Rule of law triumphs in resolution to Occupy Boston

THE RISE AND fall of the Occupy Boston encampment at Dewey Square has been hailed as a model of how police and city officials should respond to peaceful political dissent in the public sphere. Compared with video footage of cops pepper-spraying and clubbing protestors in Oakland, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere, Boston looked pretty good. After nine weeks of occupation, most of the Boston protesters peacefully left Dewey Square-their statue of Gandhi held high, their message against economic and power inequalities heard by millions. Their banners proclaimed: “You can’t evict an idea.”

Media pundits praised police and city officials for showing “uncommon restraint.” It’s a narrative that, while true in part, misses the real story. In truth, it was a court’s intervention-not benevolent cops -that protected both the peace and the right to protest in Boston. And who brought in the courts? It was the Occupy Boston protesters themselves.

http://tinyurl.com/79g22n9

Today is the anniversary of Roosevelt’s ‘Second Bill of Rights’ Speech

[Roosevelt] We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

http://tinyurl.com/82fj4yj

Fighting Cynicism Without & Within

Among the dozens of attempts to launch a movement against greed and inequality this year alone, no one will ever know exactly why Occupy Wall Street actually worked. Now cynicism and inequality face hard questions from all corners. The challenges to inequality unfold more publicly than those to cynicism. There are at least three examples of tortured cynicism we can assume with confidence are occurring, even if the actors don’t report to duty in the twitterverse.

1) Established activists, organizers, and the institutional forces of progressivism feel hella butthurt over OWS. We spent decades shouting into the abyss, hoping our shenanigans would spark a national movement for economic justice. Then a movement started without us, and it didn’t even have the decency to give us credit or accept our obviously superior leadership. It turned out we never planned for what we would do if the uprising we always wanted to happen actually happened. We can assume that every union leader, lefty intellectual, or nonprofit operative lingering at the margins is really thinking, “Why isn’t this MY movement?”

http://tinyurl.com/7lcf724

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 1/12/12” »