If you're one of the millions of people who get emails from MoveOn.org, then you've probably heard of the "99% Spring." Far from another clickable internet petition, it is possibly the largest attempt ever to train people in nonviolent protest techniques. Some Occupy types have criticized the effort as a scheme by Democratic operatives to co-opt their movement. But the reality is probably the opposite: It seems that America's best-known progressive fundraising organization is now taking its cues from Occupy Wall Street.

The government of Iceland has forgiven the mortgage debt for much of its population. This nation chose a very different way of stopping the crisis from the rest of European countries. It decided to hear the requests of the population and to put politicians and bankers on the bench of the accused three years after their financial excesses would sank one of the most prosperous economies in 2008. teleSUR

The training is quite good. Go because it’s great to be on the same page for a moment with eager, enthusiastic 99 percenters who want to make this great land of ours a better one. Drop your defenses (if you have any) and rest assured no one is talking about elections. Let’s focus on the original OWS vision: mass, creative, effective direct action against the banks, Wall Streeters and political forces that drove our economy off a cliff and want to charge us for getting back on the precipice again

Rule #4: Don’t Share Your Video with Police
If you capture video of police misconduct or brutality, but otherwise avoid being identified yourself, you can anonymously upload it to YouTube. This seems to be the safest legal option. For example, a Massachusetts woman who videotaped a cop beating a motorist with a flashlight posted the video to the Internet. Afterwards, one of the cops caught at the scene filed criminal wiretapping charges against her. (As usual, the charges against her were later dropped.)

On the other hand, an anonymous videographer uploaded footage of an NYPD officer body-slamming a man on a bicycle to YouTube. Although the videographer was never revealed, the video went viral. Consequently, the manufactured assault charges against the bicyclist were dropped, the officer was fired, and the bicyclist eventually sued the city and won a $65,000 settlement.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They ‘fired’ the top 1% of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1% was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment.

One way to learn more is by watching or listening to a few (or all) of these great lectures on the OWS movement. Some were given at OWS events and others take a look at the larger issues surrounding the discontent, but all will help you better understand the reasons so many people young and old are passionate about supporting this protest movement.

Forrest also repeatedly asked for assurances – at least five times – that the NDAA would not sweep up people like the plaintiffs: journalists engaged in journalism and citizens engaged in peaceful protest. Again, every time, the lawyers for Obama and Panetta said that they could not give her such assurances. At th

20120330 So far 70 journalists have been arrested in 12 cities around the United States since Occupy Wall Street began. This number includes an array of people who were documenting and reporting on Occupy events including professional press, freelancers, photographers, independent filmmakers, and citizen journalists. Scroll to the bottom for the most recent updates. For a quick list of arrests and a break down of their affiliation and occupation see this spreadsheet.

The majority of marketing and communications executives at financial services firms said that Occupy Wall Street has impacted their business, according to a study conducted by Echo Research and Makovsky, two research and communications firms. The number one challenge for firms this year is dealing with a negative public perception, according to Scott Tangney, an executive at Makovsky. In recent years past, recovering from the financial crisis superseded that concern.

"Banks and financial services firms have now shifted their focus from liquidity and financial performance to customer satisfaction and their own employees," said Scott Tangney, an executive at Makovsky. "The Occupy Wall Street Movement has indicated to firms where they need to be focusing."

The study’s findings come a little more than one week after Occupy Wall Street protesters were met with arrests celebrating the movement's six month anniversary.

Yet despite all the ruckus caused by the movement, more than 95 percent of marketing executives are blaming their firms' bad reputations on the companies themselves, not the protestors, according to the study.

That's in line with sentiments expressed by Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit in October, when he said the protesters' sentiments are "completely understandable."

Income Inequality: The 99 Percent movement refocused America’s political debate, forcing news outlets and eventually politicians to focus on rising income inequality. While debt and deficits were the primary focus of the media before the movement started, their attention after the movement began shifted to jobs, Wall Street, and unemployment. By the end of October, even Republicans were talking about income inequality, and a week later, Time Magazine devoted its cover to the topic, asking, “Can you still move up in America?”

In a recent article in the New York Times, occupiers described frequent harassment and interrogation by NYPD intelligence and FBI: “police officers or detectives have been posted outside buildings where private meetings were taking place, have visited the homes of organizers and have questioned protesters arrested on minor charges … one protester says he was questioned by a police detective and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Meanwhile, authorities are demanding access to the Twitter accounts of prominent occupiers like Jeff Rae and logs of occupy websites. And in Florida, Occupy Miami was raided without cause by paramilitary police on March 13.

On reddit, one activist argued the situation is far worse than is being reported in the news, claiming to have encountered:”DHS bugging of common meeting grounds; DHS paying individuals to attend our meetings and cause disruption; police breaking into property, creating fire hazards, then getting protestors living there evicted for said fire hazard; police breaking into private property and installing surveillance equipment in people’s homes. In at least one instance they left it obvious enough to leave a message; police arresting individuals solely to have them identify photographs of other occupiers; manipulating our personal bank accounts, such as canceling our access to our own accounts.”

Taken together with news of the authoritarian new law H.R. 347, these sinister stories suggest that authorities in the United States are preparing to aggressively disrupt Occupy’s May spring offensive.

Weigh in below and tell us how you think the movement can outmaneuver these authoritarian efforts to shut down our people-power.

How, then, did an oppressed people succeed in showing that the violence was actually in white racism, rather than in themselves?

They did it by creating brilliant dramas in which they contrasted their own behavior with that of their opponents. Part of the brilliance was in forcing their opponent into a dilemma in which either choice would put the demonstrators ahead of the game.  The story-line for a lunch-counter sit-in, for instance, was: “I want coffee at this whites-only lunch counter. If you serve me, fine. I win. If you don’t serve me but instead beat me or arrest me, fine. I win because I show where the violence is coming from.” (I was privileged to learn this lesson firsthand; my first arrest was in a civil rights sit-in.)

In other words, at their best, the young people avoided doing what could be perceived as mere provocation—like walking into the streets to stop traffic or hassling shoppers. The students were much cagier than that. They carefully set up no-win situations for their opponents, and therefore, against all odds—including the KKK terrorists—they usually won.

Furthermore, because they knew the stakes were high, the students took steps to heighten the contrast as much as possible. They showed up at the lunch counter with ironed dresses and white shirts and ties and polished shoes, with a textbook in hand.

