“The right to free speech and the assembly in the United States is on the books in the constitution, but the elite bankers and the financiers or hedge fund managers, the Wall Street bankers, they do not like people speaking the truth and believe that they should be in jail,” Mark Mason, with the Occupy Oakland in San Francisco, said in a Wednesday interview.
“If we had a democracy wherein people could ensure that the 15th Amendment where equal protection under the laws was enforced, police would be storming banks and arresting bankers and putting them in jail instead of protesters,” Mason pointed out.
The activist praised the Occupy protests as nationally and internationally “vital,” but noted that the movement is expected to face “additional police suppression.”
The exacerbating economic conditions, corruption, poverty as well as social and economic inequality in the West has sparked the anti-capitalism Occupy movements in major cities in the US and Western countries since September 2011.
The protesters use the slogan, “We are the 99 percent” to distinguish themselves from the one percent of Americans who are in possession of the greatest portion of the nation’s wealth.
ASH/GHN/MA
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