Photo By John Hoff (September 2) In preparation for RNC 2008, St. Paul supposedly studied the experience of cities like Seattle, and their response to demonstrations like the WTO protests in 1999. But did St. Paul actually learn all the lessons to be learned? Apparently, they...
...did not. In Seattle, years of messy lawsuits followed in the court system. Letting loose on a crowd of politically-active, socially-conscious people...letting the gas drift and hit media, bystanders, people in coffee shops while ACLU and National Lawyers' Guild stands by, prepared to defend civil rights...is a recipe for years of expensive litigation. Seattle knows this. St. Paul is about to learn it. Your tax dollars hard at work, paying the lawyers.
(I asked the protester, above, how he hurt his leg. He said it was nothing notable, just "some bulls***," but he wasn't going to let it stop him from marching)
i did read that as part of the initial negotiations, the RNC was required to take out an insurance policy that would cover litigation related to the convention. who knows if it will actually turn out that way or not, though.
ReplyDeleteMichelle