Anti-corporate protests in America have spread, and so have the arrests and charges of police heavy-handedness. With US mainstream media ignoring the rallies, some protesters are taking the task of informing the public into their own hands.
According to AP news agency, on Friday New York police arrested 14 people for obstructing traffic by standing or sitting on the street and also for turning over trash cans, hurling bottles and knocking over a police scooter.
There were reports of more police violence on Friday with some people left bruised and battered. One New Yorker was pushed face-down onto the pavement after apparently being run over by a police motorcycle.
In San Francisco, protesters heckled media mogul Rupert Murdoch during his speech at an education forum on Friday. Activists repeatedly interrupted Murdoch’s speech, accusing him of trying to profit from public education. About six activists were reportedly escorted out of the conference room. None were arrested.
The movement against corporate influence has gone global, with demonstrations planned on Saturday in dozens of cities worldwide, including the US, Canada, the EU and a number of Asian and African countries.
Despite the scope of the protests, American members of “Occupy Together” claim they are still being ignored by the mainstream media. In these circumstances, some have taken the task of informing the public into their own hands.
Occupy Wall Street’s own TV
From the mass demonstrations of support to the disturbing images of police brutality…
Day after day, the world has been able to watch Occupy Wall Street in action through www.globalrevolution.tv, a live web stream documenting the ongoing corporate resistance and civil unrest growing and growing in the Big Apple.
“It is not about one political party or this or that,” said the website’s co-founder Vlad Teichberg. “It is actually creating a platform to have this debate without it being manipulated by the powers that be.”
Five years ago, Vlad Teichberg was a derivatives trader on Wall Street. Today, the 39-nine-year-old is among those camped out in Zuccotti Park protesting against the financial institutions he once worked for.
“I saw unlimited greed combined with an unethical hierarchical system. The combination of these two created the biggest bomb the world has ever seen. It sunk the world economy,” he said.
Teichberg co-founded and launched globalrevolution.tv four weeks ago when the Occupy movement began in New York.
“We also teach people how to shoot video, immediately edit it and how to make it go viral,” he said. “The whole idea is that you are creating an instantaneous record and a witness.”
Now that the Wall Street movement has exploded worldwide, globalrevolution.tv will be broadcasting live streams from more than 70 countries and 600 cities.
“We are going to have a team of people staying in contact with all the other squares and figuring out what is happening there and taking their streams and putting them on the globalrevolution channel,” Teichberg said. “So this is sort of a model for a replacement for CNN.”
Teichberg says mainstream media outlets will be unable to marginalize or spin the peaceful uprising as people from all over the world take to the streets demanding elected leaders begin working for the majority instead of financial elites.
“It is a worldwide movement,” he said. “These principals of equality are going to redefine everything because we are basically creating the new United Nations except it is not the United Nations it is the United People.”
The people of the Occupy movement picked their first fight with the world’s most powerful political and economic force – an exceptional and ambitious feat which was initially criticized but is now spreading across the planet.