The two Occupiers to speak were Brooke Washburn and Beth Foster.
Ms. Washburn spoke first, discussing the need for and purpose of the round-the-clock 24 hour protest that has been taking place in Chattanooga for over 130 days. Here are some highlights from her speech to the Commission:
"Occupy Chattanooga is not about tents. You call us an eye sore and compare those tents to an eye sore. The real eye sore in Tennessee is the Corrections Corporation of America - the contract we have with them."
"We are all members of your community, we are all members of the workforce, we all have families here. I personally am a Chemical Engineering student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga - I take 14 credits, I work in the bio-fuels lab twice a week and I then I work 30 hours in the service industry. Sometimes, the only time I have to protest is at 1 in the morning. Even though I know that some people cannot see me, I call [and] I write [elected officials], nobody listens to me. So the only thing I feel I have a voice is my body, so if that means I'm going to lay down at the courthouse instead of sleeping a couple hundred feet away [at her home], that is what I'm going to do."Ms. Foster spoke last.
"We were waiting for the outcome of the Federal lawsuit. We were waiting for the courts to decide whether the County could Constitutionally enforce their ex post facto law against our protest. We were trusting in the system. How naive of us. When the County realized it was not going to win the Federal lawsuit it dismissed the suit and then it did what those in power have always done to the 99% - it misused its power."
"Why were we evicted from the protest? Why were our First Amendment rights ignored? Why were we given no warning? Why was our property searched? Under what authority did the eviction take place? Under what law?"
You can watch the entire presentation by Occupy Chattanooga to the Hamilton County Commission here:
Updated for language and links at 1:01 pm 3.21.2012