The Occupy Wall St blog has an informative summary of attempts to reclaim the American political process which has been pwned badly by financiers in recent times [1]. The basic concept is that people who represent the 99% of the population who aren’t super rich have protests in Wall St and now other business areas. Care2 has an interesting article about US marines opposing the brutal actions of police against Occupy Wall St protesters [2], apparently they treated Iraqis better than US police are treating Americans.
The movement has spread to other locations, the OccupyTogether.org site has information on related events all around the world [3].
We have an ongoing event in Melbourne, Australia. It’s been going for a week and yesterday Robert Doyle (the Mayor of Melbourne) ordered police to disperse the protest, so riot police and mounted police forced the protesters out of the city square [4]. According to the news reports there were only 100 people there at the time, here is a Google Maps link to the location, as you can see 100 people would not take up much of that space, not even with banners etc. The smart move would have been for the government to ignore it all until the protesters got bored.
Now of course we will have more and bigger protests. The use of riot police will probably be considered as a good thing by some of the more aggressive protesters, but anyone who doesn’t want to make the government (and the corporations that control it) look bad would consider it a gross error. Robert Doyle needs to be replaced, the liberal reason for replacing him is that we just don’t want unnecessary force used against peaceful protesters. The “conservative” reason for replacing him is that he’s grossly incompetent, he transformed a small protest that wasn’t getting much media attention and appeared to be losing interest into a large protest with a lot of media attention.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
Hello.
Normally reading your blog through Planet Debian, and I haven’t been here for a while. You’ve chanced your sites layoyt or style or whatever, and it looks kind of nice, I think. Only the banner which says ‘Linux, politics, and other interesting things’… first thought was it’s a Volkswagen advertisement. The second thought was it’s a Volkswagen advertisement. And again and again and again. It still looks like one. :) Maybe you drive Volkkari, who knows. :)
I was forced to change style, I’ll write about that soon.
I used to drive a VW Passat, it’s a fine car. Why do you think my blog looks like a VW advert?
A ‘me too’ , the banner immediately triggered VW associations.