I had to coax myself into clambering out of my doomer sanctuary yesterday, where a cardinal shivered in the rosy rain of the Japanese maple outside my kitchen window. I took a trip into the city, headed towards a reception for Judith Joy Ross, an amazing photographer I had met at the Tar Sands Protest in Washington DC, and who had kindly invited me to the reception for her latest exhibit at the Pace MacGill Gallery, just off Fifth Avenue. Very swish.
While I was in Manhattan I took some photographs myself, and even though it has very little directly to do with the purpose of writing this blog at Wit's End (you know, trees dying from air pollution and if you don't, go up up up to the BasicPremise link!), I thought I would post some images - alternating with a letter to the editor written by an occupier... a letter that eloquently exposes the sham that our democracy has become. It's a very frightening raw glimpse into the fascist control that is quickly destroying American democracy. Aside from that essay, there are several interesting things to note about the images. One, is the dearth of Christmas lights. I'm not complaining - I think they are a hideous waste of energy. But what does it portend that there are none?
Looking up and down Fifth Avenue...nothing?
I don't know if it's city budget cuts, or not. By the end of the evening, there was but one star.
A fountain was the only gleam I found.
Another concern of course of mine, is the sickly condition of the tree at Rockefeller Center.
My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”
As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it.
As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.
When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.
I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.
At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.
With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.
I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.
Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.
As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”
So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.
Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.
If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.
If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.
But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.
The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?
I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.
Thank you for letting me share that anger with you today.
Patrick Meighan
That artificial waterfalls was a donation to people of NYC by the head of CBS, William S. Paley, back when rich people wanted to give some of the loot back to people. It was built in the 60s and I spent much time there away from the street noise when I wasn't protesting a war in SE Asia.
ReplyDeletecatman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paley_Park
ReplyDeleteThanks Catman! I was quite taken by that scene.
ReplyDeleteOrganised crime has become institutionalised crime: if our leaders aren't themselves crooks, they're on the payroll, whether they admit it to themselves or not.
ReplyDeleteAnd they own the lawmakers...
Please allow me to have what's known in these parts as a small paddy. You know what? The writer of that piece SHOULD be angry. He has every right to be furious. He was a witness to assaulted by the LAPD. The little liberal nod and eyebrow raise at the end is exactly why we are in this mess. If he -- with his media connections and writing skills, and all the other good middle-class advantages -- can't be translated into the courage to stand right up and use the system, then what hope is there for anyone else? It almost sounds like he was just having a "weekend experience", and it got a bit rough for him, playing protester. He'll tut about his experience and dine out on it for a while. Then it's tomorrow's chip wrapper.
ReplyDeleteSerinde
True Serinde, but being assaulted by the police tends to focus the mind. It's a process that radicalizes the wrongfully arrested. Here's a running tally - over 5,000.
ReplyDeletehttp://occupyarrests.moonfruit.com/
Personally, I think things will escalate - especially as food becomes unaffordable and more people lose jobs and homes. When they start throwing protesters into the FEMA camps these incidents will look like picnics.