Several hundred protesters from Occupy Wall Street converged on the Capitol yesterday to voice their disillusionment with a government system perceived as having been completely hijacked by corporate cash.
I posted a recap of a few of the day’s most interesting events.
AP:
“I’m encouraged,” said Jon Wynn, 63, of Snow Camp, N.C., who traveled to Washington to attend the protest and visit friends. “There’s energy here, even if there’s not a whole lot of people.”
The protest comes amid numerous polls that show 84 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, near an all-time low.
Four people were arrested, according to U.S. Capitol Police, one for allegedly assaulting a police officer and three others were charged with crossing a police line.
Meanwhile, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in an interview Tuesday for Politico’s “Playbook Breakfast” that, “we don’t really have much of a connection with the Occupy” when the discussion turned to the topic of Occupy DC and the group’s attempt to disrupt Congress.
Occupy DC has been fixed on the national radar ever since Washington Mayor Vincent Gray urged federal authorities to clear out the tent city, saying Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue has become a health and safety hazard.
Unlike other Occupy camps, Occupy DC enjoys a degree of protection because the park is on National Park Service land, and as such is located in federal jurisdiction.
Pelosi also said that the Tea Party was a “wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.”
The part that went unspoken, but Pelosi did allude to, is that unlike the Tea Party, Occupy is a genuine grassroots movement about which the Democratic Party still knows very little about (that should be clear from the way Pelosi almost adorably refers to Occupy DC as THE Occupy).
The right-wing blogosphere raced to frame this video as Pelosi distancing Democrats from Occupy, but I read her statement as the House leader confessing she just doesn’t know very much about the group.
For Occupy’s sake, Dems’ ignorance is a world of improvement from the party attempting to hijack the movement and use it to soley attack Republican officials.
And honestly, since Occupy’s whole issue with politics is that both parties are tainted by corporate cash, a little more distance between Occupy and Democrats might not be such a bad thing.
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