Nov. 19, 2011 at 6:06pm with 64 notes
politicsoccupy wall streetmatt taibbijournalismrolling stone magazine
More politics, as said by my favorite journalist

“The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault polite crowds of Occupy protestors. This deployment of law enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government ‘committed’ to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

“This a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat- and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protests, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual fund holders and carpenter unions through the mass sales or fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

“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 those file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be be helping get their money back. Instead, they’re on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.”

-Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone 

  1. voteeveryoneout reblogged this from stquincy
  2. familiarwiththematter reblogged this from stquincy and added:
    Can’t the private sector regulate this for us? Oh, right, the police are rented by the private sector. The market solves...
  3. megaera reblogged this from socialuprooting
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  11. exallamsehtfes reblogged this from socialuprooting and added:
    and still no precedent set, no arrests of the wall st thieves who stole from us. booooo amerikkka, boooooo on u i say
  12. cakeandrevolution reblogged this from socialuprooting
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  15. riningear reblogged this from thebiblemachine
  16. thebiblemachine reblogged this from socialuprooting and added:
    Taibbi is a fucking voice of reason. He’s like Dr. Thompson, without the wildness.
  17. inspirement reblogged this from socialuprooting
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  22. madprinceseeu reblogged this from youthiswasted and added:
    I was thinking something along these lines when New York found three million dollars or so to hire new cops in order to...
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