Monday, October 3, 2011
The first of many Occupy NOLA explainers from your confused local media
Posted by Charles Maldonado on Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 5:10 PM
New Orleans will be #Occupied as opposed to just occupied, on Thursday, and, if Occupy Wall Street has been any indication, participants in the protest are going to be endlessly hectored by local media for a statement of purpose or list of demands or something.
They will likely give one, and that will confuse matters more.
A sprawling, unfocused, overly earnest, TV-news-unfriendly script for a cartoon based on a TV show based on a movie based on a comic book. Okay, and that will confirm for a lot of people that what we're dealing with here is a bunch of etc. who have too much damn whatever on their hands and just need to grow up and settle down with a nice job-spouse-drink.
But the fact that this movement has been going on for a while, has not lost its momentum and is in fact growing nationwide perhaps suggest that we're not doing ourselves any favors in disregarding it so quickly. So here, briefly, are some decent explanations I've seen in the past few days.
Author/reporter/preeminent Wall St. bitterness expert Matt Taibbi on Countdown with Keith Olbermann:
Writer Edward Murray at Huffington Post:
An easy way to dismiss the relevance of Occupy Wall Street is to label it as a bunch of unemployed kids with no clear-cut agenda shouting, "Grr, money bad!" This is not the situation. Young New Yorkers don't need to sleep in a park to complain about being broke; they have bars in Astoria for that. Some people say that the protestors are only undermining their cause by not having a clear mission statement. But that may not be true, either. In fact, Occupy Wall Street may expose the Achilles' heel of many other civil protests. Occupy Wall Street has no repeated cheer to stop coal mining, or to grant civil rights, or even to end a war. This protest cannot be boiled down to a simple soundbite because this protest is ambitiously seeking a complex, fundamental, philosophical change in the social, political, and economic infrastructure of our country. (Try feeding that line to Katie Couric before she goes on the air and see what kind of terrified, vacuous stare you get in return.)
And probably the best, and simplest, of them all, the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr:
Speaking of...
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SlutWalk comes to New Orleans
This Saturday, locals stage their version of the protest against sexual violence that started in Toronto.
- Apr 5, 2012
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Comments (8)
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Keep arresting citizens of peaceful protests and bring more attention to this issue! The movement is gaining momentum in its THIRD week now and Occupations are popping up all over the country! Stand up together and use your voice to give to those without through peace and solidarity. Tax the rich and feed the poor- you are the 99%! See my Occupy Wall Street painting and Anonymous homage on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09… where you can also see videos of the protests and police brutality as well as get other sources for coverage of the movement.
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Yet another condescending, confused and dismissive "journalistic" account of Occupy Wall Stree/NOLA. Apparently we should all just stick to partying and watching Saints games.
Really? I thought the entire point of this post was telling people not to be dismissive of it. Sorry if that didn't come through.
I think we should all ban together to put an end to the huge private bank erroneously called the Federal Reserve. There is nothing federal about it. Our hero Andrew Jackson nearly lost his life ending the central bank only for Wilson to let them back in. Jackson's last words on the accomplishments of his life was "I killed the bank!" and we should honor his memory by doing the same.
Liberty Jewel
your hero andrew jackson? the same andrew jackson who killed the indians???? i as an american indian will honor him by spitting on his grave. he is a bum and a murderer, but you all just continue to ignore history and be lead like sheep to your own demise. end the fed, yeah sure i'm for that, but i will never join terrorist like van jones, soros, piven to accomplish that goal. and i will never call a murderer a hero!!!! good lord, do any of you actually know anything about what you are doing and who you support?????
