Daily Kos: I See What Occupy Vancouver Did There…And It’s Brilliant:
At the Daily Kos, Ed Murray shines the light of reason on the corporate media’s theme-O-the-week:
The media’s latest attempt to undercut the message of Occupy movements all across the globe is by touting the “cost” of these protests. Many sources are reporting that Occupy movements are costing cities hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime because apparently it takes an entire precinct to make sure that 50 people don’t sleep through the night.
In the piece, he highlights Occupy Vancouver’s response: point the number of meals served to people who would otherwise have gone hungry, the number of beds provided to people who would otherwise have slept on the street, the public-health services offered to people with substance-abuse problems, and so on. As he argues:
These are only a few ways that these protests are actually picking up social and civic services and alleviating taxpayer burden by subsidizing some of the costs associated with running a city.
As someone once said, it’s all about controlling the narrative. Is it worth engaging the apparatus of repression and its corporate mouthpieces in terms of dollars and cents? I don’t have a quick answer, and given what I was arguing a couple of days ago, my initial response is to avoid talking about it in their terms, but I can’t dismiss Murray’s argument about adopting a variety of tactics out of hand.
Thoughts?
Related posts:
- Fiscal demonization of @OccupyTO continues on CTV | #classwarfare
- How The Globe channels the 1 per cent | #Occupy #classwarfare
- The Sun’s effect on our national conversation is obvious, but what about the Globe?
- Class warfare and the corporate media
- And George Carlin too, while we’re at it
- Now what’s all the fuss about?
