AP reports: “The cleanup of a plaza in lower Manhattan where protesters have been camped out for a month was postponed early Friday, sending cheers up from a crowd that had feared the effort was merely a pretext to evict them.”
For more, including video streams from various cities, see.
MICHAEL RATNER, mratner at michaelratner.com
MARGARET RATNER KUNSTLER, margaret at kunstlerlaw.net
Available for a limited number of interviews, Michael Ratner is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, who is with the National Lawyers Guild, are authors of the just released book Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st Century America.
Ratner told IPA last night that “We have written a letter to the property owners, the city and the police making clear that closing down Occupy Wall Street violates the First Amendment and is flatly illegal.” This morning, he spoke to Democracy Now from the square, describing the protesters’ General Assembly decision making process and organizing that brought out thousands to defend the park. Ratner described the “roar of joy” that went through the park before dawn when it was known that Bloomberg had backed down. He noted that the protesters had done a massive cleaning of the park: “The health emergency was a pretext to destroy something all Americans should be proudest of. … You can eat off the ground in this park.”
GEORGE MAGIROS, gmagiros at gmail.com
Magiros is with the National Lawyers Guild.
DANNY SCHECHTER, danny at mediachannel.org
Producer Schechter’s documentaries include “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time” and “In Debt We Trust.”
ARUN GUPTA, ebrowniess at yahoo.com,
A founding editor of the New York City based Indypendent, Gupta also helped found the Occupied Wall Street Journal. He is currently in D.C.
NATHAN SCHNEIDER, nathan at wagingnonviolence.org
Schneider is an editor of the website Waging Nonviolence.