The danger of such contrast is known well to people whose job is to defend an unjust status quo. When activist behavior reveals so clearly the injustice of the state, it results in a loss of the state’s legitimacy. Dozens of dictators have learned this to their sorrow. Smart managers of repression have therefore come up with a counter-strategy: reduce the contrast in behavior between the activists and those charged with repression. Here are some of their tactics:

Pay or persuade people to pretend to be activists and do something that can be called violence. This might be property destruction (since a lot of people believe property destruction is violence), but it could also mean attacking police or others on the side of the status quo.
Accuse the activists of violence whether or not there’s any evidence of it.
Plant the evidence. In Philadelphia during the 1960s, a young, largely-white anti-racist group couldn’t reach consensus to state publicly that they were nonviolent, even though they hadn’t yet planned any acts of violence. They were increasingly effective in their nonviolent campaign, so the police staged a raid on the communal house where some of them lived, herded everyone into the living room, searched the rest of the house and “discovered” explosives in the refrigerator. With that planted evidence they were able to pretty much destroy the group, and the young people were powerless to defend themselves,

E-mails have surfaced that for the first time reveal UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was informed on Nov. 9 while traveling that police used batons to forcibly remove an encampment involving hundreds of student Occupy protesters, yet did not call a halt to their use.

The use of force was criticized as excessive not only by students who were hit and are suing the university, but also by faculty and others.

The Nov. 9 protest is under investigation by a campus Police Review Board to determine who authorized use of batons by police, seen on video hitting nonviolent student protesters who had pitched tents in violation of campus policy. The five-member Review Board, convened by Birgeneau in November, is also holding hearings to determine a timeline of events that day and whether police conduct was appropriate.

Birgeneau, who was traveling in Asia on the day students first set up tents as part of the Occupy movement, received an e-mail from Provost George Breslauer soon after the first of two police confrontations with protesters on Nov. 9.

"Police used batons to gain access to the tents," Breslauer wrote, describing a scene in which 300 to 400 students had locked arms to prevent police from moving in. "This is likely to continue for days, I suspect."

Birgeneau responded a few hours later.

"This is really unfortunate," the chancellor wrote. "However, our policies are absolutely clear. Obviously this group wanted exactly such a confrontation."

A second e-mail from Birgeneau reiterates the no-tent policy and refers to the mishandling of Occupy Oakland, where tensions were inflamed in October after Mayor Jean Quan at first permitted encampments, then had police remove them forcibly. She then reversed course but eventually had the tents removed for good.

"It is critical that we do not back down on our no encampment policy," the chancellor wrote Breslauer, copying the message to several other executives. "Otherwise, we will end up in Quan land."

(02-20) 15:42 PST San Quentin -- As many as 700 peaceful Occupy demonstrators gathered outside San Quentin State Prison this afternoon as part of a nationwide effort to call for prison reform.

"It's been an amazing day," said Crystal Bybee, a spokeswoman for the local Occupy 4 Prisoners group. "We've had hundreds of people out here reading messages from prisoners and speaking out about issues that are important to us."

Among the reforms protest organizers are calling for are elimination of solitary confinement, a ban on the death penalty and an end to California's "three-strikes" law. The protest was one of about 15 taking place at prisons across the country today.

San Quentin was placed on lockdown in anticipation of the protest, with prisoners being kept in their cells. On-ramps and off-ramps from Interstate 580 at East Francisco Boulevard were closed during the protest.

The demonstration, outside the prison's East Gate, ran from about noon to about 3:30 p.m. A spokesman for the Marin County Sheriff's Office described the protest as peaceful.

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com

*As a forward Rogue Media would like to add the notion that Occupy could easily work with a multitude of faiths, This editor knows from our experience in Minneapolis that the Somali community is protesting the same fundamental things that we are,  yet the 2 groups seem to never coordinate on a scale that could easily be accomplished with a little communication, unity  and (dare I sound cliche on Valentine’s day and say it anyways) Love.*

A celebrated Occupy chaplain weighs in on Jesus, the failures of Christianity, and the future of Occupy

I’m a clergy, baptized with pepper spray after a Seattle police assault while trying to keep the peace in the midst of an ugly confrontation.  Back in the day before the State crushed the Occupy encampments, I’d venture into them, amazed at how the occupiers looked out for each other.  No one was left out: the mentally ill, the homeless, the drug addicted, the alcoholic, the young and the old were all folded into the community. Granted, much of this benevolence was funded through the generosity of countless of comfortably-housed sympathizers that wanted to support the movement. But it was, in my opinion, as close as I’ve ever seen to the utopianism of the early Christian church, when believers held all things in common.

That’s how the original Jesus Movement started, back before the Roman state got involved and launched Christianity 2.0. 

download posters

Occupy Santa Cruz took over a vacant bank to be a community center.

I should be clear here what I mean by "anarchist principles". The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society - that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage or wage labour, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Anarchists wish to see human relations that would not have to be backed up by armies, prisons and police. Anarchism envisions a society based on equality and solidarity, which could exist solely on the free consent of participants.

A few such incidents will inevitably occur.

The question is how one responds.

If the police decide to attack a group of protesters, they will claim to have been provoked, and the media will repeat whatever the police say, no matter how implausible, as the basic initial facts of what happened. This will happen whether or not anyone at the protest does anything that can be remotely described as violence. Many police claims will be obviously ridiculous – as at the recent Oakland march where police accused participants of throwing “improvised explosive devices”—but no matter how many times the police lie about such matters, the national media will still report their claims as true, and it will be up to protesters to provide evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, with the help of social media, we can demonstrate that particular police attacks were absolutely unjustified, as with the famous Tony Bologna pepper-spray incident. But we cannot by definition prove all police attacks were unjustified, even all attacks at one particular march; it’s simply physically impossible to film every thing that happens from every possible angle all the time. Therefore we can expect that whatever we do, the media will dutifully report “protesters engaged in clashes with police” rather than “police attacked non-violent protesters.” What’s more, when someone does throw back a tear-gas canister, or toss a bottle, or even spray-paint something, we can assume that act will be employed as retroactive justification for whatever police violence occurred before the act took place.

All this will be true whether or not a Black Bloc is present.

If the moral question is “is it defensible to threaten physical harm against those who do no direct harm to others,” one might say the pragmatic, tactical question is, “even if it were somehow possible to create a Peace Police capable of preventing any act that could even be interpreted as ‘violent’ by the corporate media, by anyone at or near a protest, no matter what the provocation, would it have any meaningful effect?” That is, would it create a situation where the police would feel they couldn’t use arbitrary force against non-violent protesters? The example of Zuccotti Park, where we achieved pretty consistent non-violence, suggests this is profoundly unlikely. And perhaps most importantly at all, even if it were somehow possible to create some kind of Peace Police that would prevent anyone under gas attack from so much as tossing a bottle, so that we could justly claim that no one had done anything to warrant the sort of attack that police have routinely brought, would the marginally better media coverage we would thus obtain really be worth the cost in freedom and democracy that would inevitably follow from creating such an internal police force to begin with?

