Occupy Wall Street has been completing its “spring training” and preparing for some summer action, including a general strike on May Day. That’s right: the “liberal Tea Party” is telling people to stay home from work, in the middle of Barack Obama’s endless grinding unemployment.
The general strike is supposedly an act of protest against police brutality, committed back when various municipalities, including New York City, had grown tired of lawless mobs squatting in public parks. There was plenty of Occupy brutality on display over the past weekend, as a black-garbed mob trashed a Starbucks in New York’s East Village, using metal pipes.
The New York Daily News, which very carefully avoids mentioning the Occupy Wall Street connection until it absolutely has to, describes the scene:
Customers at an East Village Starbucks escaped a shot of shattered glass in their lattes when the cafe windows withstood an anarchist onslaught.
Patrons at Astor Place coffee shop dashed underneath tables as metal pipe-wielding protesters attempted to shatter its floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas windows during a Saturday night riot, police and workers said.
Luckily, the unbreakable panes prevented injuries, one barista said.
“It was scary, we didn’t know what was happening,” she said. “There were a lot of them with bats and wearing masks.”
The frightened woman and her coworkers scurried to lock the door, she said. “No one got hurt in here and that’s all that matters.”
But two NYPD officers weren’t so fortunate. A sergeant was hit repeatedly in the head, body and hands with a metal pipe, a police source said, while a lieutenant also sustained injuries.
The cops swiftly arrested these “anarchists,” and one of them turned out to be “Occupy Wall Street attorney Alexander Penley.” The Daily News doesn’t mention it, but Penley is one of the original OWS organizers, not just an attorney they keep on speed-dial. Here he is in a November 2011 article in USA Today, talking up the wondrous “diversity” of his movement:
"We come from all walks of life," says Alexander Penley, a 41-year-old lawyer who helps organize protests for Occupy Wall Street, where the crusade to protest corporate misdeeds and income inequality began Sept. 17. "In 25 years as an activist, this is the most diverse group I've been associated with."
Speaking of “diversity,” Penley – like the vast majority of Occupiers – is white. Do we happen to know if either of the cops attacked with those metal batons is black? I’m just curious. After all, the media spent several years claiming that the racial dimensions of certain grass-roots movements are a matter of critical importance.
Of course, Penley will now be magically transformed into a “rogue element,” even though The Blaze notes that at the time of the violent assault, plenty of sympathetic observers knew it was an Occupy action. There is reportedly growing enthusiasm for these “black bloc” tactics, in which masks and dark clothing are used to maximize confusion and prevent the easy identification of the “activists.”
President Obama and the Democrat Party have previously embraced and endorsed the Occupy movement. Maybe someone should ask them for an official Party position on “black bloc” tactics, since it looks like we’ll be seeing more of them.
Does anyone recall the Tea Party, or any "rogue elements" that happened to orbit their movement, attacking either cops or overpriced coffee shops with metal pipes?
