We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Tracking Journalist Arrests at Occupy Protests Around the Country

Click here to access article by Josh Stearns from Storify. 

Yesterday, I used the latest example of none-coverage by US media--the massacre of striking workers in Kazakhstan, to illustrate how mainstream media controls coverage of events in the world where the One Percent have an interest in those areas. Clearly the One Percent do not like the challenge presented by the Occupy movement here within the US. Initially they simply ignored it. Recently they have been covering it with a lot of ambivalence, but what is often overlooked is how the enforcers of the One Percent are treating journalists who try to cover the various protest actions. In this piece the author assembles reports of numerous incidents across the US where the authorities are arresting, detaining, and assaulting journalists trying to cover events related to the Occupy movement.