Misinformation #1: “OWS’s numbers are dwindling.”
Misinformation #2: “OWS was weakened by the eviction of our camps.”
Misinformation #3: “OWS has lost its purpose and focus.”
Misinformation #4: “The 2012 U.S. elections are eroding OWS’s relevance.”

Manna-hata, a Lenape term meaning "island of many hills," became Manhattan when translated into the English language by an Englishman working for the Dutch who had established a colony on the island.

The Lenape were defrauded of the island by the Dutch in 1626.

As Georgetta Stonefish Ryan (Lenape) writes for the National Museum of the American Indian:
The “sale” of Manhattan was a misunderstanding. In 1626 the director of the Dutch settlement, Peter Minuit, “purchased” Manhattan for sixty guilders worth of trade goods. At that time Indians did everything by trade, and they did not believe that land could be privately owned, any more than could water, air, or sunlight. But they did believe in giving gifts for favors done. The Lenni Lenape—one of the tribes that lived on the island now known as Manhattan—interpreted the trade goods as gifts given in appreciation for the right to share the land. We don't know exactly what the goods were or exactly how much a guilder was worth at that time. It has been commonly thought that sixty guilders equaled about twenty-four dollars. But the buying power of twenty-four dollars in 1626 is not known for sure.
As would be repeated across the region, the Lenape did not realize that the Dutch meant to claim the lands for their exclusive use -- an exclusivity that the Dutch would work violently to protect against the Lenape and then the English.

In 1653, in fact, the Dutch built a wall attempting to block Lenape, other Native nations, and the English from attacking "their" settlement. By 1700, when the English assumed Dutch land holdings in the region, they tore down the wall and paved a street over its location that they called "Wall Street."

The English would be defeated by the Americans. The Americans would preserve "Wall Street" -- and all of Manhattan -- as their own.

The Americans would never redress the history of Native land fraud that had made the U.S. possible. They would continue this fraud by violating their first ratified treaty with a Native nation -- the Lenape in 1778. This treaty provided -- among other things -- safe passage for Americans through Lenape territory during their war with the English. As all of the treaties that followed, it was a treaty that would be violated by the Americans in the name of U.S. sovereignty and territorial rights.

"Wall Street" is only possible because of this history of land fraud and treaty violation.

Occupy Boston Ratifies Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples
Hopefully others will follow.... (This is what I'm talkin' about!)

The following resolution was passed by the Occupy Boston General Assembly on October 8th, 2011:

RESOLUTION:  Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

WHEREAS, those participating in “Occupy Boston” acknowledge that the United States of America is a colonial country, and that we are guests upon stolen indigenous land that has already been occupied for centuries, Boston being the ancestral land of the Massachusett people; and

WHEREAS, members of the First Nations have continued to resist the violent oppression and exploitation of the colonizers since they first arrived on this continent, and as a result have a great amount of experience that could strengthen this movement; and

WHEREAS, after centuries of disregard for the welfare of future generations, and the consistent disrespect and exploitation of the Earth, we find ourselves on a polluted and disturbed planet, lacking the wisdom to live sustainably at peace with the community of Life; therefore be it

RESOLVED, That we seek the involvement of the First Nations in the rebuilding of a new society on their ancestral land; and

As a signal to the national “Occupy” movement and to members of First Nations who have felt excluded by the colonialist language used to name this movement, it shall be declared that “Occupy Boston” aspires to “Decolonize Boston” with the guidance and participation of First Nations Peoples; and

The Occupied

Not all 99%ers are created equal.

Within them are the 1.8% of the U.S. population -- including the 1.6% of American Indians and Alaskan Natives and the .2% of Native Pacific and Caribbean peoples including Kanaka Maoli, Taíno, and Chamorro– who have, as the Lenape, been defrauded of their lands and rights to governance in a long history of colonial expansion that now defines the imperialism of an empire: that defines, in other words, the possibility for the 1%.

Not only have they been defrauded of their lands and governance but 24.2% live below the poverty line and 31.7% live without health insurance. And these are old statistics, not ones produced by the 2008 economic crisis. They are the statistics that embody the economic system created by the colonialism and imperialism that defines the United States.

We Are Still Here

I stand with the OWSers. The economic system we live in is unjust, inhumane, and aimed at protecting the legal and economic privileges of the 1% over and against everyone else.

But we have not just been kicked out of our homes: we have been kicked off our lands.

I do not believe the occupation of the OWS movement will lead to reform.

The aim has to be on decolonization. It has to be on a redress of the very wrongs that historically and today define the system we live in.

posters by D Rooker, et. al?

Scandinavian workers realized that, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.
January 29, 2012  |    
Photo Credit: Christopher Neugebauer
 
 
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While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

LouandPeter sing at a demonstration in Madison.

We spoke with an OWS organizer about the barricades being removed tonight from Zuccotti Park and here's what he told us-

The barricades around Liberty Park were an edifying example of our modern day police state showing flagrant disregard for our constitutionally protected first amendment rights.

The fact that it took the city this long to defend the rights of the people of New York City is an embarrassment to Mayor Bloomberg.

This court victory shows, once again, that the 99% will not be silenced by the corrupted 1% who desperately clings to power. The people, united, will never be defeated! Whose park? Our park!

-DAVID DEGRAW, OWS Organizer

The filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a public place, including police officers performing their responsibilities, fits comfortably within these principles. Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting "the free discussion of governmental affairs." Mills v. Alabama, 384 U.S. 214, 218 (1966). Moreover, as the Court has noted, "[f]reedom of expression has particular significance with respect to government because '[i]t is here that the state has a special incentive to repress opposition and often wields a more effective power of suppression.'" First Nat'l Bank, 435 U.S. at 777 n.11 (alteration in original) (quoting Thomas Emerson, Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment 9 (1966)). This is particularly true of law enforcement officials, who are granted substantial discretion that may be misused to
-9-
deprive individuals of their liberties. Cf. Gentile v. State Bar of Nev., 501 U.S. 1030, 1035-36 (1991) (observing that "[t]he public has an interest in [the] responsible exercise" of the discretion granted police and prosecutors).

