One data point is just data. Two points are a trend. Three points are a correlation.
Denver, Portland, Oakland, New York.
And we musn’t forget Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For years, an abandoned car dealership was a blight on the town’s business environment but no one did anything about it. Then, the Occupy Movement stepped in and occupied the building and, voile! Last Sunday, the cops moved in and arrested the occupiers for squatting. Township authorities cleared their agendas and focused on solving the suddenly most important issue before them – condemning the building.
Why the rush?
On Monday, when Mayor of Oakland, CA, Jean Quan’s legal council quit, he said something cryptic about supporting Occupy Oakland and not the 1%. That was interesting. And then the deputy mayor quit too. Then we find out that Quan was one of 18 mayors nationwide on a conference call sometime in the past week where allegedly they planned to break up the occupy protests.
There are three possibilities for who coordinated the raids:
1.) The mayors were all good golfing buddies, got together over a few beers and decided all on their own to rid themselves of these meddlesome protestors.
2.) The 1% organized an online Mayor’s Retreat where participants offered charitable donations to the cities who took a more proactive approach to cleaning up their parks. Does Oakland need to buy some property for a new school? Does Chapel Hill find itself short on funds for their downtown business zone Renaissance project? It wasn’t a coordinated effort to shut down the Occupy Movement. It was simply a way for the 1% to give back to these communities and pair up interested benefactors with cities that have been stretching their tax dollars as far as they could go and were still falling short of their obligations. Call it Noblesse Oblige.
3.) One (or both) of the political parties was involved in cleaning up the Occupy Movement. It could have been either party because both take wads of cash from the 1% and have an interest in keeping their finance industry masters happy. But there’s only one party in charge of the executive branch departments that might prove useful to coordinating the clean up. But that’s just a conspiracy theory and you will never find the fingerprints of anyone in particular on the documents. But I would love to know who set up that conference call. And isn’t it conveeeenient that it all went down right after that off year election where so many politicians were forced to give lip service to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Maybe it was the Republicans. They haven’t chosen a nominee yet and maybe they don’t want to be put on the spot, having to scrunch up their faces and make little strangled choking noises about how the Occupiers are speaking for some terribly misguided but well-meaning people who should be working. But if that were the case, how did they manage to get Democratic mayors like Jean Quan and Portland Mayor Sam Adams (with a name like that, he really should be an occupier) to go along with it?
So, here we see clear evidence of a coordinated effort but we don’t know what motivated the mayors to terminate the occupations. The timing is suspicious. There is no doubt now that there was a conference call. And the resignation of Dan Siegal in Oakland suggests that the 1% are involved, whether by itself or through some political/electoral coordinating committee.
I want to know WHO did it.
Who decided to get together and terminate the peaceful assemblies of these occupiers to protest and speak? Who decided to use the excuse of “cleaning” (or, more accurately, “cleansing”) the parks? Who put together the trigger words that they all used about health and safety and danger and crime? Who has associated those words with a group of people who are protesting social inequality brought on by the unchecked and reckless behavior of the 1%? And while we’re at it, if the cities were so concerned with sanitation and hygiene, why did they make it so difficult to get porta potties at the sites? And why do they permit vampire romance addled teenagers to camp out in a parking lot in front of a theater for 5 days for tickets to a silly movie without subjecting them to pepperspray, batons and arrests for unlawful, unpermitted assemblies?
And what is the meaning of an unpermitted assembly? The very idea violates the spirit of the first amendment that says that citizens have the right to assemble and speak. If you have to ask for a permit to do this, isn’t that the same as saying you don’t really have this right because someone else has the power to deny you the permit? I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that the Constitution was written broadly enough that powerful people have been able to argue that just about any truncation of your rights are permissable because the Constitution didn’t explicitly say “no”. Why is it that movements like Occupy Wall Street are routinely shut down? Why is it that so many grassroot movements such as the Occupy movement fail to take root because they can’t get permits?
Anyway, I want answers. I want mayors who have been “forced” to cooperate for fear that their local and state parties might lose campaign funds to come forth and tell us the truth. It won’t go well for them if they don’t tell the public the truth and the truth comes out anyway. Now that the press have had their own rights violated and reporters roughed up, they have an interest in finding this out for themselves. The timing was really, really bad from a PR standpoint. It came way too soon after an election. And now a whole year stretches before us so that those of us who have questions and demand answers can keep this issue going.
The coordinators didn’t end the movement. No, the idiots focussed the concentration of the nation with laser like intensity on the Occupiers now. The way these raids were carried out, complete with jack booted thugs and helicopters in the middle of the night, is enough to make even the most whacked out 2nd amendment nutcase sympathetic and make the most liberal minded crunchy granola type think that owning a gun to defend yourself against governmental overreach isn’t such a bad idea. So, whoever it was who planned this hamhanded operation should be congratulated for finally finding common ground between the two extremist ends of the parties.
If I were to hazard a guess, I’d go with Rahm Emmanuel’s syndicate. Yep, he’s got the whole mayor thing going, he’s in Chicago, which has a reputation, he’s familiar with how to use the 1%’s money to gain political influence in an election year and he’s not into subtlety. There’s just enough distance between him and the 1% and the Obama campaign and just enough irritation from the merry pranksters of Occupy Chicago that it would make it look entirely reasonable for him to want to squelch them and help his fellow mayors squelch them.
That’s my hypothesis. What kind of data to we need to make a correlation?
Filed under: General | Tagged: assembly, Chapel Hill, cleansing, coordination, Denver, first amendment, Jean Quan, mayors, Oakland, occupy movement, permits, Portland, post-election, Rahm Emmanuel, raids, Sam adams | 31 Comments »