Tag: Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Miami Gets No Respect

Buck Banks

The Occupy Miami camp was soggy and bedraggled after a night of several inches of rain and 30 mph winds.
The Occupy Miami camp was soggy and bedraggled after a night of several inches of rain and 30 mph winds.

It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of the Occupy Wall Street protests — Occupy Miami, which has been on site at city hall for more than a month now, can’t get no respect.

Last week when Zuccotti Park was forcefully emptied and New York’s OWS protesters streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge, a series of messages was projected on the side of the Verizon Building. Among those messages was a list of Occupy sites — New York, Oakland, Portland. But no Miami. The list included “Florida” instead, no Miami.

Besides a few demonstrations in Sarasota, Daytona and several other Florida cities, no place except Miami has maintained a sustained and violence-free effort. They have negotiated with the city for permits to stay on the property, they police themselves pretty well (one heroin overdose and a runaway 11-year-old notwithstanding), and they hold almost daily demonstrations as well as workshops, discussions and a nightly movie projected on the side of the city hall building.

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UC Davis Chancellor Faces Silent ‘Walk of Shame’ over Pepper Spray Incident

Jon Ponder

Here are two related, remarkable videos. On the left, UC Davis campus police fire pepper spray into the faces of protesters who are sitting peacefully on the ground. On the right, after facing a barrage of criticism over the incident, the university chancellor walks out of a building to her car at night while hundreds of protesters look on in total silence.

Sacramento Bee:

[University of California-Davis] officials found themselves under a barrage of Internet-driven outrage Saturday, after campus police officers pepper-sprayed protesters at an Occupy UC Davis encampment Friday.

Saturday evening, after holding a news conference to address intense nationwide media interest, UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi walked through a blocks-long gantlet of students, who stood silently as she passed to a waiting SUV. Katehi had stayed inside the building for more than two hours after the conference.

Earlier, the crowd of protesters, which grew to 300 or more, had waved signs and chanted “Resignation, Resignation” and “Take Responsibility.” There were no police officers in sight and protesters dispersed shortly after the chancellor departed.

The board of the Davis Faculty Association, among others, has called for her resignation.

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Media Matters: What If Occupy Wall Street Was Sponsored by a Cable News Channel?

Jon Ponder

There’s been a lot of chatter about the difference in the “liberal” media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the rise of the tea party mobs in 2009 and its failure to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement today.

There are several reason for this, including the fact that tea partyists signaled that they were on the verge of violence from the outset. First, they put their propensity toward violence on display by showing up in a succession of congressional town halls where they indulged in fits of rage, supposedly over government spending, directed at their representatives. Then they began showing up armed outside venues for presidential events and other political gatherings fully armed.

“If it bleeds, it leads” in journalism. And the corporate media could not risk not being on the scene when some nutcase finally popped off and attacked a politician — except of course, there were no reporters around when that finally happened, to Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, in January 2011, nearly two years after the tea bagger summer.

Media Matters points to another reason Occupy Wall Street is not getting the same coverage as the tea baggers did early on — the tea party was sponsored indirectly by Fox News, which gave it virtually wall-to-wall coverage that first year:

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