KEEP HANDS OFF PROTESTERS SAYS GREEN-RAINBOW PARTY

BOSTON - In response to the arrest of over 120 people early Tuesday morning, the Green-Rainbow Party (GRP) called for the City of Boston to find ways to accommodate the Occupy Boston demonstrators who have been gathering in the Dewey Square area of the City.  In response to the reported roughing up of members of the Veterans for Peace brigade, the GRP condemned any excessive use of force against peaceful protesters.

“The Occupy Boston movement is an important and long overdue effort to assert the rights of our citizens to have a government and a society that works for all the people, and not just for insiders and big money opportunists,” said Green-Rainbow Party Co-chair John Andrews.  "The people who are gathering are exercising their rights of free speech under the Constitution, as well as their inherent rights to ask for redress of their grievances. Any government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people should work to accommodate their gathering, not find excuses for attacking them. The police need to be told to back off, and solutions to problems need to be negotiated with the protest organizers.”

Andrews noted that “Government officials can work with Occupy Boston to resolve traffic or landscaping problems without taking away the inalienable rights of citizens to protest government abuse.  We have to get our priorities straight. “Jill Stein, former Green-Rainbow Party gubernatorial candidate, spoke to the Occupy Boston gathering last week. “The Occupy movement is a cry for change from workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas and young people whose future is being stolen from them by politicians intent on serving Wall Street rather than the people,” she said. “People are being forced from their homes by big banks that defrauded consumers. The planet is being sacrificed to protect profits of polluters.

 
The Occupy Wall Street movement is addressing the root of these problems, and the 99% must be heard.  Both the Democrat and Republican parties have broken America's social contract by refusing to remedy -- in fact, deliberately aggravating -- our intolerable economic inequities.

We are alarmed to hear of excessive police force being used against people exercising their Constitutional free speech and assembly rights.   We are especially concerned to hear of the reported roughing up of Veterans for Peace,  who risked their lives to defend those rights for all of us.  We call on the authorities to refrain from the use of violence, and to respect the rights of citizens to protest peacefully."

Patrick Burke, a college student who serves as GRP membership director, noted, "My fellow students, who are facing years of debt and unemployment, are being arrested for demanding a better future.  And Wall Street is allowed to steal billions without any of the bankers being led away in handcuffs.  That's why we're not going away.  That's why we're not going to be silenced." 

Last week the Green-Rainbow Party officially endorsed the Occupy protests and called upon people to support them.

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