Ensuring the public's right to gather information about their officials not only aids in the uncovering of abuses, see id. at 1034-35 (recognizing a core First Amendment interest in 'the dissemination of information relating to alleged governmental misconduct'), but also may have a salutary effect on the functioning of government more generally, see Press-Enter. Co. v. Superior Court, 478 U.S. 1, 8 (1986) (noting that 'many governmental processes operate best under public scrutiny').
. . .
Our recognition that the First Amendment protects the filming of government officials in public spaces accords with the decisions of numerous circuit and district courts. See, e.g., Smith v. City of Cumming, 212 F.3d 1332, 1333 (11th Cir. 2000) ('The First Amendment protects the right to gather information about what public officials do on public property, and specifically, a right to record matters of public interest.'); Fordyce v. City of Seattle, 55 F.3d 436, 439 (9th Cir. 1995) (recognizing a 'First Amendment right to film matters of public interest'); Demarest v. Athol/Orange Cmty. Television, Inc., 188 F. Supp. 2d 82, 94-95 (D. Mass. 2002) (finding it 'highly probable' that filming of a public official on street outside his home by contributors to public access cable show was protected by the First Amendment, and noting that, '[a]t base, plaintiffs had a constitutionally protected right to record matters of public interest'); Channel 10, Inc. v. Gunnarson, 337 F. Supp. 634, 638 (D. Minn. 1972) (holding that police interference with television newsman's filming of crime scene and seizure of video camera constituted unlawful prior restraint under First Amendment); cf. Schnell v. City of Chi., 407 F.2d 1084, 1085 (7th Cir. 1969) (reversing dismissal for failure to state a claim of suit claiming police interference with news reporters and photographers' 'constitutional right to gather and report news, and to photograph news events' under the First Amendment (internal quotation mark omitted)), overruled on other grounds by City of Kenosha v. Bruno, 412 U.S. 507 (1973); Connell v. Town of Hudson, 733 F. Supp. 465, 471-72 (D.N.H. 1990) (denying qualified immunity from First Amendment claim to police chief who prevented freelance photographer from taking pictures of car accident).

Mic Check: Occupy Everywhere
By Talia Cooper (Linda Hirschhorn's daughter)

Ask me why I'm singing I'll say 99
Ask me why I'm dancing I'll say occupy

If we occupy everything we're too big to fail
Let's occupy everything so we're too big to fail

Can I get a mic check --mic check
Mic check- mic check
(x2)

Occupy! -Occupy!
Everywhere! -Everywhere!
(x2)

Ask us why we're angry, we'll say systems' greed
Ask us if we're staying we'll say we won't leave

If we occupy everything we're too big to fail
Let's occupy everything so we're too big to fail

Can I get a mic check --mic check
Mic check- mic check
(x2)

Occupy! -Occupy!
Everywhere! -Everywhere!
(x2)


Hey 1 % we are talking to you
Corporate giants, institutions too
We're calling for a change for a power shift
Come get on board, come get with it!
We're on stolen native land, it's important to say
So it's already occupied anyway

Ask what we're creating we'll say a movement
Ask who we're conveying say 99 percent

When we occupy everything we're too big to fail
Let's occupy everything so we're too big to fail


Can I get a mic check --mic check
Mic check- mic check
(x2)

Occupy! -Occupy!
Everywhere! -Everywhere!
(x4)

(intellectual property of Talia Cooper)

"The Occupy Barstow website proclaimed that Barstow is 'about as far from Wall Street as you can get.' But the Barstow occupiers probably did not know that there were also Occupy actions in Weaverville, Idyllwild, Calistoga, El Centro and many other small California towns, even in very remote areas," write professor of sociology Christopher Chase-Dunn and graduate student Michaela Curran-Strange.

And the majority of Occupy cities are not in the Northern, more liberal, part of the state. They are almost equally divided between the north and south.

"The north-south finding is interesting because most people believe that the political culture of Northern California is much more Leftist than that of Southern California," Chase-Dunn and Curran-Strange write. "Our findings suggest that this is no longer true, at least as indicated by the propensity to establish Occupy sites."

Leonard Cohen Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Few Wall Street executives have been criminally charged for their role in destroying the economy, but thousands have been arrested nationwide for peacefully protesting, including at least five hundred people in San Francisco and Oakland, and at UC Berkeley. The price tag to evict campers also was not without cost to taxpayers: Oakland spent at least $2.4 million and San Francisco at least $1 million. This dichotomy reflects a system that mostly forgives those who set the country on a path to economic ruin, yet arrests others for camping, David noted. "The courts are there to enforce the status quo; the status quo is capitalism," he said.

But the desire to confront police and stand ground was shared by only some of the 150 people who have made up Occupy Berkeley. Maxina Ventura, who has been staying in the park off and on with her children ever since it started two months ago, took down her tent on Wednesday. She said she could no longer stand behind the radical fringe of protestors who seemed determined to fight police at all costs.

“We had to make it clear we were not a front for those people,” said Ventura.

In the two months since Occupy Berkeley set up camp in Civic Center Park, Berkeley police have responded to 33 calls for service to the park, 24 of which were classified as crimes. The most serious of these included an attempted rape, a stabbing, and a few assaults. Police also issued 46 citations for smoking in a public space and drinking alcohol.

At its height, there were about 70 tents pitched at the park with a population of about 150 people.

Berkeley police released this partial list of activity at the Occupy Berkeley camp.

A few protesters remained last night after Berkeley Police had cleared Civic Center Park of the Occupy Berkeley encampment. OaklandElle, an Occupy Oakland Medic, was one of them, and the only one reported as being arrested.

1.Occupy thge civic realm. All over the country, budget-strapped municipalities are eliminating city services, closing libraries, laying off police, and so on. As they retreat from these important civic and social functions, they leave a vacuum that we can occupy. Occupiers could, for instance, “occupy the library” – not as a symbolic protest that inconveniences librarians and patrons, but to take over a library that is being closed, turning it into a “people’s library” akin to those on the encampments. It wouldn’t be a protest at all, it would be a public service. In unsafe neighborhoods where police services have been cut back (or where residents don’t trust the police to begin with), activists could “occupy the night” by providing escorts and a friendly, protective neighborhood presence of big dudes with vests and walkie-talkies, perhaps military veterans, former police, and ex-gang members, trained in mediation, who do some of the work that we would like police to do.

2) occupy the economy
3) Occupy abandoned buildings.
4) Occpuy politics
5) Occupy the environment

Five main attributes of OWS have contributed to its massive success and provide the basis for its continuation as a radical alternative in the future.

1. Presenting a Narrative, World View or Declaration — Not Specific Demands

Until OWS, the left had not set forth an alternative narrative to that of the right or democratic party liberals. Such a narrative explains to people why we are in our present mess, who and what is responsible for our predicament, and offers a broad solution. The right has such a narrative: the evil is big government and the solution is to cut taxes and government spending. The liberal narrative tends to be that the lack of government oversight and a rigid adherence to free market capitalism is the problem and that more government regulation is the answer. The left has all too often simply presented a mélange of programmatic demands and a defense of government programs.

OWS presented a competing narrative that resonated with millions of people: corporate power and greed got us into this mess, the only way out is for the 99% to stand together to demand equality, justice and fairness. It is that broad perspective, narrative or worldview — as opposed to a laundry list of demands — that helped change the political debate. People see the world through a broad lens or framework — to convince or move them is not primarily a logical or factual process, but one of providing a lens or framework with which to view reality. OWS did just that.

