That Insignificant, Ignored Protest in NY

The major media has studiously ignored Occupy Wall Street. If they write anything about it, they report it to be crazies and diehards, a hundred at most, who persist in hanging out in the Wall Street area, aimless, pointless.

Funny... that "less than 100" resulted in over 700 being arrested while thousands stormed the Brooklyn Bridge. At least the UK's Guardian newspaper is reporting what is happening in the US:

More than 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening during a march by anti-Wall Street protesters who have been occupying a downtown Manhattan square for two weeks.

The group, called Occupy Wall Street, has been protesting against the finance industry and other perceived social ills by camping out in Zuccotti park in New York.

During the afternoon a long line of protesters numbering several thousand snaked through the streets towards the landmark bridge across the East River with the aim of ending at a Brooklyn park.

However, during the march across the bridge groups of protesters sat down or strayed into the road from the pedestrian pathway. They were then arrested in large numbers by officers who were part of a heavy police presence shepherding the march along its path.

Will the major media in the US recognize this event? Will they continue to report it as a handful of odd mentally unstable youth with no political agenda? Will it take tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands mobilized and seizing major urban centres before the US media acknowledges that there is a public movement afoot in the US that is neither right nor left, but a mobilized citizenry who is fed up with the lies of the media and the fact that Wall Street has bought the politicians and control the news and police and the politicians?

By the way... this protest seems to have been carefully manipulated by the police so that it could arrest in bulk the whole crowd. Yet again, proof that the police and the politicians are conspiring to suppress the democratic impulse by prevent popular demonstrations:

But others said the sit-down protest appeared to happen only after the protesters were deliberately blocked off by police after actually being allowed onto the roadway. "They met the police line and ended up being arrested one by one," said Damon Eris, another protester.

The march ended in chaotic scenes with police buses driving up the bridge to be filled with arrested marchers. The packed buses then drove off to central booking. Meanwhile, other marchers waited at the bottom of the bridge's Manhattan side and cheered as some released protesters, or those who had escaped being blocked off, came back down. "Let them go! Let them go!" was a frequent chant.

From an Associated Press report:

More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.

...

Some of the protesters said they were lured onto the roadway by police, or they didn't hear the calls from authorities to head to the pedestrian walkway. Police said no one was tricked into being arrested, and those in the back of the group who couldn't hear were allowed to leave.

...

Elsewhere in the U.S. on Saturday, protesters assembled in Albuquerque, N.M., Boston and Los Angeles to express their solidarity with the movement in New York, though their demands remain unclear. Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have been camped in Zuccotti Park and have clashed with police on earlier occasions. Mostly, the protests have been peaceful, and the movement has shown no signs of losing steam. Celebrities including Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon made recent stops to encourage the group.

This is going to blow up into a major social movement because the heavy-handedness of "the authorities". The police and the politicians are showing themselves to be puppets of Wall Street and the big money that for too long has controlled everything.

This is the Arab Spring come to America.