Why hasn't every official responsible for turning Lower Manhattan into a police state resigned or been fired yet?

No, this isn't Nazi Germany or a Latin American dictatorship. It's Monday morning on Pine Street in Lower Manhattan.

by Ken

Could someone remind me what country this is we're living in? Because as I struggled through the tiny corridors allowed this morning for pedestrian traffic in Lower Manhattan's Financial District, I saw no possibility of anything remotely unpeaceable except for the shocking police-state presence.

Oh, I made it through with a minimum of hassle except to my battered psyche. In the United State of America people are no longer allowed to demonstrate in public places? So have we officially declared the American experiment with democracy and free expression over? It was shocking. In response to absolutely no threat of any kind, none whatsoever, our powers-that-be turned the Financial District into the kind of armed camp you associate with Nazi Germany or a Latin American dictatorship. I don't understand how anyone who in an official capacity participated in the decision to create this fascist lockdown is still employed. By now they should not only be off the job but referred to the appropriate federal and/or state authorities for consideration of appropriate prosecution.

We've talked a lot about the steady erosion of civil liberties given cover by 9/11. I've never seen so starkly graphic a demonstration. I would say that it's time for us to decide what kind of society we want to live in except that the decision appears to have been made already: a police state.

Inside my office, a coworker reported hearing a woman say, "Why don't they just arrest them all and get it over?" Lady, why don't you just go the hell back where you belong, to Soviet Russia?

From nytimes.com:

September 19, 2011, 12:28 PM

Wall Street Protests Continue, With at Least 6 Arrested

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Updated, 1:42 p.m. | In a continuation of the demonstrations that began on Saturday, nearly 200 protesters marched along Wall Street and other parts of the financial district Monday morning, brandishing American flags and signs denouncing the economic system. At least six of them were arrested.

Office workers heading to their desks passed the protesters on the sidewalks with little incident. At times, the two groups squeezed shoulder to shoulder through narrow passages formed by metal police barricades.

The first three arrests came on Pine Street, when a police lieutenant ordered that two men wearing ski masks be taken into custody. Officers then arrested a woman wearing a plastic mask on the back of her head.

The next arrest came a few minutes later on when a deputy inspector standing on Wall Street ordered a man wearing an orange hat to keep moving. The man, who had turned around in a crowded sidewalk just west of Broad Street, spoke to the inspector for a moment, then lifted his hands and said that he was having difficulty moving.

At that, the inspector reached over a curbside barricade, grabbed the man and tried to haul him from the sidewalk onto the street. As the man backed away, the inspector lunged forward, holding onto the man and toppling the metal barricade. The inspector fell to the sidewalk and a moment later the man in the orange hat was also on the ground, being handcuffed.

The police confirmed that three men and a woman were arrested under provisions that make it illegal for two or more individuals to wear masks, and that another man was arrested on charges of jumping a police barrier and resisting arrest. (A reporter and a photographer for The Times who witnessed the episode between the man in the orange hat and the police did not see him attempting to jump a barrier.)

Another woman was arrested around 11:45 a.m. as she was writing in chalk on the sidewalk on Broadway near Zuccotti Park. “They just came up and grabbed her,” said Jessica Davis, 19, who identified the arrested woman as Andrea Osborne. The police confirmed a sixth arrest, of a woman.

APOLOGIES FOR THE LATE POSTING --

If I have the strength, following the three-hour trip home, I'll add an explanatory whine.


WHEW! I MADE IT! (aka WHINY ADDENDUM)

When I left my desk a little after 6pm ET, it didn't occur to me to worry that this post wasn't finished. After all, I had till 9pm ET to hammer it into shape, and just one stop along the way, to pick up a prescription at the CVS store at Nassau and Fulton Streets, which after all would leave me right in front of a subway entrance for the A train. No sweat.

Until an hour-plus before, I hadn't been out all day to see what the armed occupation looked like late in the day. When I finally ventured out, it was just to get (finally!) to the gym, which is practically just across the street -- down the half-block on Broad Street to the corner of Broad and Wall Streets, and then across Wall to just the other side of Federal Hall. But the fence-delimited human cattle passageways were still up, and with the crowd packed into that limited space, and some of us trying to worm our way through (while others were there to stand and gawk), a 30-second walk took about five minutes.

The good part is that intersection (which is mostly closed off to traffic as part of the post-9/11 New York Stock Exchange security district) is one of the city's most popular tourist gathering points, what with Federal Hall and the NYSE on diagonally opposite corners. Normally the obstacle to pedestrian progress is the mob of phone-camera-waving tourists. Well, today all those folks who would have been gathered there, or at least the ones who had been hardy enough to force their way into the camp, got an up-close view of the Shame of America.

When I headed out to the gym, and then when I returned, and again when I left the office for the evening, I had a powerful impulse to say, loudly enough for the paramilitary occupiers to hear, stuff like: "This is a disgrace." "Isn't this America anymore?" Or even to ask one of New York's Formerly Finest (for the "paramilitary occupiers" were indeed the shock troops of the NYPD), "Aren't you at least a little ashamed?" But all three times I decided finally that while I maybe wouldn't mind making a little trouble, no, I really didn't want to cause myself trouble. So much for free speech.

Anyway, I managed to pick up my prescription, and headed down to catch my A train, only to find I couldn't get onto the platform because of the mob being told by a New York City Transit employee that there were delays (she mentioned "20 minutes"), not just on the A, but also on the 2 and 3 and the 4 and 5 trains, which run through the same Fulton Street station. So I retreated to the street and headed west, thinking maybe to catch my no. 1 local train, without knowing whether it was running, although as I approached the World Trade Center site, which is where my westward trajectory was taking me, I realized I was smack between the Chambers and Rector Street stations --oh, once upon a time there was a no. 1 stop there, at Cortlandt Street, but back in 2001 it incurred the wrath of Osama bin Laden.

Alternatively, it occurred to me, I could possibly snag an M5 bus, which take me from nearly all the way downtown to nearly all the way uptown, a mere 11 blocks from home. And what do you know, there was an M5 bus, still boarding passengers in the bus stop, enabling me to catch it and even get myself a swell seat. It's a long trip by bus, but hey, I had plenty of time . . . And then, a mere three hours later, I was home! (Don't ask. The M5 ran into traffic like I've never seen at that hour on Sixth Avenue, and then by the time we made it to Columbus Circle hordes of passengers tried to crowd their way onto uptown-bound buses, with vague word of "no trains above 59th Street, which hardly seemed related to the problem with trains below Fulton Street. And apparently the two conditions were totally unrelated -- as I gather from a crawl under the programming on our local cable news channel, NY1, and also from the MTA.info website, which attributes tonight's problems to a "water condition" at 110th Street.)

Now tomorrow morning I not only have to get back to the Financial District, and into the Financial District, but I have to get out again in time to get uptown (on the East Side) for an 11am root-canal appointment (no, I'm not making this up; believe me, I wish I were), and then back into Midtown for a 5:30pm Municipal Art Society tour of architecture of the Garment District (I'm still not making this up), and then Wednesday morning . . . but enough.

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