When I complained about Julian Assange speaking at Occupy LSX, I was told I was being divisive. When I drew attention to zohra moosa and Chitra Nagarajan's experiences of racism at the same occupy camp, I was also told I was being divisive. Complaining about the Labour Party, about the Lib Dems, about rapes at other Occupy camps, about inaccessible feminist meetings, and about issues being ignored under the heading of #solidarity, all get me called divisive.

The idea is that if you complain about something, you risk dividing the movement, at which point the opposition - be it the patriarchy, the 'right', the rich, the government - can move in and rule. And I understand this concern. When a movement is struggling for a voice, the last thing it needs is the people within it arguing amongst themselves, instead of against the people they are uniting to fight.

However, there comes a point when supporting a movement whose ideology or aims you broadly agree with becomes one painful compromise too many. And if you speak up, the 'divisive' accusations pour forth. But in my daily, lived experience, the division does not come from me raising awareness, the problem comes from the issues arising in the first place.

Because if I cannot physically get into your occupy camp, it is not me who has divided the movement. There is a very literal division between the non-disabled people who can get in, and the disabled people who can't. And because if there have been rapes at your occupy camp, or your occupy camp produces a document telling anyone who is raped at the camp to not go to the police, it is not me who divides the movement by drawing attention to it, it is those who rape, and those who attempt to suppress legal redress against rapists who cause a division. And because if disabled people who can't leave the house spend hours and days and weeks live tweeting events to take part in, and raise awareness of, a demonstration, and then those same disabled people actually plead with the protesters to add benefit and social care cuts to their banners and chants, and are ignored at every turn, the division is being created by them, not me.

I understand that in a broad movement, gathered together ideologically but not always agreeing, compromises will need to be made. I am becoming less and less understanding, however, about how often the white, heterosexual, cis, non-disabled men are asked to compromise, in comparison to the rest of us. Because being called divisive is sometimes very similar to being silenced.

Record of Police Violence During D12 Actions

Submitted by admin on Mon, 12/12/2011 - 17:55
This morning San Diego's picket line at the port was held for three hours until broken by police, after which longshoremen crossed picket lines and went to work. Several people were violently snatched and arrested.

Also this morning in Houston marchers were snatched by police, handcuffed and lain out on the ground.  The fire department covered them in a giant red inflatable tent to conceal what they were doing to them from the rest of the protesters.  Many cops had tape covering their names and badge numbers.  In the hours following police repression increased, mounted police attacked  protesters followed by more arrests, and there was one report of a gun being pulled on someone parking their car near the protest.

Denver, Longmont, Boulder and Greely gathered at the WalMart distribution center in Loveland Colorado this morning to blockade the trucks in solidarity with the West Coast Blockade.  Protesters were dragged away by police and arrested.

Seattle's blockade this evening is currently being tear gassed, and flash grenades are being deployed.

Both San Diego and Seattle have requested an extension of the blockade, in solidarity with them for the police repression they have endured.

Since the events of Monkey Hill, hundreds of studies with captive primates have shown that impoverished environments result in heightened aggression and antisocial behavior. Such behavior has been shown to significantly increase under conditions of overcrowding, when there’s a lack of novelty in food, entertainment, or social opportunities, when the population increases and the number of strangers in a colony grows, or, most crucially, when food is limited and/or fluctuates dramatically (see Honess and Marin, 2006 for a review of the literature). Any of these factors can greatly increase the level of stress that individuals experience and promote social discord.

2. Don't say that the government 'taxes the rich.' Instead, tell them that the government 'takes from the rich.'
"If you talk about raising taxes on the rich," the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But  "if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no. Taxing, the public will say yes."
3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the 'middle class.' Call them 'hardworking taxpayers.'
"They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the 'middle class' and the public will say, I'm not sure about that. But defending 'hardworking taxpayers' and Republicans have the advantage."
4. Don't talk about 'jobs.' Talk about 'careers.'

The Federal Appeals Court has ruled that video recording the police in a public place is a constitutional right for all U.S. citizens. This is a great win for the freedom movement.  Public officials need to be held accountable for their actions.   See ruling below.

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.

Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.

This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater.

This is a message to the Police, to the military, to the TSA, to Homeland Security and to members of every other enforcement arm of the government.
http://waitingforthestorm.com

Tim Wise on Rachel Maddow, 10/21/11 – Discussing Race in the #Occupy Movement
Posted on October 22, 2011

Here is the clip from the 10/21/11 Rachel Maddow Show, in which I discuss race and the #Occupy Movement (and left activism more broadly) with guest host Melissa Harris-Perry. Didn’t get to say much but an essay will be forthcoming with a much more detailed analysis of the importance of crafting an antiracist narrative as part of the struggle for economic justice.

It was Foster's job to monitor and investigate allegations of fraud against Countrywide employees and make sure they were reported to the Board of Directors and the Treasury Department.

Kroft: How much fraud was there at Countrywide?

Foster: From what I saw, the types of things I saw, it was-- it appeared systemic. It, it wasn't just one individual or two or three individuals, it was branches of individuals, it was regions of individuals.

Kroft: What you seem to be saying was it was just a way of doing business?

Foster: Yes.

In 2007, Foster sent a team to the Boston area to search several branch offices of Countrywide's subprime division - the division that lent to borrowers with poor credit. The investigators rummaged through the office's recycling bins and found evidence that Countrywide loan officers were forging and manipulating borrowers' income and asset statements to help them get loans they weren't qualified for and couldn't afford.

Foster: All of the-- the recycle bins, whenever we looked through those they were full of, you know, signatures that had been cut off of one document and put onto another and then photocopied, you know, or faxed and then the-- you know, the creation thrown-- thrown in the recycle bin.

Full transcript available here.

And this is where another of my favourite issues comes up: the entitlement complex of the left.

Because the only way this makes sense to me is if those people who are telling feminists to shut up about fucking sexual assault are assuming that they’re safe in doing so.  It’s not like we can stand up and say “well screw you and your thinly-veiled sexism, I’m voting for a party that’s openly misogynist!  Haha!”  It’s not like we’re all going to flip them the bird and refuse to vote at all in their inherently patriarchal set-up-for-men’s-interests system, right?*

So they feel safe saying “shut up about your silly women’s issues”.  Because we have to be on their side.  And gods know that they do have a tiny point in that openness about any issues in the Occupy movement will be instantly leapt upon by the media machine as proof that these protesters are just silly/stupid/ignorant/evil/selfish/dysfunctional/doomed to failure.

But it coincidentally also allows them to go on pretending to be amazing revolutionaries sticking it to The Man without questioning their privilege or deep-seated impulse to defend rape culture.

