Occupy Des Moines: Look Ma, no pepper spray!

There actually is a bit of good news on the Occupy front. Aside from the astonishing fact that the CBS Evening News last night actually mentioned — and played a portion of! — the BBC interview with Oakland mayor Jean Quan, where she ‘fesses up to being on a nineteen-city conference call to discuss things like OWS (I wonder if the arrests of at least five reporters and the manhandling of several others in Bloomberg and Kelly’s efforts to silence the press might have had something to do with this sudden volte-face on a usually-establishment-coddling network’s part?), there was this:

The General Executive Board of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters unanimously passed a resolution today supporting the right of protesters at Occupy Wall Street to assemble at Liberty Park. The Teamsters further commended New York Supreme Court Judge Lucy Billings for issuing a restraining order this morning restoring protesters’ constitutional rights.

“You can draw a direct line from the Wisconsin protests in the winter to Occupy Wall Street to the overwhelming rejection of an anti-union ballot question in Ohio,” said Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa. “Occupy Wall Street is bringing new energy to a fight that labor has been engaged in from the beginning: The fight for an economy that works for everybody, not just the 1 percent.”

English translation: “Dear Bloomberg, Kelly, Cuomo, Quan et al: Here is some salt. Go pound it up you know where. Love, Jimmy’s Kid.”

Of course, Mr. Hoffa, having been born in Detroit, has had a front-row seat to watching the growth of income inequality as American CEOs enhanced their own wealth and destroyed our manufacturing base by shoving American jobs overseas. Which brings me to Occupy Detroit:

Occupy Detroit plans to continue its effort indoors later this month when it moves from Grand Circus Park to a building in southwest Detroit.

Members are seeking a two-week extension on their permit to stay at the park so they can break down their camp and move to a building at Michigan and Wesson, said Zachary Steve, a community organizer involved with the encampment.

Amazing! No tear gas, no rubber bullets, no white-shirted supervisory police officers wading in and hitting people with batons. They didn’t get a two-week extension, but they did get a one-week extension:

“All of us sit here because some people fought, because some people occupied, because some people demonstrated,” Councilman Kwame Kenyatta said. “They did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Saying the Occupy Detroit protesters have been peaceful and cooperative, Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. said he was not opposed to the one-week extension.

Considering that there are a lot of vacant buildings in Detroit that could use some good tenants (buildings fall apart much faster if they don’t have people inhabiting them and looking after them), this looks like a win-win all around.

Another Occupation that is getting along well with the local authorities is Occupy Des Moines. After a slightly rocky start in their original encampment on the lawn of the state capitol, Kevin Gosztola reports that they are doing just fine after a month at Stewart Square (see picture above from Kevin’s post), and are on good terms with the police and the fire marshall. Local residents seem to like them just fine, too.

Going back to New York state, we see that while the part of Lafayette Park controlled by Grand Moff Cuomo and the state patrol has been subject to growing harassment, the part owned by the City of Albany exists largely unmolested as the entire city government from the mayor on down has a much higher opinion of the Occupiers than they do of a governor who is of, and works for, the one percent.

Speaking of working for the one percent, in addition to the news of Quan’s colluding with eighteen other mayors on how to best destroy the Occupy movement, I just now saw this little news item buried at the bottom of a story on the CBS News website (emphases emphatically mine):

The New York raid was the third in three days for a major American city. Police broke up camps Sunday in Portland, Ore., and Monday in Oakland, Calif.

The timing did not appear to be coincidence. On Tuesday, authorities acknowledged that police departments across the nation consulted with each other about nonviolent ways to clear encampments. Officers in as many as 40 cities participated in the conference calls.

Sounds like the work of the quasi-official Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, whose meetings probably don’t fall under governmental open-meeting laws as they’re not a government organization per se.

All of this news, along with Charles Pierce’s reminder that the cops in Phoenix reacted with far, far less violence to a Tea Partier who packed a loaded gun to a speech by President Obama than the cops in various other cities (and Phoenix!) have to folks who’ve been sleeping in parks, helps point up the fact that the various excuses used by the authorities in these cities to tear gas, baton, pepper spray, shoot with rubber bullets and bean-bag ammo, and otherwise inflict violence on a nonviolent group of persons, are just so much nonsense and folderol.

Really, there was no “need” for the police forces of these cities to spend the past two months engaged in gradually-escalating warfare against the Occupiers in their locales. There was only the growing irritation of the one-percenters at seeing a bunch of “rabble”, to use the Murdoch-owned New York Post‘s own term for the ninety-nine percenters, suddenly changing the terms of political discussion from “how much more can we destroy of the social safety net so we can give more tax breaks to our wealthy campaign financiers?” to “um, maybe we’d better stop talking so much about cutting things and start talking about jobs and income inequality”.

That is all.