occupy wall street

ows ended last night after cops pepper sprayed, beat, lrad'ed protesters...lrad is long range acoustic device which is basically a sound cannon...i spent about an hour watching it on http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution after seeing #ows overflow with tweets...no major networks were covering what was happening, and the only way to get information was through twitter and live video feeds that people at the protest were uploading...whether one agrees with ows and their agenda or lack of, what you can't condone is preventing the press from covering the protest in order to allow cops to beat protesters without worry of it being aired on national tv...it seems like a bad precedent was set, and the same might be done at other "occupy" locations where police brutality is used under a press blackout to kick out the protesters...the fear is that other more traditionally defiant areas might erupt in riots... the bay area could be one of those areas since oakland is already pissed off with what the police did and historically has had a bad relationship with them...critical mass might be building in berkeley after the protesters in oakland moved there (hope they don't trash the campus)...it also signals a change in how we receive news...not through the major media channels like tv and radio where it is filtered, censored, and skewed, but live and direct from the source over the net...one of the main reasons why i keep a twitter account even though i tweet very seldomly

people say that ows has no agenda, but i think that the agenda is an overwhelming frustration with the overall corruption of both financial and government institutions...the people have no other viable outlet to voice their frustration since the media is controlled by those same institutions...protesting in public was the only way to get any message out...also, it is impossible to have a narrow and defined agenda for something as broad as trying to fix financial and government systems that feed off each other's corruption

this shouldn't be about a liberal or conservative agenda...this is to try to stop the rich and powerful from rigging the system to help themselves year after year...i read franzen's freedom recently, and two quotes from it summarize the ows situation very well

“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.”

“The reason this system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it.” - Freedom, Jonathan Franzen