You can tell that when Occupy Denver was finally evicted, it was a real eviction (not a pretend eviction to be immediately followed by them being allowed back in as happened with Occupy Oakland) because this time, no Kent State Moment, no highly dramatic confrontation footage, no gigantic hordes of police dressed in maximum menace gear.
Seems that when you actually evict the Occupiers, you don’t need nearly as many police as when you pretend to evict them.  Two hundred police evicted Occupy Denver, a few of them dressed in riot gear. Thousands of police were strangely unsuccessful in evicting Occupy Oakland. But as in Oakland, it is apparent that the same people are running both the eviction and the occupation. Those arrested in the eviction are not getting legal representation from the Occupy Movement. They are going to be getting court appointed lawyers, which in practice means prosecution appointed lawyers. When I last saw a court appointed lawyer at work, he got about thirty of his clients convicted in twenty minutes, some of them for crimes they could not possibly have committed.
If you get busted in a pretend eviction as at Oakland, you get a real lawyer, for free, for maximum courtroom drama. If you get busted in real eviction, you are on your own. Since court appointed lawyers make up for low fees by high volume and high speed processing, there is unlikely to be any drama. No matter how low the pay for a job, it is mighty good pay if you don’t actually have to do the job.
The Occupations had become an embarrassment. The occupiers are filthy, they stink, disease is starting to spread. They are stupid, incompetent, criminal and dysfunctional. The ruling elite, people with highly advanced degrees in basketweaving from elite universities, want to run Wall Street, but are revealed to be incapable of running a camp.
They are going to make a final attempt to shut down Wall Street briefly, and then, looks like that will be the end of “Occupyâ€. Since they have been consistently unsuccessful in their attempts to enter defended privately owned offices, this will probably take the form of a street blockade, with police protecting their blockade from being broken, in the way their blockade of Americans for Prosperity was so swiftly broken.
While the Occupiers chant “pigsâ€, and “police brutalityâ€, I expect we shall see the police, not the Occupiers, enforcing the Occupiers coming brief blockade of Wall Street. If instead the police turn a blind eye to the occupiers obstructing people, as they did at the Americans for Prosperity Confrontation, I expect that the occupiers will again be dealt with as they were at that confrontation.
IÂ hope that when the occupiers attempt to blockade Wall Street, the police will be mysteriously busy elsewhere, as they were for the Americans for Prosperity blockade, but expect to see firm enforcement of the official story line, wherein fearful Wall Streeters supposedly quail before the might of an enraged populace, protected by the thin blue line of the police.
But, though I fear we are likely to see covert police backing of the blockade, I hope to hear again the wonderful chant by the occupiers of “Arrest that man! Arrest that man! …” as followed their unsuccessful blockade of Americans for Prosperity, when the police only showed up after the occupiers had gotten the worst of it.
On the one hand, if our rulers were rational, what they would do is have the police shut down Wall Street supposedly for the safety of Wall Streeters, but the other hand, our masters are apt to drink their own Kool-Aid, and believe themselves to be not the state, but the mighty masses revolting against the state, in which case they will once again have the police mysteriously absent from the confrontation.
The people who organized this three ring circus are incompetent. They should have waited until spring of next year (an election year) before pulling the trigger and getting things started. Waiting until fall, with frigid winter cold just around the corner, to start a multi-month long public camping exhibition was brain dead. Starting in early spring would have meant that students, recently released for summer vacation, could have filled the ranks under sunny skies.
The rapes, the murder, the suicide, the tuberculosis, the blocked traffic, the vandalism,the petty thievery, the brawling, the stench, … . People aimed for Woodstock and they got Altamont. This whole “Occupy†stunt is turning out to be something worse than a disaster. It’s an embarrassment.
I hope it never ends!
Yes, why now, rather than in 2008, when the biggest bailouts were happening and they could blame Bush for them, or in 2012, when they could hope to influence the election.
I think the answer is: Tea Party envy. The self image of the state is that it is the opposition to the state.
This is the left’s reaction to the tea party. The tea party says “no bailouts”, to which the left replies “more regulation”. But it is a weak reply, since their own protests draw attention to the fact that the regulators are as much in the pockets of the banks as ever they were.
Of course, if the regulators were not in the bank’s pockets, chances are that even more money would have be hurled in the general direction of favored voting blocks. We have the best government money can buy. If it was not for bribery and corruption, things would be even worse.
Not sure I believe it but he’s a thought:
Nothing stopping them from restarting the movement next spring. By then they will have figured who the hardcore OWS people are and use to focus hate on their real target: Mitt Romney. The Movement already gets media coverage about 100X what they deserve and it’s best to know who they can call on for their dirty work early. Obama wants a rerun the leftist 60s protests and it took years to develop the really hardcore violent core of the movement.
The sixties movement was pushing on an open door, much like Occupy Oakland “blockading” a port where the Mayor had shut the port down, and sent the port workers to supply astroturf for the “blockade”. Wall Street, on the other hand, somewhat to my surprise, tends to bar the doors and send in the rentacops to man the doors against the Occupiers. They may be corrupt, but they are not decadent yet.
I thought they were cozier with Obama than that, but perhaps the coziness abruptly diminished when they found they were being set up as the the evil guys responsible for the economic crisis, in much the way that the mainstream parties in Wiemar Germany blamed the Jews and the anglophones for the hyperinflation.
The Nazi party won the 1930 elections because most Germans blamed Jews, England, and the US for the hyperinflation. Hitler himself, however, never uttered that big lie. He knew, and sometimes said, that the cause of the hyperinflation was printing money to pay people to neither work nor fight. It was the mainstream parties, not the Nazis, that were most responsible for fomenting antisemitism in Germany. Hitler merely reaped the crop that the mainstream parties sowed.
The mainstream parties told the people that they could have had something for nothing, if only the Jews had not messed it all up. Hitler was happy to let people believe the lie, but unwilling to endorse the lie.
Today the story the Greeks are hearing is that they could have something for nothing, except the evil bankers are preventing it. Perhaps Wall Street anticipates being similarly demonized, and so is less inclined to cooperate than were the academics of the sixties.
The Greeks should, of course, stiff the bankers, but if they stiff the bankers, the country will have to live within its means.
The Occupation is ostensibly about “the 99 against the 1%â€, not the bailouts. Would have made more sense to hold the protest back in 2007. The income of the top one percent is heavily leveraged to the stock market. When the market goes up, their income goes way up. When the market goes down, their income goes way down. The high water mark was in 2007. Since then, the market crash has been a great leveler. Their share of gross income is now no higher than at any point during Clinton’s second term.
“The Whole World is Watching!”
Yeah. The whole world is watching you make asses of yourselves in public.
People got to watch “what democracy looks like†at the ‘68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago … and voted for Nixon in a landslide.
Don’t you mean advanced degrees in “The impact of basket weaving on gender roles around the world and their interaction with white imperialism”?
Sounds more accurate, except, of course, they would not say “white imperialism” because only white capitalists are capable of imperialism, much as blacks cannot possibly be racist, and Muslims cannot be sectarian.