Announcements 




Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



Thank you for donating

If you've made a donation and wish to receive thank you gifts for your donation, be sure to send us your mailing address via our Contact form.

See our thank you gifts for your donation.



The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.


Subscribe to our Weekly Summary & receive our FREE Resist Trump window cling


resist (Car window cling)

Email us with your mailing address at contact@btlonline.org to receive our "Resist Trump/Resist Hate" car window cling!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


Between The Lines on Stitcher

stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

inequality
"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

Between The Lines Blog  BTL Blog

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Special Programming Special Programming

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Between The Lines Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

Share this content:

|

Podcasts Subscribe to BTL

Podcasts:  direct  or  via iTunes

Subscribe to Program Summaries, Interview Transcripts or Counterpoint via email or RSS feed

If you have other questions regarding subscriptions, feeds or podcasts/mp3s go to our Audio Help page.

Between The Lines Blog

Stay connected to BTL

RSS feed  twitter  facebook

donate  Learn how to support our efforts!

After Police Raid, Zuccotti Park Still a Hub for Occupy Wall Street Movement

Real Audio  RealAudio MP3  MP3

Posted Nov. 23, 2011

Interview with Mark Bray and Senia Barragan, Occupy Wall Street media team, conducted by Scott Harris

occupy

Although the police carried out New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s order to evict Occupy Wall Street activists and remove their tents and infrastructure from Zuccotti Park with brutal efficiency on Nov. 15, the park remains a hub of the movement. A recent visit to Zuccotti Park found that a large number of activists remained there participating in rallies, organizing protests and conducting daily General Assembly meetings.

New York City’s Occupy movement showed its strength just two days after Bloomberg’s raid, on the second month anniversary of their founding. Organizers employed nonviolent civil disobedience in an attempt to close down the New York Stock Exchange and later in the day, led tens of thousands of protesters on a march across the Brooklyn Bridge in what they called a “Festival of Lights.”

Elsewhere around the country, local governments and police are continuing their attempt to suppress the Occupy movement by dismantling encampments and physically assaulting activists. A recent incident where video images captured police officers on the campus of the University of California at Davis, attacking activists engaged in non-violent civil disobedience with pepper spray at close range, has generated public outrage at police and renewed support for the movement. Between The Lines' Scott Harris traveled to New York’s Zuccotti Park on Nov. 19 and sat down with two members of the Occupy Wall Street media team, Mark Bray and Senia Barragan, who talked about how the dismantling of the park has affected their organizing and some of the major issues confronting their fast growing national movement.

SENIA BARRAGAN: (The eviction of Occupy Wall Street in lower Manhattan began) about 1 o'clock in the morning on that day. Mayor Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to clear out Zuccotti Park or Liberty Square. So they blocked off about two or three blocks' kind of radius so no one could get in. There was a complete media blackout. No reporters were allowed in, in fact, several were arrested. A councilman was arrested as well and bruised on the head trying to get in to observe.

And so, in the process, a lot of our fellow occupiers were violently torn from that park. A lot of them were brutalized by the NYPD and about a thousand, I don't know many - 5,000 books more or less the number – thousands of books were destroyed. Computers were destroyed in the process and a lot of our fellow comrades were pepper sprayed. And so, it was, I think it was just a complete act of cowardice in the middle of the night, 1 o'clock in the morning. Young people who have families, who have mothers, who have fathers, who have sisters, who have brothers aren't just animals. They're real human beings who are out there for real issues.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I've heard some people say the park certainly was critical to getting this movement off the ground in New York and nationally and internationally. But, having been there for almost eight weeks, people are still there during the day, but you can't camp out and you don't have the infrastructure that you had before. How much of a difference is that going to make in terms of organizing outreach and having the public visibility which made this so powerful?

MARK BRAY: Well, you're absolutely right that the park was instrumental in getting the movement off the ground to begin with. Obviously, we took the tactic of having a geographic location as the center of our movement and having an encampment from the examples from the Arab Spring and the Indignados in Spain and various movements in France and Greece and so forth. And so, initially I, was kind of skeptical of that – I thought it was maybe a shallow imitation of more serious struggles in other parts of the world. But, it really has captured the imagination of a wide percentage of the American people. And, the issues that we're struggling for – economic justice, democracy, education and health care – these are not new issues. Unfortunately, they've been issues for a long time. But the demonstration against it, the protest against it has been given a renewed vitality through this tactic. And so, it's interesting, because when we had the park, a lot of the press said, "Well, why do you need a park to have a social movement? Can't you just do it without a park?" And now that we've lost the park, the very same press is saying, "Well, how could you have a social movement without the park? You need the park."

So, in a strong sense, there's a tendency to try and be negative toward what we're doing, no matter what we do and we have to put that aside. So, certainly with the setback, certainly we would have like to stay in the park, and it would be insincere to say that we say that we weren't hurt by what happened. But nevertheless, it's important to clarify – and a lot of outsiders don't realize that much of the actual work of organizing, the organizing meetings were happening away from the park if only because there wasn't a lot of space with all the tents and everything. And we have donated office space, storage space, a donated kitchen. We have a large infrastructure and apparatus and network of communication that's outside of the park that wasn't touched by what happened. And so, the challenge now, in my mind, is to take the momentum we've gained because certainly we got much bigger much faster than anyone would could have expected. In a certain sense, we had a movement before an organization. And to use the success and the popularity we've gotten to try and expand throughout the burroughs and make the occupy movement bigger than lower Manhattan.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I had a question for you about national coordination. And that is obviously, with the news reports and the leaked information that the police and the federal government were in ways involved in suppressing this movement. How far along is the coordination between the various groups for some national actions and as well as some things in the future maybe I'm not even thinking of, and maybe you aren't either, but...?

MARK BRAY: Well, we have regular conference calls on different themes among different members of certain working groups. And, I think the degree of repression we faced has accelerated our communication, because it's forced us to. And so, some of the earliest examples of that really bearing fruit were solidarity marches we have with Oakland, the fact that we donated $20,000 and 100 tents to their occupation. And I know that a lot of people from the different occupations have come to New York, and when I used to sit at our press table, I would meet people from North Carolina, from Chicago, from Vermont, from Montreal, Toronto, London that would come.

And, you know there was a certain sense that we were sort of a hub for this, because we kind of got it going in the United States, and so, we've been enhancing our communication and our coordination. And I think you'll see as time goes on, more days of national action, even than we've had in the past. There's already talk potentially of having a national gathering in D.C. in the spring among all the "Occupies" coming down there. And so, it's important and the technology's made it easier. And I think the nice thing about it is that although people have sort of looked to New York as the start of it, we're trying more and more to shed that title and try to encourage initiative elsewhere and try to follow along.

For more news, analysis and commentary on the Occupy Wall Street movement, visit our Between The Lines’ special Occupy Wall Street coverage and resource page at www.btlonline.org/occupy.

Related Links: