ecember
16th of 2012 marked the 239th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, when
activists clad in Native American costumes protested a tax code that benefited a multinational corporation at the cost of taxpayers,
and committed one of the biggest acts of property destruction in
history by dumping the East India Tea Company's product into the Boston
Harbor by the crateful. For nearly fifty years, the act was either
shunned or ignored by the populace. But today, those activists' names
are among the revered "founding fathers" of our country.Yet, while we celebrate the radical activists behind the Boston Tea Party, today's activists protesting corporate greed and a rigged tax system are labeled "terrorists" by the federal government and investigated as such. This week CNN reported what most of us in the movement already knew and assumed - that the FBI had been closely monitoring the Occupy movement since its infancy and considered the movement's organizers a terrorist threat. And judging from a photo of my #S17 arrest in the CNN article's slideshow, it's safe to say I'm probably being closely monitored as well. Maybe they're reading this article. Maybe they'll at least learn something.
Since September 17, 2011, police have arrested at least 7,719
people affiliated with Occupy Wall Street. But since September of 2008,
when banks, ratings agencies, corrupt regulators and complicit
economists helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great
Depression, not one banker or corrupt government official has been
jailed. The fact that the federal government has used extensive
resources to help coordinate law enforcement response to the Occupy
movement is well-documented. The FBI's budget request for 2013 is $8.2 billion.
Surely, with 34,000 employees and an impressive budget, the FBI could
glean all the information they needed for the arrests of those who
rooked families out of their homes to make excessive short-term profits.
There's certainly no shortage of evidence that can be found for free
with a simple Google search.
According to redacted FBI documents, federal agents
had been warning the New York Stock Exchange of a coming "anarchist
protest" since August of 2011, a month before the movement even began.
Surely they also knew in advance that Moody's and Standard and Poor's were intentionally giving AAA ratings to worthless mortgage-backed securities that Goldman Sachs eagerly sold to state pension funds on the open market, then referred to as "shitty deals"
in private emails with one another. If the FBI spent the same amount of
time and resources on gathering evidence to use against corrupt bankers
in court as they did on profiling Occupy Wall Street activists, we
might not even be protesting right now.
It's offensive that our government, which was founded
on revolutionary war against tyrannical government and protesting the
multinational corporations they colluded with, puts nonviolent
protesters in the same classification as terrorists. It's offensive that
it is now considered criminal activity to peacefully protest economic
inequality. But it's disgusting that our government is letting real
terrorists and criminals get away while going after the very people
trying to make things right.
It shouldn't shock anyone anymore to say that the
United States is now a police state, or that walking on a sidewalk in
New York City while protesting can end up with your head in between a
cop's knee and a sidewalk, or that the I in FBI stands for Intimidation
rather than Investigation. Hoping that President Obama will suddenly
start caring about the rights of protesters in the United States or
appoint a new Attorney General that will prioritize the protection of
the First Amendment is naÔve and silly. But what we should do is
continue to build our own evidence locker against the bankers, continue
to announce their crimes to all who would hear, and keep risking arrest
to get the truth out. Maybe we can finally turn the cops against the
real bad guys.
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