Tag: protests

Searching high . . .

Tampa expected 15,000 protesters for the Republican National Convention. So far, the city has seen no more than “a couple thousand,” Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor told reporters this morning.  “There aren’t nearly the number of demonstrators we expected,” Castor said.  One reason could be Hurricane Isaac, which forced some bus companies to cancel planned charters of protesters into Tampa Bay..

Searching low . . .

How little impact are the protests at the Republican convention making?  Well, let’s put it this way, yesterday the Tampa chief of police cancelled a scheduled afternoon press conference because there wasn’t enough to report. The Examiner reported Monday that the crowds were sparse at the protests and they haven’t gotten any larger since then. Reportedly, the largest crowd at any protest was 300 people at one at Ybor City, which is about three miles from the convention center.

Searching everywhere they know . . .

There were several protests Wednesday, but none of them were what city officials had feared.  The largest was sponsored by Planned Parenthood at Julian Lane Park about a mile north of the Tampa Bay Times Forum.  It featured speeches and chants like ” Ho ho, hey hey, Planned Parenthood is here to stay.”

At midday, there was a protest at speech featuring former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  During the speech when Rice was talking about the compassionate Bush administration, a Code Pink protester, former Army Colonel Ann Wright, stood up and said, “You can’t be compassionate and kill people!” However, no one was arrested and for the most part, everything has been extremely calm.

Asking the cops wherever they go . . .

Have you seen dignity?

It’s hard to say where it went wrong,

Decades before me and this song,

Through the banksters and the wars,

I just can’t take it anymore . . .

As the leaders of the People’s Republic of Plutocracy, Inc. prepare for the corporate coronations of Romney and Obama in Tampa and Charlotte, they’re fervently hoping Occupy Wall Street won’t spoil all the fun by sending dangerous American citizens into the streets to tell the truth all over the place.  In Beltway offices, Homeland Security meetings, and conference calls with the militarized police departments of the One-Percent, the same questions are being asked about Occupy Wall Street. Who are those people?  Why are they going to the national conventions with protest signs and devious plans to say whatever they want about the government, right out loud, in broad daylight where other citizens might hear them?  What the hell do they think this is, a democracy?  

I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to matter how many riot police are in the streets, pepper-spraying everyone in the twilight’s last gleaming, Americans are going to hear what Occupy Wall Street has to say in Tampa and Charlotte about the “government” and the “job creators” and this trickle down train wreck they call an economy.

Oh yeah . . .

Oh please believe me, I’d hate to miss the train.  Oh yeah.

The chorus of our new national anthem is inspiring, isn’t it?  Feel free to sing along Fox viewers, low information voters, brainwashed birthers and cable pundits, pulpit pounders of the Westboro Baptist Church and Obamabots of the Great Orange Asteroid . . .  

Every worker had a hard year,

Every banker had a good time,

Every general had a wet dream,

Every fat cat saw the sun shine.

Oh yeah.

There’s room at the top they are telling you still,

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill.

The more you smile as you kill, the higher you go. In American politics. In American banking. In American business.  All of those smiling killers have been smiling even more in 2012, because they think the Occupy Movement is dying.  Dying like democracy is, dying like equality is, as dying like justice is.

William Rivers Pitt . . .

We are told that the Occupy movement is over, finished, and irrelevant, but I strongly disagree. It is relevant because it happened: the passion required to bring needed change to this nation is out there, all around you, and the evidence of that was there for all to see last year. That passion, that desire, and those numbers are still there, multiplying and gathering strength for the struggles to come.

Occupy, like all the other great movements in American history, is passing through its infancy. The civil rights struggle was an afterthought in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, until the slow and steady groundswell of popular support delivered the Civil Rights Act and the end of legalized Jim Crow racism in America. The anti-war movement was barely a blip on the screen of popular consciousness for many, many years, until it exploded everywhere, ended a war, and took down a president.

Occupy’s infancy will end, and when it does, we will be participants in and witnesses to another moment in history, a moment when the righteous tide will wash in and sweep away the filth that pollutes us as a people and a country.

Steal 15 trillion dollars?  No problem.  

Violate park rules?  Riot police will splatter your blood all over the street.

William Rivers Pitt . . .

Buffalo Springfield was wrong. There’s something happening here, and it is exactly clear. We are, at this moment, in a savagely perilous place.

There are plenty of people out there who will flap the idiots currently running for the GOP in your face in order to dragoon you into supporting President Obama come November, and that’s fine. That’s their job, that’s what they do, and there is no doubt that the comparison favors them…but it is a stone-sharpened fact that, nationally, we are at this moment hedging true fascism as sharply as we were back in the ‘Bad Old Days’ of George and the boys, if not more so.

Some would argue that we are closer now to a true fascist America than we were then, because people of good conscience who fought against George W. Bush’s militant, media-succored fascism tend nowadays to be inclined to let this current happy-faced fascism slide. After all, it’s an election year, “Obama is better than Bush.”

  The credit agency S&P cutting the ratings of nine European countries on Friday is normally nothing more than financial news, and it got reported accordingly. But buried deep in its report was an interesting sentence.

 Governments are also aiming to put greater focus on growth-enhancing structural measures. While these may contribute positively to a lasting solution of the current crisis, we believe they could also run counter to powerful national interest groups, whose resistance could potentially jeopardize the reform momentum and impede the recovery of market confidence.

 S&P doesn’t elaborate on who these “powerful national interest groups” are, or why they would oppose governments trying to grow their economy, but it’s pretty easy to guess. It’s also easy to see the likely consequences of this conflict of interests.

Dear President Obama,

I’m glad you’ve opposed the attacks on Wisconsin’s public workers, but you need to do more. You need to go there and speak out, or at least speak out again and more strongly, because Americans need to understand what’s at stake, and those who are standing up there and elsewhere need to see you standing beside them. If you speak out powerfully enough, you might not only help stop Scott Walker’s raw power grab and the similar actions of Walker’s compatriots in other states. You might even help revive the long-demoralized spirits of those whose volunteer efforts carried you to the presidency.

You could talk, if you went, about the value to America of the teachers, nurses, firefighters, crisis counselors, and other public sector workers who are under attack, and of the hypocrisy of a governor whose corporate tax breaks launched this supposed fiscal crisis to begin with. You could make clear the stakes for all of us–that if Walker or other Republican governors can end the ability of public workers to join together for a common voice, ordinary citizens will end up with far less power to shape the course of our democracy, and predatory corporate interests will have even more.  You can talk in your in style. You can be calm and reflective. You don’t have to scream. But you have to show the American public and your discouraged supporters just how high the stakes are.  You have to do your best to draw the line.  

   Strikes and protests from Greece to Spain to Slovenia to Ireland to Romania have followed riots and bloodshed.

  The corporate media has reported this unrest with the following narrative:

 The Greek people are angry because their government pledged to make cuts in social spending…

 Fox News correctly observed that “Greece lived for years beyond its means, borrowing money and spilling red ink to finance excessive government spending, offer socialized health care and provide lavish wages for federal workers.”

 It’s a rather convenient spin: greedy, lazy, leftists workers that are getting their comeuppance. It’s the same narrative that the corporate media rolls out whenever social services are being cut anywhere in the world.

  It’s a convenient story because it is a complete story. Nothing more needs to be done. Good guys win. Bad guys lose. Roll the credits.

 Except that this isn’t the whole story by a long shot.