The Gary Null Blog

By Danny Schechter

Host of The News Dissector
Fridays @ 1pm (EDT) 

Author of The Crime Of Our Time

A week ago, I produced a TV documentary on inside the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York.

It was already somewhat obsolete by the time it aired.

The Park, once a buzzing center of debate and open-air meetings has gone residential in the sense that virtually every square inch of what was a half-acre political terrarium is now dominated by tents, an effort to insure more protection from the elements and some better level of personal security. As private spaces proliferated, public space shrunk.

Now, public health officials are raising the prospect of the spread of germs while violent incidents in other cities have police nationwide threatening to shut down the occupations in the name, of course, of preserving public safety.

The first happened in Oakland, a town with a long history of police violence that was on display when cops overran the camp, seriously hurting an Iraq veteran, and triggering a call for a General Strike. Now the gendarmerie are hoping to shut it all down.