The use of the trifecta is a really serious problem. Basically, what happens is the police come up to a group of people who, belonging to a marginalised and over-policed group, are somewhat suspicious of the motives of the police approaching them. The interaction is impolite.

One of the members of the groups swears.

The police say “right, we’re arresting you for offensive language, we’ll take you down for the station”.

The person says something like “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me, you can’t arrest me for that I’m not going anywhere”, or perhaps shrugs off the hand of a police officer.

The police say “right, count two, now we’re charging you with resisting arrest, too”. The police grab the person.

The person struggles, and perhaps elbows one of the police officers in the process.

The police say “right, count three, now we’re charging you with assault” (or, perhaps, assault police officer, which is more serious).

So the person ends up before the Local Court (or equivalent in other states) with three charges, two of which look relatively serious (resist arrest and assault). A custodial sentence is not unlikely, especially if the person has prior convictions and can’t pay a fine.

The trifecta does not always arise out of an initially trivial interaction, but it often does. An interaction which may not have happened were it not for the greater amount of interest police take in certain groups.

Mr Holland also seems unaware of the billions that DHS has pumped into domestic police forces, integrated in such a way that it is naïve, in a sense, for him and for me to even be debating whether federal forces "coordinate" with municipal ones because now they are often financially merged into one entity. The amount of money flowing from DHS to NYPD is stunning, as El Diario reports:

"The New York City Police Department plans to spend about $24m in federal homeland security grants to pay for overtime. The NYPD budget lists an estimated $180m in counter-terrorism and intelligence spending for the upcoming year, with one half covered with federal grants. […] A study by the academic journal Environment and Planning estimated that nearly 40% of public space in downtown Manhattan is a 'security zone'."

In other words, this 2011 report indicates that DHS is paying NYPD three and a half times NYPD's overtime budget annually: $180m of DHS money is spent on "intelligence gathering"; so $90m of NYPD's budget, in one year alone, is from DHS. Thus, Holland and I are foolish to debate over whether there is "coordination" between NYPD and DHS. If you look at the numbers, financially, NYPD is, to some extent, DHS. Look at the Nemeth maps: geopolitically, lower Manhattan is, within certain boundaries, the province of DHS. This is true of Zuccotti Park, where NYPD received $25m to surveil and track license plates.

So Holland's criticism that it is invention on my part to reference federal and municipal coordination in protest crackdowns on dissent is not only oblivious to the funding and geopolitical jurisdictional issues cited above, but is also seriously ahistorical. Tom Hayden's piece in the Nation is far more accurate, in that he chides me, on his part, for not going far enough in reminding readers of how common such federal-municipal coordination has been in suppressing US dissent and that such crackdowns are old news:

Last night, I saw the power of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) at Lincoln Center Plaza, a public space that activists were barricaded by the New York Police Department (NYPD) from entering. From behind a police-patrolled barrier, I witnessed the power of the people first hand and had a taste of authentic democratic practice. I also caught a glimpse of the possibility that the burgeoning consciousness of OWS has the potential to unleash across this nation and perhaps the world.

What is this power? It's called Satyagraha. It means "truth-force." It is the title of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiographical book about his early years in South Africa where he was first inspired to develop a philosophy of nonviolence, which he used to successfully oust the British occupiers of India. Prolific composer Philip Glass, honored the famous pacifist by composing an opera of the same name, which played last night at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan.

This Gandhian truth-force was powerfully at work in the OWS activists who convened outside Lincoln Center Plaza. Organizers invited activists to take off their shoes and place them along the barricade in an act of humility and to recognize the public space at Lincoln Center Plaza as holy ground. This act, reminiscent of a moment in Gandhi's life is portrayed in Glass' opera, which was taking place inside the building far across the barricaded plaza.

This spring, the magazine was pushing boycotts of Starbucks (for driving out local businesses) and the Huffington Post (for exploiting citizen journalists). Then, in early June, the art department designed a poster showing a ballerina poised on the “Charging Bull” sculpture, near Wall Street. Lasn had thought of the image late at night while walking his German shepherd, Taka: “the juxtaposition of the capitalist dynamism of the bull,” he remembers, “with the Zen stillness of the ballerina.” In the background, protesters were emerging from a cloud of tear gas. The violence had a highly aestheticized, dreamlike quality—Adbusters’ signature. “What is our one demand?” the poster asked. “Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent.”
White and Lasn spent a few days in early July debating when the occupation should start. At first, White argued that it should begin on July 4, 2012, so that protesters would have time to prepare. Lasn believed that the political climate could have shifted entirely by then. He proposed late September of this year; then he settled on the seventeenth, his mother’s birthday. White agreed. Lasn instructed the art department to insert “September 17th” beneath the bull and the ballerina, and Adbusters devoted a tactical-briefing e-mail on July 13th exclusively to the proposed occupation.
White watched as the e-mail’s proposal raced around Twitter and Reddit. “Normal campaigns are lots of drudgery and not much payoff, like rolling a snowball up a hill,” he said. “This was the reverse.” Fifteen minutes after Lasn sent the e-mail, Justine Tunney, a twenty-six-year-old in Philadelphia, read it on her RSS feed. The next day, she registered OccupyWallSt.org, which soon became the movement’s online headquarters. She began operating the site with a small team, most of whose members were, like her, transgender anarchists. (They jokingly call themselves Trans World Order.)

As images rolled in this week of the Egyptian authorities' assault on protesters in Tahrir Square, observers in the United States could not escape thoughts of the official violence that had very recently been wrought on Wall Street occupiers in New York City and around the country. Civilians beaten with clubs, dragged by their hair, subject to tear gas, watching their tents demolished, returning to the square they were occupying only to be beaten back again - all that spoke well of and distinguished American police was their death toll of zero.

Then came Sultan Al Qassemi's report that an Egyptian State TV anchor had confessed the inspiration Egyptian military and security forces drew from "the firm stance the US took" against occupiers, and it all made perfect sense. The Egyptian authorities, even in the post-Mubarak period, look to America for leadership.

If it wasn't for the Occupation, there wouldn't be the 'Decolonization' movement, and we wouldn't have such an amazing, unprecedented opportunity to teach priviliged white people like myself about our privilege. I always thought of myself as aware and considerate and educated to things like White Privilege. And then I attended a Multicultural Issues workshop and was humbled by my ignorance of just how badly my people don't understand and get angry about it. We've clearly got a lot of work to do as an Occupation and as a Society when all this shit is done and over with. Another day, I happened upon a Decolonization talk at OccupySF and learned about how subtly oppressive language can be. How the phrase "you guys" immediately diminishes the presence of women and transgender people. It's really insidious and just one example of many. It's been quite an interesting personal journey trying to use more uplifting, empowering and neutral language in my everyday talk and be conscious of privilege when dealing with others. And that was just one single meeting of each of those groups I was lucky enough to attend. There's been so many incredible things I've learned and it's hard to quantify them all. It all just sort of blends into this amazing ur-feeling and it's filling a void within that I didn't even know I had! For that victory alone, for me, the Occupation has already won. And I'm just one of tens of thousands of Occupiers who are going through similar awakenings. 

