Boston Occupiers join with legal advocates in effort to pry open vast, error-prone homeland security bureaucracy
As of December 1, no one seems to be winning. The BPD responded to the lawsuit with a handful of unrevealing documents, requests for extensions, stalling tactics and a promise to produce videos that they say will resolve the case. David Kelston, the lawyer representing the Guild, is skeptical. He anticipates having to go to court to force disclosure of the information about who is watching the watchers and to move forward on the public scrutiny and open debate the plaintiffs seek.
R-tolo, who was born in Argentina and came to the United States as a young child, points to a photo she has pinned above her desk showing Jorge Rafaél Videla, the general who ruled Argentina during its “dirty war” against left-wing activists. “It just reminds me of why we do the work that we do: so that this never happens again anywhere else,” she says. “I didn’t think that I would be facing the same kind of stuff here in the United States, but here we are. We always do this ‘othering’ and don’t think it can ever happen to us. But of course it can.”
Romney’s First NH Event Post-Iowa Throws Cold Water On Celebratory Mood
The tone of the event was a sharp break from the joyful mood that had accompanied the former Massachusetts governor onto a charter plane from Iowa earlier that morning, along with a swarm of press befitting a presidential frontrunner.
The first question for Romney came from Mark Provost, who identified himself as a participant in Occupy Boston and Occupy Manchester. Provost, 31, asked Romney if he would revise his statement that “corporations are people” to “corporations are abusive people.”
Romney went at Provost, asking him what he thought happened to corporations’ profits. Provost — who later told The Huffington Post that he is an “economic journalist” who traded stocks for several years on his own — answered in detail, arguing that corporate profits go “to the 1 percent of Americans who own 90 percent of the stocks.”
Romney and Provost traded comments back and forth for a moment, before Romney cut him off and dove into a lengthy monologue declaring that corporate profits often affect the retirement accounts of middle-class Americans and, more broadly, that financial success creates jobs (read a transcript of the exchange here). Provost afterward said he thought Romney dodged his questions about income inequality and excessive CEO bonuses.
[There are many more media reports or references to the exchange between Occupy Boston protester Mark Provost and Mitt Romney – 53 at the time of this writing]
Occupy First Night – New year, same Occupy
Authorities could have found any number of suspicious activities underway – the peace vigil could have been easily mistaken for a satanic séance, and who knows what was in those holiday brownies? Still, the Occupy New Year’s scene in the Hub was far from what transpired in Manhattan, where more than 60 were arrested trying to reclaim Zuccotti Park. Occupy Wall Street’s Boston counterparts went for a decidedly different kind of spectacle, planning weeks ahead of time to make a positive first impression on visiting suburban crowds.
The Morning Crawl. There are 55 stories in today’s crawl, a shorter-than-usual compilation of Occupy-related-only links. Go here for the crawl or click the “continue reading” link below to continue reading the digest, which has fewer links but may include more articles from smaller sources and commentators that publish less frequently.
Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 1/5/12” »