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The “Occupy Wall Street” protests in the financial district took a dramatic turn on Saturday when protesters tried to march across the Brooklyn Bridge. When police arrested 700 of the demonstrators, the event quickly turned into one of the largest arrests of non-violent protesters in recent history.
Funding the police
J.P. Morgan Chase donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police foundation. The gift was the largest gift in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police to strengthen security in New York. The money will pay for 1000 new patrol cars, laptops, they say, as well as monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.
It’s very significant when you have the private corporations supporting public police force. And the same thing in Minneapolis, in St. Paul, during the conventions, also in Denver for the Democratic convention. But, in St. Paul, during the 2008 RNC, they negotiated a special insurance provision with the Republican host committee so that the first $10 million in liabilities for lawsuits arising from the convention would be covered by the host committee.
Similarly in 2000 in Philadelphia with the Republican National Convention.
as a protester or as reporter covering protests, that the police are there not to protect everyone, but to protect a certain section of society from the rest of that society, more and more people in America, today, are realizing is that they are the section of society from the 1%, as the Wall Street protesters are putting it, are meant to be protected from by the police. The police aren’t necessarily out to protect everyone equally. That’s what people have been realizing across the world, and it’s very, very sad, but indicative of the problems with the massive global crisis with representative democracy.
2001 in Argentina where they had a massive economic crisis. In response, people went out onto the streets by the millions getting rid of, consecutively, four governments by banging on pots and pans, and then, rather than placing demands on, say, the government, people gathered in plazas, in work places, the unemployed gathered in neighborhoods, and to one another to solve their problems. And that’s something that, I think, began in 2001 in this form of organizing together, saying that the government, the—-no one can do it for us, we have to do it ourselves; that these are the people that put us in the crisis, so we have to look to one another. So, I think, beginning in Argentina, and they used that language of “horizontalidad”, this horizontal relationship, talking about how people relate to one each other. And since then you can see movements around the world also using this language of, we’re going to relate horizontally, we don’t want to be like this, we don’t want people on top to tell us what to do. We’re going to relate this way. And this is all over the globe, this form of not electing of formal leadership, not having a political party, in fact, rejecting all of that and looking towards horizontal forms.