General William Westmoreland commanded the U.S. military operations in the Vietnam War (1964–68) during the Tet Offensive. Tet is the Vietnamese New Year. We on the ground knew that Westmoreland’s highly publicized, overly optimistic assessments of the war were not true. We “won” every battle, but lost the war. The 1968 Tet Offensive, in which communist forces, having staged a diversion at the Battle of Khe Sanh, attacked cities and towns throughout South Vietnam. U.S. and South Vietnamese troops successfully fought off the attacks, and the communist forces took heavy losses, but the ferocity of the assault shook public confidence in Westmoreland’s previous assurances about the state of the war.
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The day was organized by Occupy SF and numerous other groups. It started before sunrise, with sometimes overlapping demonstrations focusing on corporate greed, foreclosures, war and immigration crackdowns. Demonstrators noted their connections, such as profits from building incarceration facilities. There were a few breaks, but for the most part the rain was constant.
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Protesters also decried the role that the Supreme Court case Citizens United, now two years old, has played in pulling representative democracy out of the grasp of ordinary citizens. As many as 2,000 protesters took part in all of the activities. Thirteen people were arrested in actions at Wells Fargo and Bank of America.
Threaded throughout the Financial District, Occupy affinity groups engaged in various forms of non-violent activity such as chaining themselves with lock boxes to all the entrances to Wells Fargo’s headquarters on California Street, staging a rally at the “bankers heart” sculpture at the foot of the Bank of America building, performing guerrilla theater as military personnel arresting “terrorists” (American citizens), and marching from Justin Herman Plaza throughout the financial district.
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The world community is forming, the borders that stand between nations are dissolving as the evolutionary forces of human consciousness awaken to the possibility of sustainable communities. Corporations are the usurpers who cross borders to exploit labor and the environment, buying off corrupt politicians to reap their profits, while families are being ripped apart by deportations that stop people from exercising their rights to a decent living.
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After the US Department of Justice advised that Guantanamo prison could be considered outside US legal jurisdiction, the first twenty captives arrived at Guantanamo on January 11, 2002. Guantanamo has become a place of prisoner mistreatment, torture and indefinite detention. It is an international embarrassment.
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What prompted this sentimental journey back in time when all of these freedoms were taken for granted was a twenty-something guy standing in line behind me who appeared to be taking all of these indignities in stride. At first I admired his good-natured acquiescence to all that we have lost in our precipitous slide into a quasi police state.
But it also made me sad that he has no idea, no memories, and no chance of ever knowing all the freedoms he and his generation have lost.
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There were thousands of us! Of course, the mainstream media did not report our numbers. The Sunday Chron buried the story on A11, putting a short local insert into a routine wire service roundup, and did not even attempt to estimate the crowd size. My estimate: at least 10,000 people marching, and it snowballed as we moved past Union Square and up Powell, through the cable car turnaround and back up Market toward the Civic Center.
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