While the unofficial celebration of the two month mark of the Occupy movement won't come until Thursday - when a planned march may actually shut down Wall Street itself - today is the sixtieth day of the movement, but an ugly morning to wake up to.
We'd heard rumors about what might happen last night, so when we woke up this morning to find that billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg did indeed send the NYPD to attack and remove the protesters in New York's privately owned Zuccotti Park - ln the middle of the night last night - we weren't entirely surprised. Much of the media was kept from the park during this raid, breaking not only the constitutional right of the protesters to peaceably assemble, but also the rights of the media.
In these sixty days, there has been a great deal of criticism, and an even greater overreaction by local officials across the country and the world, similar to what Mayor Bloomberg took last night. Some officials have even quit their jobs over the abuse doled out by their superiors. As we've noted previously, there's even been a concerted media smear campaign from right-wing sources (which was entirely expected), as well as a campaign from more extremist groups to infiltrate Occupy camps and cause mayhem in a failed attempt to make the Occupiers appear to be something they're not.
Both those who've now accepted the movement, as well as those who still are throwing slurs at the movement often still ask the same question they've been asking for some time now: What have the Occupiers achieved? What have they really won?
Even if the movement decides this phase is complete, declares victory, and packs up their tents, the biggest single winning achievement of the Occupy movement will still have been its ability to draw the attention of Americans and our politicians to the very real issue of income inequality in America. America is no longer the land where everyone has a fair chance to become anything they want. The U.S. right now has one of the highest levels of income disparity in the world, according to the Gini Index, a scale used worldwide to measure income inequality. In fact, the U.S. ranks in the bottom third of countries measured according to one recent study.
If you'd been paying attention to the media two months ago, you rarely would have heard any mention of the rampant inequality that affects virtually every American.
The Occupy movement also forced the big banks to back down on the most onerous of new fees they were attempting to shove onto their customers. While the Occupy movement temporarily stopped those fees, the banks are already attempting to find other ways to stick it to their customers - even trying to soak money off of the unemployed.
As we pointed out yesterday, when governments finally get their priorities in line, focus on the people and their own responsibilities, and force the banks to pay off their own gambling losses, the people win, the government wins, and those who caused the economic boom and bust of the last ten-to-fifteen years lose, as they should have all along.
Even if other politicians follow the abusive, violent, unnecessary, and questionably legal lead of those like Mayor Bloomberg in New York, or Mayor Quan in Oakland, it still wont change the fact that the message of the Occupiers is factually correct. The Occupy protesters have also been overwhelmingly peaceful - even singing to their abusers as they've been attacked. In other words, the real criminals and thugs haven't been the Occupiers at all, but those who have moved against the Occupy movement.
That last action may be the most important achievement of the Occupy movement.
As well-known journalist Matt Taibbi noted last week, "It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back."
Who are the criminals, really - and who are the people living in the aftermath of what the criminals have done?
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