News for Youse: Occupy goes worldwide, just in time for a little history lesson on MLK

It was one month ago today that a few hundred protestors showed up at Bowling Green Park in New York City to Occupy Wall Street. This weekend, hundreds of thousands of people in an estimated 80 countries joined them. The CBC put the figure at 4000in Vangroover on Saturday, although word on the ground was 5000 for the peaceful rally.

The Straight continues to cover the growing Occupy movement, thanks largely to the indefatigable Miranda Nelson. Here's a smaller item that News for Youse would like to draw your attention to (via a tweet from Naomi Klein): after being instructed by the City to remove tents and other belongings, garbage workers in San Francisco quietly returned the goods in solidarity with Occupants in San Francisco.

Bravo. It was, of course, a sanitation workers strike that brought Martin Luther King to Memphis in 1968, whereupon he was struck down—not by a lone gunman—but in a state-sponsored assassination.

Not that this was brought up by Obama during a dedication at the newly unveiled King memorial in Washington, DC yesterday. In a service evidently rife with the usual platitudes, the president described King as "a man who stirred our conscience and thereby made our union more perfect." What he didn't mention was that King was murdered a year to the day after he called for a radical redistribution of wealth and an end to war. Instead, they gave him a statue.

Back here on the ground, however, over 40 years later, it seems that King’s genie is finally out of the bottle. As the ever reliable Chris Hedges puts it in a column today, “the foundations are shaking.”

Speaking of Hedges, his tussle with bullet-headed super-capitalist Kevin O’Leary last week—in which O’Leary called the Pulitzer prize winning journalist a “left wing nutbar”— has prompted a wrist-slap from CBC Ombudsman Kirk LaPointe. “There is room at the inn for a range of views, but there is no room for name-calling a guest,” wrote LaPointe in the quaint but essentially fucking useless decision.

Anyway, anything else seems a little trivial in comparison to Occupy the World; not that the death of Indy 500 champ Dan Wheldon in a 15 car pile-up in Las Vegas yesterday is exactly “trivial”. And as for Fauja Singh’s entry into the Guinness Book of World Records, after the 100-year-old became the oldest person to complete a marathon in Toronto on Sunday—we raise our fists in support of any oldsters still out there kicking ass!

You can follow Adrian Mack's contribution to the lobotomizing techno-nightmare known as Twitter at @AdrianMacked.