Bizarre, Media, Society

Protesting Mom Called “More Disgusting Than Any Of These Filths Down On Wall Street”

I saw this amazing clip this weekend from FOX where the anchors attacked a women because she left her kids with family and friends to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

The mother, Stacey Hessler of Florida, was saying that she felt this was a historic moment for citizens to take to the streets. It is funny how such commitment is inspiring in those who share your views, but disgusting for those who do not.

The New York Post has a decidedly negative profile of her, though it seems short on independent sources. What is striking about the Fox report is the view that any mother who leaves her children to join such a protest is “filth.”

335 thoughts on “Protesting Mom Called “More Disgusting Than Any Of These Filths Down On Wall Street””

  1. gbk, I remember King Crimson. What a thoughtful post that gets at the root of the problem. I really don’t hate the “menz”. It is a myth perpetuated by two guys on this blog.

  2. Heard this discussion this morning and checked out the website;

    “In that sense, then, the hundreds of Jews who gathered across from Zuccotti Park for Kol Nidre services October 7 — in solidarity (their words) with the Occupy Wall Street encampment across the street — were upholding a tradition that began in Revolutionary War times, continued through the anti-slavery and civil rights movements, and even was manifested in the protests against the Vietnam War.”

    Read more: http://forward.com/articles/144298/#ixzz1btPZY7Vw

    BTW:Zuccotti Park is now known as LIBERTY SQUARE PARK.FYI.

  7. Divide and conquer really works — doesn’t it? People mad at SWM because she supposedly hates “menz,” hairs being split over nuances of political lexicon, all pointing fingers everywhere but not at ourselves. I feel like I’m on a playground wondering who’s going to throw rocks at me when the real problem is I’m on a fucking playground.

    Our current problems transcend political ideologies, yet many have not adjusted to this fact. We are fighting over the crumbs left to us from the heavy boots of kleptocracy. The strength of all is required to cast off this descending yoke as the illusion of personal betterment within the existing economic and political systems has been exposed to all but the truly blind.

    This country’s wars must end — now. Wars distort economies, morals, and promise illusions that do not exist. Wars leave the crumbs that we are fighting over, and leave us satisfied with insignificant gains when weighed against the moral and economic costs of their pursuit.

    After this, we should concentrate on regaining our past representative government by legally confronting their dictates of the last ten years while our perspective was, and still is, warped by ten years of war. Citizens United v. FEC should be fought at every level of legal avenue, corporate access to the Bill of Rights needs to be sheared at the roots, and executive prerogative in committing this country’s resources in wars should, at a minimum, be brought in line with the intent of the War Powers Resolution Act (50 USC § 1541-1548).

    If these four issues can be accomplished we might have a chance of effecting real change by drastically reducing the “defense” budget which is the proverbial elephant in the room. It will be a long road. Multinational corporations will threaten to pull all their resources out of this county — emulating KBR’s move to Dubai in 2008 — and there will be nothing to stop them, so let them go. As it stands now many US based corporations derive much more profit from non-US business anyway. For example, 82% of General Electric’s profits last year were based on non-US business. The corporations don’t even need us as consumer’s anymore, let alone as workers — so let them go. This has been the long game of neoliberals for many decades — fuck’um.

    Locally based economies are the future, they have to be if we have learned anything in the last decade. After this we can maybe return to the more quaint arguments of what side of the aisle you’re standing on.

    I am aware that this post will seem extremely naive to many readers of this blog and I agree that it is; but a population needs at some point to realize when they’ve been played, when the best intentions of all have been distorted into the means of betterment for a privileged few.
    I was only going to post some lyrics from King Crimson’s Court of the Crimson King and I guess I got carried away. Anyway, here’s the last two verses of Schizoid Man, which seems most apt at this point in time:

    Blood rack barbed wire
    Politicians’ funeral pyre
    Innocents raped with napalm fire
    Twenty first century schizoid man.

    Death seed blind man’s greed
    Poets’ starving children bleed
    Nothing he’s got he really needs
    Twenty first century schizoid man.

    1. GBK,

      Elegantly put. Stating the true problem and providing simple solutions is never naive.

  8. “The police costs are unnecessary. The protestors are peaceful. The NYPD received. 4million dollar gift from Wall Street…maybe they should use that money to pay overtime.”

    The following text can be found on
    http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/financial-giants-put-new-york-city-cops-on-their-payroll/ .
    (You have to scroll down a bit.)

    “Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll

    “If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

    “The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

    “New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

    “The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.”

  10. “She (Warren) did not found the OWS movement. The OWS movement is free standing and non-partisan.”

    But Al Gore invented the intertubes, and Dan Quayle invented SpeelCheck, yes?

  11. “it was inferred that they were all a bunch of KOCH suckers.”

    I think that refers to people who can’t afford their own airplane but repeat the talking points of the Koch brothers, anyway. They’ve been suckered (duped) – as in “A sucker is born every minute.”

  17. raff,

    Thanks for that reminder … I’d forgotten

    referring to : “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

    That was repeated at almost every Civil Rights March or action I took part in.

  18. raff, you are right. It is a free standing and quite unique movement. Its driving the authorities crazy because unlike formally organized movements, there is no one in charge they can arrest or hand a court order to. Authoritarian city governments and police are reacting quite predictably.

    Different versions of the OWS movement is at different stages of Gandhi’s principle:

    First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

    The reaction we are seeing is fear. They have reason to be afraid. The movement is not backing down but is growing in strength with each police assault or city council walkout. Those tactics really worked well for Mubarak and Gaddafi, didn’t they? About like they worked for the British more than sixty years ago in India.

  19. Wall Street,the one area of Manhattan where a lot of New Yorker s think that Stop and Frisk should be applied.

  20. Bdaman,
    The police costs are unnecessary. The protestors are peaceful. The NYPD received. 4million dollar gift from Wall Street…maybe they should use that money to pay overtime.

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