Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America by Amy Goodman

Author:Amy Goodman [Goodman, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics, History, Autobiography, Memoir, Political Science, Social Movements, Social Justice
ISBN: 9781501123603
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-04-11T14:00:00+00:00

POLICING THE PROPHETS OF WALL STREET

The response by police departments nationwide to the Occupy Wall Street protests was violent and oppressive. That includes their abusive treatment of the media. In the midst of the Occupy protests, two of my colleagues and I settled a lawsuit we had filed years earlier against the police departments of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, as well as the US Secret Service, for arresting us while reporting in 2008 at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul (see Introduction, pp. 14–17). When organizing a press conference to announce the legal victory, we decided it would be appropriate to hold it at Zuccotti Park, the center of Occupy, to serve as a reminder to the police that journalism is not a crime. Perhaps the settlement would be a warning to police departments around the country to stop arresting and intimidating journalists, or engaging in any unlawful arrests. We shouldn’t have to get a record while trying to put things on the record.

But do police actually pay the price? Before the 2008 Republican and Democratic conventions, each of the political parties bought insurance policies to indemnify the convention cities from any damages resulting from lawsuits. Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, told me: “Saint Paul actually negotiated a special insurance provision with the Republican host committee so that the first ten million dollars in liability for lawsuits arising from the convention will be covered by the host committee . . . It basically means we [the city] can commit wrongdoing, and we won’t have to pay for it.”

In 2011 the bailed-out Wall Street megabank JPMorgan Chase & Co. gave a tax-deductible $4.6 million donation to the New York City Police Foundation. It left protesters asking, Who was the NYPD paid to protect, the public or the corporations? The 99 percent or the 1 percent?

According to an undated press release on JPMorgan Chase’s website, in response to the $4.6 million donation: “New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing ‘profound gratitude’ for the company’s donation.” Given the size of the donation, and the police harassment and violence against the protesters, it made us wonder if this was how Kelly showed his gratitude.

The 2008 financial crisis radiated out from Wall Street and engulfed the globe. The crisis was the product of unregulated markets, fed upon by unrestrained greed that was encouraged and rewarded at banks like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. “The mortgage bubble,” journalist Matt Taibbi told me, “was essentially a gigantic criminal fraud scheme where all the banks were taking mismarked mortgage-backed securities, very, very dangerous, toxic subprime loans, they were chopping them up and then packaging them as AAA-rated investments, and then selling them to state pension funds, to insurance companies, to Chinese banks and Dutch banks and Icelandic banks. And, of course, these things were blowing up, and all those funds were going broke.” By “mismarked” Taibbi means fraudulently overvalued. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.