Letter to the Editor – February 2012

Letter to the Editor

 

ink penDear Sir:

(To Al Trottier, whose letter was published in the January issue.)

It is you who need to check your claimed facts, Al. I challenge you to offer evidence of any “murders” involving members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A person was killed in an incident in Zucotti Park while it was occupied, but neither victim nor perpetrator were Occupiers. The falsehood that the murder was related to the Occupiers was promulgated by Fox (aka Fix) News, just one example of the proven lies that it routinely broadcasts.

There were sexual assaults in Zucotti Park, one of them committed by a person with outstanding warrants for previous offenses. Criminals may be present in groups of people assembled in public spaces, but that cannot be blamed on the organizers. Can the Tea Party guarantee that assemblages it calls include only law-abiding citizens? Some members of the Tea Party have made threats of violence against the president of the U.S., but I doubt that you ascribe that to their membership, and Fix News, a principal sponsor of the Tea Party, certainly does not do so.

The non-violence to which the Occupiers have been committed has been demonstrated in videos of police assaults on them that anyone can view.  I challenge you to offer evidence of any violence committed by Occupiers. I fear that I lack the fortitude to remain nonviolent in the face of the government-sanctioned violence perpetrated against them.

Sanitary conditions have certainly been difficult in Zucotti Park and other places occupied, but objective, non-partisan assessments of these conditions have indicated that the Occupiers have done the best they could with the resources available to them.  If a Tea Party “rabble,” to use your term, had occupied the Park, the government of, by, and for the 1% would have rushed to provide Porta-Johns.

Your ambiguous statement that Fix News “is consistently at the top of the ratings when compared to the other main stream media outlets” only means that it has more viewers, not that it is rated more highly by any objective, non-partisan source with respect to the accuracy or quality of the information that it broadcasts. I challenge you to offer any evidence to the contrary. Fix News’ high viewership is, however, correlated with the woeful misinformation that objective surveys have found most Americans to possess. As an apparent devotee of Fix News, you, along with Carol Bowman and Ernie Sowers, may be unaware of the demonstrated lack of journalistic ethics evidenced by its owner, Rupert Murdoch, who controls its editorial content, and you may not have seen the film, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.

I am planning to be in Washington, D.C. in March to attend the Reason Rally that will advocate stopping the movement of the U.S. toward becoming a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, a movement fomented by broadcasters on Fix News. I intend to visit the Occupiers in McPherson Square to demonstrate that some octogenarians like me, though unable to participate physically in the movement, do support it. In my opinion, the Occupy movement is the only force effectively opposing the U.S. becoming a full-fledged, overtly racist, anti-gay, anti-immigrant (especially anti-Mexican immigrant), anti-Muslim, dog-eat-dog, theocratic plutocracy.

Ken Crosby

Riberas del Pilar

 

 


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