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.

This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2011.

The editor of the Tucson Weekly. I have no idea how I got here.

5 replies on “#OccupyWallStreet Continues”

  2. There are millions and millions of Americans who are unemployed, Pupito. It’s not that they don’t want to work — there just aren’t enough jobs, or the jobs have been outsourced, and there certainly aren’t enough good jobs. The folks who are occupying Wall Street are a cross-section of people who know that the system has failed. I’ve seen 96-year-old grandmothers interviewed
    http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

    and yes, there are students there. They have done what they’re supposed to do, they got an education, and still there’s no place for them to work. They’re getting desperate, and things have to change. There are 400 people in America who have more money than 150 million of the rest of us combined (including you, Pupito). And don’t tell me they “earned” that money. We bailed them out (I never voted for that), and they gave themselves $10 million bonuses with our money (I didn’t vote for that either). You and I are on the same side, Pupito, and those people in the streets are also on your side. You just don’t know it yet. We are the 99 percent, and it’s time for the 1 percent to share. Check it out for yourself. Power to the peaceful!

  3. So a microscopic section of the populous is protesting. One the other hand the masses voted out a large swath of the libs in the house and a smaller yet significant portion of the senate. So your likes find other ways to voice your opinion instead of your vote. Fine, that is your right. Don’t pretend that police are heavy handed when your protestor impedes his ability to put up a barricade. I would have sprayed her as well.

    Now as far as your redistribution and envy of the wealthy. I have no significant education and I make a yearly income between investments, employment and my business of 6 figures. I work hard and hope to be one of those 400 as soon as possible.

    Now as far as the bailouts are concerned. I take issue with the government picking winners and losers. There in lies my problem with redistribution. I don’t want a corporation (whose taxes are the highest in the industrialized world and are merely pass throughs for consumer goods and services) nor you nor me nor banks etc to be bailed out because that means someone used their influence to again pick winners and losers.

    People have “done what they are supposed to do” when they become successful not when they receive a piece of paper that didn’t make them employable. Boo hoo get a job you don’t like until you get skills that are marketable.

  4. I’d bitch more but I have to finish a house I’m remodeling and selling for a profit. Bad profit must take my money and give it to the welfare types.

  5. When a “microscopic section” called the Tea Party demonstrates, all of the media rush down to cover them. Twenty people standing in an empty field gets more coverage than thousands of people protesting on Wall St saying that they’re fed up with the way this country is being run. Why? Because a handful of big corporations own most of the media — and they’re not left-wing corporations, but right-wing like the Murdoch empire.

    If you think that you are going to become “one of the 400” by remodeling a house and selling it for a profit, you are deeply delusional. There is less financial mobility in this country now than any time since World War II, and the 400 is never, ever going to let you in, even if you make “six figures.” (they make eight and nine figures) They fool you by holding out that carrot, but when they are done with you, you will learn that they’re not going to let you into the club. One slip off the roof, one catastrophic illness, and you’re going to see that. As long as they keep you busy putting the rest of us down, as long as they divide the 99 percent by encouraging us to blame each other (your “boo hoo,” calling people “welfare types,” assuming we don’t vote), then they get to laugh all the way to the bank while you do their dirty work.

    and about the protesters who were pepper-sprayed, look at the video, at the whole video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ05rWx1pig…
    You will see that they are already corralled, they are not impeding the police in any way, and a lieutenant reaches over the barricade and sprays them and some onlookers. This is the “greatest country,” right? We’re better than the others because of our constitutional freedoms, right? So let’s not act like a police state because people are exercising their right to free speech. It’s messy to have differences of opinion, but if we don’t stand up for people we disagree with, then we have nothing to be proud of. Thanks for the response, moyla75!

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