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From the Fearless Blog:
"Indirectly it appears the advertising industry has kicked off #occupywallstreet. Not intentionally of course and merely by being the subject of condemnation and opposition of Adbusters magazine.
The earliest signs of the now coast-to-coast protest were seen on June 9th when the anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters registered the domain occupywallstreet.org. One month later, an independent group registered occupywallst.org where the official site was eventually hosted. Adbusters announced plans for a peaceful protest on Wall Street in July and Anonymous, a hacker activist group, encouraged it's members to attend not long after that.
Anonymous was involved in the protests in Tunisia an Egypt. During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Egyptian government web sites, along with the website of the ruling National Democratic Party, were hacked into and taken offline by Anonymous. The sites remained offline until President Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Anonymous also has ties to Wikileaks, further explaining the sighting of the Wikileaks truck at the protest site. Anonymous clearly has skills and connections.
One of the earliest and most consistent complaints from the protest has been the lack of coverage of the protest and the real issues by the mainstream, corporate owned press. It remains to be seen if Anonymous plans to hack any U.S. news organizations, but based on past activities, it seems a real possibility. The protest in general clearly hopes to use citizen journalism to turn the tables on big corporate media.
Corporate media certainly tried to ignore it as long as they could. This quote from a story in Business Insider from a police officer was as dismissive as possible. New York City officer: "If you find the protest, let us know, because we haven't heard a thing about it since we got here." Yet the photos from the same story show huge crowds facing off with police.
Finally, you may be wondering what are those masks are about. Those are Guy Falkes masks and they are a symbol/disguise used by members of Anonymous to protect their identities and brand their activities. Guy Fawkes was part of a plot to overthrow the king of England in the early 1600s and his character was made popular in the comic book V for Vendetta.
We're extremely supportive and sympathetic to the protesters here at The Cottage. They are showing enormous courage in the face of seemingly all powerful institutions. They are being arrested, maced and harassed without the protection of them media. They are mocked and laughed at and toasted with champagne from the high-price balconies above and yet they are remaining peaceful. Allowing us to bear witness to how lost our American values have become.
Adbusters has a point that gets lost too often in their anti-consumerism message and that is that 1% of the population have profited wildly from the last 20 years and the other 99% have seen zero. Special interest money has corrupted our system. That's not sustainable. It's not fair. And it's not the America that 99% of Americans want. If this is a democracy, those numbers should matter.
By Alex Bogusky
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
video & other images on the original site
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