Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

Marched about 4 miles today. Good stuff, annoying diversions on the Union Square-to-downtown leg. Dogs are barkin'.

Was also surprised, as always, that 20somethings know the words to "We Shall Not Be Moved."

more or less agree about strikes but the 'reasonable people who would like to give ows some advice but don't entirely support it because they have a list of problems' are kinda useless, do you know why the movement does stupid things, because all the reasonable people are busy writing blogs posts to themselves

ps morbs was interviewed for local tv news!

was out at union square myself, seemed huge and well organized

couldn't see Das Racist, tho

event was v. big in nyc today, as big as the bigger rallies in ows p1 even

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:57 AM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yah heard on twitter like 6k-ish

I'd say more than that

also several Captain Americas in attendance

we had a bunch of in-uniform metro workers leading anticapitalist chants, which was kinda cool

also all four of my bus drivers nonchalantly let me on without paying today

btw, WABC ran a single 3-second shot of my sign with my head cut off

ha

that's still a lot of exposure!

Meanwhile in Seattle, local "superhero" Phoenix Jones pepper-sprayed protestors, and a few dudes broke a bunch of windows and slashed some tires, helpfully distracting from the peaceful pro-immigrant march.

wtf

almost certainly cops acting as agent provacateurs

A KING 5 News photographer covering the May Day march in downtown Seattle on Tuesday was assaulted by one of the marchers and ended up with a bloody cheek.

Richard Departee was covering the march as the participants made their way through downtown.

“I found myself in with a group (dressed in) black, kinda Gestapo-looking thugs – face masks and dark glasses – I think as soon as they saw me it was like ‘Hey get out of here, you know, scum,’ and started pushing me,” he said.

Departee said he backed off and then three or four of the people turned around and surrounded him and shoved him back.

“Then one guy took his one-inch dowel, a wooden pole with the red flag … he just took it back and popped me in the face,” said Departee.

He said he dropped his camera but then later decided to take pictures because there were about 20 people.

“The same thing happened,” said Departee. “They came swinging their poles again at me and that time I bolted.”

Departee has worked at KING TV for more than 30 years.

video here

https://p.twimg.com/Ar1vZrrCIAEH09P.jpg

http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2012/05/01/video-portland-police-beat-protesters/

wow, that's crazy - and scary as hell. seattle cops seem to have been relatively hands=off today.

i heard quite a lot of stuff about police provoking the marchers to legitimize their reactions. they were prepared today and will be, going forward.

also love the classic "i'm media!" / "I don't care!" exchange in the second video.

yeah, it's a sad-funny inversion of the black bloc guys' "no media" stance in the departee assault video

or rather the two mirror each other depressingly

The NYT account of yesterday's events is, of course, a few short paragraphs on page A20.

And the ABC affiliate piece had 20 seconds of some harpy ranting about the cost of police overtime, plus the most nitwit pseudo-anarchists they could find.

Yeah, I knew this before, but I can now say from firsthand knowledge that the image you get from news coverage of Occupy has very little to do with the reality. So many reasonable people of all ages and identities, and an even smaller contingent of 19-year-old fools than I expected.

watched They Live last night and was like dang this is so au currant why don't the occs totally appropriate the slogan/imagery and then roddy started acing people indiscriminately and I had second thoughts

NYC turnout was WAY more than 6k at union square at least; I'd say closer to 30K at least

free the cleveland idiots

yeah 30k seems like a reasonable estimate

30k in NYC and only a 100 in DC?

In Washington, more than 100 supporters of Occupy D.C. gathered in Meridian Hill Park before the march to the White House, joined by local members of unions such as the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO and the Amalgamated Transit Union. They unfurled red flags, played guitars, painted cardboard signs and played “Inequality Pong,” a game whose players tried to drop a Ping-Pong ball into a cup labeled “1 percent.”

As the march began and the protesters moved down 14th Street toward the White House, participant Brittany Duck, 24, a student, said she hoped that the day would reinvigorate the local Occupy movement.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/occupy-movement-returns-for-may-day-protests-in-dc-new-york-and-around-us/2012/05/01/gIQASDqQvT_story.html

I just worked. Sorry Hoos

NY wrapup by The Nation, w/ video:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/167666/tens-thousands-march-oakland-new-york-may-day

i missed part of the day at the park, so i'm not sure when annie was there & suspect she saw the crowd at a lull--the march was 5-600

easily two dozen of our key organizers decided to spend mayday in new york, which kinda pissed me off

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/occupy-the-regulatory-system/2012/04/27/gIQAjo21lT_blog.html

More coverage of the Occupy the SEC folks

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/on-hannity-michelle-malkin-tears-into-juan-williams-comparing-occupy-violence-to-tea-party-racism/

same ol' same ol' from Fox tv folks

Tho IMO we should be careful about "normalizing" their outrageous bullshit.

Word.

Today a woman I work with was lamenting a blog post by a feminist blogger using a picture of Nick Nolte as an example of ugliness "too judgmental," yet I know the same woman would shrug at this story. "Eh, what do you expect?"

That shrugging is part of the equation that people like Malkin thrive on.

"cleveland occupy leaders were arrested in connection with the bridge bomb plot"

of course they were

10 to 1 none of occ cleave's charges stick

On the police tactics in NYC on 5/1:

Snatch-and-grab police tactics intimidate crowds, but do not lead to the sort of dramatic mass arrest scenes that capture national headlines; it’s a more insidious form of crowd control. It is worth adding, however, that there was no shortage of police aggression: At one point I saw firsthand as a marcher was grabbed by police in the Lower East Side, his face slammed to the street. When pulled up and taken away, officers covered his face with his T-shirt so onlookers could not see the blood.

Then, after the mass evening march in New York had finished and no more than a thousand people had moved to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial park at Manhattan’s southerly tip, the NYPD once again covered the area. Some remaining hundreds of the May Day participants had gathered for a mass general assembly; others milled around, sharing stories about the day or dancing to the ever-present drumbeats. The police encircled the small concrete park in time to disperse the relaxed crowd at 10 p.m., when the park closes. Clad in riot gear, the number of officers kept growing; hundreds and hundreds on foot and in vans surrounded the memorial park and every office building, street and corner. The NYPD is the seventh largest standing army in the world, and on the evening of May 1, New York felt like a city under military siege — it was terrifying.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/03/the_nypd_may_day_siege/

Tho IMO we should be careful about "normalizing" their outrageous bullshit.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, May 3, 2012 8:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Agree, but as you most certainly know it is hard to keep fighting back 24-7 so as to call them on this stuff. It's hard to compete with the money of Karl Rove's pals.

The NYPD is the seventh largest standing army in the world

really?

Okay, it's something Mayor Bloomberg said. What a dumb thing to say.

Is it not a true thing?

As an army, they would be somewhere in between Tunisia and Belgium.

yeah he basically made that up it's bullshit, unless he has some tricky definition of "standing army"