Ten years after the diabolic and tragic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center there is a new Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.
"Occupy Wall Street" is a popular uprising swiftly spreading through the heart of America against political corruption and unchecked corporate criminality. The new Ground Zero is Zuccotti Park, a small private park a stone's throw from Wall Street. It has been a long time coming.
Even before the fetid, toxic smoke had begun to clear over that 9/11 pile, the vast criminal enterprises that own America clamored over the nearly three thousand martyred corpses to take full advantage of the shock and awe opportunities that had presented themselves after that terrible event.
The Bush-Cheney gangsters, the interchangeable lawmakers and lawbreakers of Washington DC, the insatiable Military Industrial Complex, the instantly created Terror Industrial Complex and El-Qaeda of Wall Street, its corporate cannibals, hedge fund hooligans and immoral greedheads unleashed their pedal-to-the-metal fear-mongering, war-profiteering, Constitution-shredding, wealth-gobbling frenzy.
In ten years, these ghouls have nearly succeeded in sucking the lifeblood out of the American Dream. The final WMD blow to our democracy was El-Qaeda of Wall Street's 2008 destruction of the entire world economy. These financial terrorists were subsequently rewarded for this crime of the century with get-out-of-jail-free cards accompanied by $17 trillion dollars of US taxpayers' money.
Who wouldn't be pissed off at that?
"Occupy Wall Street" is following in the footsteps of the Freedom Caravan that is challenging decades of tyranny and thievery in the Arab World, the popular outbursts of enraged protest in Greece, Madrid and London against the global bankster gangsters, and the massive demonstrations against the union busting, public employees-sacking, pension looting and vote-rigging shenanigans of the outlaw governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Florida.
Like these other movements for democracy and against oligarchy, "Occupy Wall Street" began via the 21st century's electronic jungle telegraph as whispered variations of Howard Beale's cry of outrage "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!!"
In mid-September, a small, earnest and peaceful group of primarily college students, their lives already mortgaged up the wazoo with student loans but with no prospects for jobs thanks to Wall Street's unfettered economic plundering and pillaging and Washington's shameless, craven corporatist groveling and pandering, gathered in Zuccotti Park to little fanfare.
But in a few short weeks, "Occupy Wall Street" has increased exponentially (thanks also to some unprovoked doses of NYPD police brutality). It has become a gathering of thousands of demonstrators - teachers, techies, small business owners, union members, housewives, artists, airline pilots, salesmen and retirees, waitresses and Walmart greeters, workers, out-of-workers and more students - in over 100 American cities. Their voice is no longer a whisper but a defiant and resonating challenge to the villainous powers that be: "You are the 1% who have stolen all the money! We are the 99% who have all the votes!!"
The Wall Street - Washington Axis of Evil were always much more comfortable with the zombie jamboree that was the Tea Bag Party, the GOP's own renta-mob of yowling, paranoid, gun-toting, overweight, ill-informed, white, racist, easily manipulated boobs. They loved them some Tea Bag Party with their Revolutionary War costumes and straw hats dangling tea bags, their idiotic signs demanding government keep its hands off their medicare and childish drawings of Obama with a Hitler mustache and swastika eyeholes or a bone through his nose. Whenever and wherever a corporal's guard of Tea Baglican rabble turned up the media's lapdog full team coverage was there for the fake political reality show.
This time, however, the evil-doers and evil-enablers were at first taken by surprise by a citizenry they had thought were successfully lobotomized and pacified by years of exposure to corporate media's non-stop wall-to-wall brain-scrubbing shock treatment. These Establishment Critters have quickly pivoted to the usual full smear attack on a challenge to their power, wealth and will.
New York's $20 billion mayor, Michael Bloomberg, long a reliable shill for Wall Street, who might not recognize democracy if it sat down next to him on his private jet to Bermuda, offered up some condescending comments about "Occupy Wall Street" being a threat to Wall Street jobs!! Say what??
Corporate media, its yammering commentators, chuckleheaded news actresses and supine print and teevee dictation-takers masquerading as journalists, has delivered an onslaught of snide, sarcastic, fact-free, propagandistic reports and analysis in order to ridicule, isolate, trivialize, diminish, deflect and ultimately destroy this democracy movement's momentum. What's your message? What are your demands? What's your bumper sticker? You look silly! Get a haircut! Keep off the grass! Get a job! Get lost!
Barack Obama, who campaigned and was elected on the progressive promise of "Change we can believe in", only to instantly drop that mask and become President Pipsqueak, the Pentagon's poodle and Wall Street's caddy, who could barely even utter the word "union" when the outlaw Gov. Scott Walker was on his anti-union rampage in Madison, Wisconsin, was asked about "Occupy Wall Street" during a recent press conference.
Having once again donned his running-for-President disguise, Obama offered a half-hearted acknowledgement that "Occupy Wall Street" expresses the "frustration" (weasel word alert!!) that Americans feel about the financial crisis. He then proceeded to step on that faint praise by segueing into the woofery of needing a strong effective financial sector, bragging about the wonders his administration has acheived so far to that end and touting his piffle of a jobs bill. Paging Tim Geithner!! Paging Larry Summers!! Paging....Elizabeth Warren!!
Warning to "Occupy Wall Street": Be wary of Obama's embrace. Wall Street is running the biggest rigged wheel of fortune casino in the history of the world. And Obama has shown himself over and over to be the political equivalent of the gambling casino "cooler", the guy who is hired to jinx the play of high roller big winners just by standing next to them.
It is a good bet that the bagmen and toadies of the Wall Street-Washington Axis of Evil are even now hard at work trying to cajole, threaten or bribe the owners of Zuccotti Park to rescind their permission and chuck out "Occupy Wall Street" from the new Ground Zero.
At some point, the minions of the 1% will more than likely infiltrate the demonstrations with trouble-makers and agents provacateurs (French words alert!!), though probably not as blatantly as the club-wielding camel-riding goons the Pharoah Mubarak sent to Tahrir Square in Cairo.
But as Gandhi, who knew a thing or two about successfully challenging the entrenched 1% on behalf of the ignored 99%, once observed: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
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