SoCal Street Cart Vendors Hurting After ‘Occupy’ Group Splatters Blood, Urine
SAN DIEGO (CBS) — A pair of Southland street cart vendors who were forced to shut down their businesses after “Occupy” protesters vandalized their carts are hoping to get some help from local residents.
KNX 1070′s Tom Reopelle reports a fundraiser in the Gas Lamp district in San Diego on Monday night is aimed at helping two vendors get back on their feet.
The coffee and hot dog carts were located in Civic Center Plaza, the same location as the Occupy San Diego protesters.
That group first settled in to the plaza Oct. 7 and set up a tent city which has since twice been taken down by police.
Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators, but when they stopped, the protesters became violent.
And according to one city councilman, bodily fluids were used in the attacks.
“Both carts have had items stolen, have had their covers vandalized with markings and graffiti, as well as one of the carts had urine and blood splattered on it,” said Councilman Carl DeMaio.
The damages will likely require at least a complete cleaning if not a replacement of the cart covers, DeMaio said.
In addition to the attacks, the vendors also said they recently received death threats.
Proceeds from the fundraiser will go directly to help the two business owners.
After a relatively peaceful start, the “Occupy” movement has sparkedviolent clashes with police in Oakland and recently saw protesters push an elderly woman down a flight of stairs in D.C.
Occupiers terrorize us: eatery
A business owner near the Occupy Wall Street encampment claims she has been repeatedly harassed and threatened with bodily harm by protesters after she and her employees refused to give in to their outlandish demands.
“I’ve been told, ‘Watch your back!’ 10 times,” Stacey Tzortzatos, owner of Panini & Co. Breads, located across from Zuccotti Park, told The Post yesterday.
She and her employees are terrified by the constant threats, which she said began after she demanded the protesters stop using her shop’s restroom as a place to bathe every day.
The final straw came about two weeks ago, when the demonstrators broke a bathroom sink, flooding the shop, and clogged the toilet -- setting her back $3,000 in damages.
She put up a sign that said the bathroom was out of order, but they tore it down shortly afterward, she said.
“I have the police in here 10 times a day, [and] I’m the bouncer. I’ve been called the spawn of the devil. “It’s unbelievable what goes on in here every day, ” Tzortzatos said.
And on Friday, she said, a crazed squatter burst into the shop and demanded that workers fill a 10-gallon container of water.
When they refused, “he banged it on the ground and started yelling” and threatened the staff, she said.
“He said he was entitled to have it for free.”
Tzortzatos said the unsafe conditions begin at around 5 p.m. every day, when “they come from the park drunk, under the influence of something.
“They use one of our doorways as a bathroom, and we have to scrub it down every morning.
“I’ve had people come in here and yell, ‘Boycott! Boycott!’
“They unplugged my ATM machine and plugged in their computers,” Tzortzatos said.
Another businessman, who complained to The Post about the squatters’ behavior last week, said yesterday that the situation has since deteriorated, adding, “You don’t know the half of it.”
But the protesters appear to be digging in, erecting three of what will eventually be more than two dozen, 16-by-16-foot military-style tents that will help them stave off hypothermia in the coming winter.
And they’ll have some entertainment today.
Music legends David Crosby and Graham Nash are slated to perform an acoustic set of protest songs this afternoon at Zuccotti Park.
Liberals Make Deal With Violent, Anti-Zionist OWS Devil
The news stories have been piling up documenting violence and disruptive behavior stemming from Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the country. In Washington,Occupiers sought to storm a conference being held by a conservative group. In Boston, a group of the Occupiers marched on the Israeli consulate chanting “viva, viva Palestina.” And in New York, fear of sexual assault led to the creation of a special guarded tent for female protesters.
Defenders and sympathizers of the OWS movement have claimed that conservatives have cherry-picked isolated incidents out of context in order to besmirch a legitimate effort on the part of citizens to express their discontent with the economy and the political situation. It must be admitted that when it was just a matter of stray signs or utterances that might have been true, though it must also be said this was exactly the tactic used by liberals in the media to try to demonize the Tea Party movement. But with the sort of group violence we saw last week in Oakland and the attempt to interfere with the right of conservatives to free speech and assembly in Washington this past weekend, it is no longer possible to pretend that a spirit of hooliganism is not integral to OWS. Nor, after the march in Boston, is it possible for OWS’s Jewish defenders to assert that the sort of anti-Zionism that raised its head in Boston is an aberration.
It bears repeating that despite all of the huffing and puffing by the chattering classes about the threat to democracy that the Tea Party was alleged to pose, nothing like any of this ever happened at Tea Party rallies or their protests against members of Congress at Town Hall meetings. The Tea Party protesters may have occasionally been rude to a member of Congress or a senator, but they did not block traffic, attempt to stop those who disagreed with them from holding meetings or attempt to shut down an Israeli consulate.
This is not an accident.
The OWS movement is a spiritual descendant of the leftist protest of the 1960s that embraced violence and sought to disrupt and shut down institutions they didn’t like. Many Americans don’t like Wall Street and rich people. But the idea that a movement that has easily morphed into a piece of dangerous street theater represents the views of anything more than the far left is absurd.
The outrage in Boston also ought to remind liberal Jews who might otherwise be inclined to sympathize with OWS that the far left in this country is a cesspool of anti-Zionism. Liberals who make common cause with OWS are making a deal with an anti-Semitic and radical devil.
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