Five port workers in Cairo refused to sign for a shipment of 7.5 tons of tear-gas from the US, fearing that it would be used against demonstrators; another 14 tons of tear-gas were expected from the US at the time. Peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square were subjected to relentless gas attacks by the military government last week. The shipment was eventually released and sent to storage owned by the Ministry of Interior in Cairo.

Egypt’s al-Shorouk newspaper reported that upon the arrival of the shipment, massive disagreements broke out between employees, where five employees refused to sign for the shipment, one after the other.

The five, being dubbed by activists as the “brave five”, were to be refereed to a investigative committee as to why they refused to perform their duties, which has since called off.

The news about the shipment’s arrival stirred the Twittersphere, after it was consumed all day with the country’s first post-revolution elections, and activists mocked the reinforcement of weapons that is being used against them.

UPDATE: Egypt imports 21 tons of tear gas from the US, port staff refuses to sign for it (via JWZ)

Democratic congressional candidate Ray Lutz was arrested for registering voters in San Diego's public Freedom Plaza (AKA Civic Center Plaza), where the local Occupy protest has taken place. The San Diego police arrested Mr Lutz for trespassing and confiscated his voter registration forms.

I've been skeptical of the "this is what democracy looks like" slogan (since mostly, democracy looks like boring things like long meetings, constituency consultations, and voter booths). But by any measure, registering voters in a civic square is assuredly "what democracy looks like." And arresting people who register voters? Well, that's something else altogether.

Ray Lutz being arrested at Freedom Plaza - Occupy San Diego

Women never fare well in occupations. Occupy Wall Street is no exception.

I’ve been to OWS five times. What I have observed and heard about women’s roles and status in the encampment raises deep and disturbing questions about the state of OWS –– dare I say the progressive movement? –– particularly its lack of an analysis of racial, gender, socio-economic, and LQBT disparities. Many of those I met seemed to lack basic understanding of the social determinants that put young people at risk for poverty, poor health outcomes, sexual violence, economic disparity, and homelessness.

While there needs to be a wholesale examination of internal OWS politics, I am specifically limiting my observations to the role and treatment of young women.

It was miraculous, and I hope that spirit of community, or mutual respect, or restraint or whatever–LOVE–love of oneself, of one’s city, or one’s fellows can spread through Los Angeles’ police and community and become a model for both cops and civilians to work in cooperation to obey the laws and foster change.

Chief Beck was on the news today saying that the assembly in the park is a violation, but there is not a specific time to begin enforcing it. And at 8:30 this morning a judge began a hearing on an injunction filed over the weekend to prevent Occupy form being evicted. Meanwhile, plans are being made by Occupy to launch Occupy 2.o.

There will always be situations—an armed and barricaded suspect, a man with a knife to his wife’s throat, a school-shooting rampage—that require disciplined, military-like operations. But most of what police are called upon to do, day in and day out, requires patience, diplomacy and interpersonal skills. I’m convinced it is possible to create a smart organizational alternative to the paramilitary bureaucracy that is American policing. But that will not happen unless, even as we cull “bad apples” from our police forces, we recognize that the barrel itself is rotten.

Imagine the community and its cops united in the effort to responsibly “police” the Occupy movement.
Assuming the necessity of radical structural reform, how do we proceed? By building a progressive police organization, created by rank-and-file officers, “civilian” employees and community representatives. Such an effort would include plans to flatten hierarchies; create a true citizen review board with investigative and subpoena powers; and ensure community participation in all operations, including policy-making, program development, priority-setting and crisis management. In short, cops and citizens would forge an authentic partnership in policing the city. And because partners do not act unilaterally, they would be compelled to keep each other informed, and to build trust and mutual respect—qualities sorely missing from the current equation.

Los Angeles police are being praised for their planning, outreach and judicious use of force in ousting the Occupy L.A. encampment Wednesday morning, but a few protesters are reporting more physical confrontations with some of the 1,400 officers.

In a KCAL 9 video, now posted on YouTube, Tyson Heder, 35, was taking pictures of the eviction, when a police officer shoved him away. The video showed Heder then standing up, yelling at the officer, then being forced to the ground by several policemen.

His sister, Christy Collins, said Heder was in custody Wednesday morning.

Occupy L.A.: Photos | Videos | 360° photos | Live webcam

Collins, who lives in Albany, N.Y., said she got an emotional phone message from him some time after his arrest. He posted on Facebook, "They beat me and stole my camera." Collin said her brother had not been an Occupy participant previously and apparently went to the encampment Tuesday night just to take pictures.

"I do think it was horrible and excessive," Collins said after watching a video of the encounter. "But I have to say, I was relieved it wasn't worse once I saw it."

But her battle was not with police officers or security guards. Instead, those who had treated her with disdain were fellow activists, every one of which was white and male.

When all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail, and in two months, cities have spent an estimated $13 million policing, and in many case evicting, their occupations. That's only part of the tab; they will spend much more defending themselves against lawsuits and settling claims of police brutality.

The Oakland PD is being sued by the ACLU of Northern California and the National Lawyers Guild. Other suits are pending in Denver, Minneapolis, Austin, Cedar Rapids, Tucson, New York and at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. That kind of litigation costs big bucks. A recent investigation by the Bay Area Fox News affiliate found that the city of Oakland, with 400,000 people, has paid out $57 million to settle lawsuits stemming from police abuse over the past 10 years.

One has to wonder about the opportunity costs. How many people could have been offered drug rehab, job training, low-cost housing, mental health and other services for that money? Here we have a community that needs those services, and its citizens are concentrated in one place. So, why not send in social workers instead of riot cops?

This preference for law enforcement over social support is part of a larger trend. Barbara Ehrenreich recently wrote about the fact that, “in defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty.”

So concludes a recent study from the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, which finds that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more "neutral" infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container.

Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down.

The lesson that was driven home for me in Cancun is that the police, and those who dictate their policy, have enormous discretion over whether a confrontation turns violent. It mostly depends on what image they want to project. That is, it depends on politics. 

One tactic is to occupy the home of a family facing eviction, in the hopes that media attention will encourage the bank to rethink whether the homeowners have exhausted their options after all. Another, more radical action is to take over a vacant property, co-opting it for use by a family that's already homeless (or by occupiers).

