Time 8:30 am – On my way to “some kind of protest” going on at 555 Market Street.
I happen to have had the TV on the local news this morning, and it was treating some “protest” event as more of a traffic nuisance than anything. The news broadcast did, however, have time to show coverage of a dismal little anti-homosexual rally that took place at some church last night, which made me feel like taking a whack at covering whatever was going on in the financial district. (I was curious what wasn’t being reported on. Why would they show a taped rally from the night before instead of a live one as it was happening?)
Two more stops till Montgomery Street. I have absolutely no idea what to expect…
____ 30 minutes pass____
Wow! That hunch really paid off. It turns out that it was an anti-war/anti-Feinstein march and rally protesting what the protesters were claiming was that Diane Feinstein was directly profiting from Iraq-War defense contracts. (I haven’t had time to investigate and attempt to confirm these allegations one way or the other yet.) (Actually, what they were saying is that Diane accepted campaign contributions from the, in their view, questionable, McKesson Corp. I have since confirmed the connection between Feinstein and McKesson. The company contributed $6,750 to her last year, according to open secrets.org.)
A guy with a speakerphone explained that there were 20 people having a sit-in upstairs in the building at Feinstein headquarters.
The Cops were generally cool at the beginning — really cool in fact (as the pictures I post soon will demonstrate), but when the crowd started to congregate in front of the McKesson building, they soon threatened to arrest anyone touching the front doors. It looked like things were about to be uncool for a minute, definitely. One cop singled out one of the protesters, and said he wanted to talk to him privately. The guy quickly walked over to me and asked me if I would mind taping their conversation. I just nodded and kept filming.
I’m going over to use my buddies’ editing in about an hour to compress my footage and edit it into a few digestible chunks. Maybe the popular media will see fit to report on the event…
I’ll be uploading my footage soon!