Occupy Wall Street is out and about celebrating their 6 month anniversary with a march, and they've got beautiful weather for it, too. Several "mic checks" already mentioning the "American Spring," and a "Resurgence" of the movement, and a powerful year.
Seems there has already been some trouble with the NYPD. According to Twitter reports, protesters have already been arrested for "standing on the sidewalk too long."
Via livestream, I'm hearing that the earlier skirmish with police began because a man was handing out fliers, there was some sort of struggle that ended with the man with the fliers demanding an apology from one of the cops.
Tim Pool just tweeted, "Cop just approached a journalist and said "You're laughing now, you werent laughing when you got arrested."
I'll add an update later. If the rumors are correct, the occupiers plan to attempt to re-take Zuccotti Park.
Tim mentioned possibly taking a break, so here's Global Revolution's livestream as well:
Streaming from inside the police van after arrests. I have no idea how they pulled this off! If you watched the video I linked to in my earlier post, everyone who was arrested was put in metal cuffs behind their back.
As of now, everyone is still in jail.
Earlier: Video footage of the police arrests show that no one from Global Revolution was "resisting arrest" as claimed. Arrests begin around 4 minutes into the video, and continue until the end when with no reason given NYPD arrest 2 people who were down the street observing on the sidewalk, watch below:
If you had any remaining doubt that we're now living in a police state here in the U.S., what happened early this morning at the Occupy Wall Street Livestream office should make it painfully clear.
Ever since September 17th, 2011 and Zuccotti Park, Global Revolution Media has been a large supplier of the media coverage has been covering the Occupy Wall Street movement both here in the U.S. and internationally, providing followers of the movement with raw video footage and keeping their viewers informed.
Monitoring livestreams coming across the internet, the media team picks the best ones for rebroadcast. This small team of dedicated media broadcasters serving the Occupy movement makes finding information quick and easy, making following a plethora of events and breaking occupy news possible for followers. The Global Revolution media team operated out of a leased studio office at 13 Thames Street in Brooklyn, but continuing to do so is in doubt at this time, and the future of the operation in jeopardy.
Earlier this morning, Global Revolution Studios was ordered to vacate from their building by the NYPD in conjunction with the building department. It took three separate departments visiting 13 Thames to finally come up with a reason to remove the Global Revolution team with a posted notice despite having all applicable paperwork for the department of buildings in order. The reason given to me by the Global Revolution team is “A made up sprinkler condition.” Supporting this allegation of falsified conditions is that the very same building passed the same inspection standards back in 2011 in the month of November with no comments or concerns as to the buildings integrity or its sprinkler system.
It’s also odd how the first floor and cellar is imminently perilous to human life, and the floors directly above are perfectly fine. Even the person living illegally in the basement is perfectly fine where he is, meaning it’s specifically the area that Global Rev occupies and nothing else. One could accurately allege that this was a direct attack against one of the major voices of the movement and considering Global Revolutions direct affiliation with the Occupy movement; has made it an obvious target for this attack on free speech. The overreaching plan of these actions has been to suppress the ability of Occupy to communicate and to share the movements’ collective stories as they unfurl. By being a nexus of streams and information, authorities are attempting to do a top-down decapitation of the movements’ media coverage by once again isolating the information to the general public.
Six key members of the team were arrested at the Thames Street location, "charged with Trespass, Obstructing Governmental Administration and Resisting Arrest. They are likely to remain in jail overnight," according to Global Revolution's TV blog.
“We can do all of this from laptops”—Vlad Teichberg, GlobalRevolution.TV, after the #OccupyWallStreet and international live news protest channel was evicted from its NYC base.
Thames Street isn't the first home occupied by Global Revolution, and doubtful it would be it's last. In the beginning, activist Vlad Teichberg of Global Revolutiona worked in a small, dark, second-floor room in a clapped-out building on Lafayette at Bleecker. (His neighbors include the War Resisters League, the Socialist Party USA, and the Libertarian Book Club.) This is the original home office of globalrevolution.tv, which channels vérité video from occupations around the world through hosting sites such as Livestream.com.
