New York – The images are crystal clear. A half dozen cops surround a slender and petite blonde with a dancer's figure while one of them cuffs her and pinches her nipple. She screams in agony. An officer kneels on a man's adam's apple to control him while cuffing him.
Their crime: While marching with Occupy Wall Street protesters from a plaza in the financial district, they left the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, blocking lanes of auto traffic.
According to a pollster, all this might just help President Barack Obama's chances for reelection. Said G. Terry Madonna at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the protests are part of a broader theme of class warfare.
Warren Buffet, billionaire investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, said on PBS that the class warfare is very good for people of his social and economic station, “and my class isn't just winning, I mean we're killing them.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg News Service, agreed, noting that police gave people multiple warnings to be good or be gone, to get out of the road. He supported the police's actions in clearing the bridge by arresting 700 for disorderly conduct and giving most of them court summons to appear.
“The police did exactly what they are supposed to,” he told reporters yesterday before marching in the Pulaski Day Parade in midtown Manhattan. New York “is the place where you can come to express your views. Protesting is fine, but you don’t have the right to go and without a permit violate the law.”
According to David Meyer, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America,” the question activists face is “‘How do you do something that generates news, which doesn’t implicate you for being at fault?’ And I guess New York City police were really helpful in this regard.”
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