scared, has a follow-up story on some of the seemingly unjustifiable police-driven violence from this weekend, and unfortunately, some of the forces in the background of the protests have taken justice in their own hands in a twisted, privacy-thrashing, way:

Anonymous has leaked the personal information of the cop who, according to photographs and video, is responsible for pepper-spraying young women during the Occupy Wall Street protest on Saturday. It is one Anthony Bologna, a Deputy Inspector for Patrol Borough Manhattan South. Bologna's badge was photographed on this blog and Anonymous has created a Pastebin document containing Bologna's possible phone numbers plus the names of his family members and possible addresses.

[...]

We just spoke with Patrick Bruner of Occupy Wall Street, who said that "I'm upset the information was released the way that it was. We've had the information since last night and chose not to release it this way. We're not a fan of vigilante stuff."

We wondered whether Occupy Wall Street felt the original message of the protest was getting diluted by anger at the NYPD, as Kat Stoeffel suggested today at the Observer. Bruner said "This is something we're worried about."

"But I don't think that's the case," he continued. "What this shows more is that the system isn't interested in protecting us anymore, it's interested in protecting itself."

Also, the movement spreads to Arizona on October 15th, according to a Facebook page and competing Twitter feeds organizing a protest at the State Capitol.

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