Elon James White:
"Oh? The NYPD are treating you badly? Violent for no reason? Weird." -- Black People

In twenty-first-century America, “rights” are increasingly meant for those who behave themselves and don’t exercise them. And if you happen to be part of a government in which no criminal act of state -- torture, kidnapping, the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, the launching of wars of aggression -- will ever bring a miscreant to court, only two crimes evidently exist: blowing a whistle or expressing your opinion. State Department official Peter Van Buren, whose new book about a disastrous year he spent in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, is a must read, learned that the hard way. So did Morris Davis. So may we all. Tom

plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.

Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly "bang the drum on plutonomy."

And bang they did, with an "equity strategy" for their investors, entitled, "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer." Here are some excerpts:

"Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper...[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years..."

"...the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US-- the plutonomists in our parlance-- have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US...[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor."

"...[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact."

This lively RSAnimate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, makes the excellent point that the decentralised application of coercive authority has a storied history:

From the battles over abolition to the labor wars at the turn of the last century to the Red Squads of the twentieth-century police departments to the struggles over Jim Crow, state repression in America has often been decentralized, displaying that very same can-do spirit of local initiative that has been celebrated by everyone from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam. Though Tocqueville and Putnam were talking of course about things like creating churches and buildings roads, the fact is: if the locals can build a church or a road on their own, they can also get rid of dissenters on their own, too, no? 
Sometimes little platoons wear jackboots. Mr Robin goes on to say:

It’s not surprising that faced with the crackdown of OWS protests, Wolf would immediately turn to a theory of national, centralized repression. It’s part of our national DNA, on the left and the right, to assume that tyranny works that way. 
I actually find it more than a little surprising that folks on the left would so easily forget that tyranny is often local. The liberal antipathy to the sort of decentralisation of power confusingly known as federalism runs very deep, and is rooted in the very things Mr Robin mentions, such as the struggle to abolish Jim Crow. I would argue that Ms Wolf's it-goes-all-the-way-to-the-top conspiracy theorising seemed so plausible to so many OWS sympathisers because the Occupy movement is itself fueled by a conspiracy theory: that the richest 1% have conspired to capture the political system and use it to bend the economic system to their exclusive advantage. So it's not surprising that Ms Wolf's conspiracy theory, which fits so neatly with OWS's larger conspiratorial narrative, would find such a receptive, credulous audience.

The size of the financial industry alone is worrisome. As Katrina vanden Heuvel pointed out at the Washington Post, “Obama has said that we can't go back to an economy where the banks make 40 percent of all corporate profits. But the big banks are emerging from the crisis more concentrated than ever, and financial sector profits are already up to nearly 30 percent of total corporate profits.” Banking, like trucking, is known as an “intermediary good” -- nothing is produced by the industry – and if any other intermediary good represented around 10 percent of the U.S. economy, people would consider that a major problem.

To create those complex financial instruments, finance has begun to cannibalize the “best and brightest” college graduates--or at least those looking for the fattest paychecks, whether purely out of greed or a need to pay off heavy student loan burdens (often owed to the same banks).

Pat Garofalo at Think Progress noted that “The four biggest banks issue 50 percent of mortgages and 66 percent of credit cards: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup issue one out of every two mortgages and nearly two out of every three credit cards in America.” Not only that, but he also pointed out that the five banks we’ve tracked here are the ones that control 95 percent of the derivatives in the country--the complex financial instruments that investor Warren Buffet called “financial Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Apparently young activists standing up and calling “Shame on the 1 percent!” is scary enough for Sotheby's to increase its security.

The New York occupiers followed Governor Andrew Cuomo to a party hosted by the Huffington Post, and community groups working in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street hosted a tour of millionaires' homes in the city.

The oligarchy of moneyed interests have done a spectacular job convincing the working middle class they should be angry at 20 year old OWS protestors, illegal immigrants and the inner city welfare class, rather than the true culprits – the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. This is a testament to the power of propaganda and the intellectual slothfulness of the average American. U.S. based mega-corporations fired 864,000 higher wage American workers between 2000 and 2010, while hiring almost 3 million workers in low wage foreign countries, using their billions in cash to buy back their own stocks, and paying corporate executives shamefully excessive compensation. The corporate mainstream media treats corporate CEO’s like rock stars as if they deserve to be compensated at a level 243 times the average worker. The S&P 500 consists of the 500 biggest companies in America and while the executives of these companies have reaped millions in compensation, the stock index for these companies is at the exact level it was on July 9, 1998. Over the last thirteen years workers were fired by the thousands, shareholders earned 0% (negative 39% on an inflation adjusted basis), and executives got fabulously rich.

How we got into this mess

Nov., 27, 2011

‘Fraud is fraud’
At a White House press conference in October, ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper asked President Obama why his administration hadn’t pursued criminal cases more aggressively in the aftermath of disasters at Lehman Brothers and other banks.

“I don’t think any Wall Street executives have gone to jail, despite the rampant corruption and malfeasance that did take place,” Tapper said.

Obama replied that in many instances the government might have trouble making criminal charges stick, because “a lot of that stuff wasn’t necessarily illegal. It was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless.”

Obama isn’t alone in suggesting that criminal fraud by banks wasn’t the main cause of the nation’s financial disaster. Bankers have cited unpredictable market conditions, the federal government and borrowers as being among the chief culprits.

In congressional testimony, former Washington Mutual chief executive Kerry Killinger blamed borrowers for misleading WaMu about their incomes and other details in their loan applications.

“I’m certainly very disappointed to think about my customers lying to me, because that’s fraud and it shouldn’t happen,” Killinger said. “But I think an objective look at things is that there must have been situations where people did not tell the truth on their applications."

Many whistleblowers who worked inside major banks counter that it was fraud by lenders — not borrowers — that was the driving force in the growth of toxic loans that caused the mortgage meltdown.

“Fraud is fraud,” Parker said. “It’s fraud if someone changes information in a loan file without the borrower’s knowledge or does anything deceptive to get a loan approved and passed through. How can you say those are not criminal acts?”

Parker and other former mortgage workers say some borrowers did take part in the fraud, but they usually did so with coaching from sales representatives who knew how to work the system to get deals done. And in many cases, Parker and others say, borrowers weren’t aware of the deception and were fooled by bait-and-switch salesmanship and other tactics used by the mortgage professionals who controlled the process.

A two-year U.S. Senate investigation found that senior management at Washington Mutual ignored clear evidence that bank employees were engaging in fraud.

THE TRUTH

In our phone interview, Wexler gave a rather mundane-sounding rundown of the two calls. "PERF's reason for being is to take on difficult issues and try to make sense of them and discuss them. When Occupy emerged, a couple of [police] c hiefs said, 'Let's have a conference call and talk about this.' We set up a line and let people talk to each other. Not everybody came on, some people did. There was no agenda. There wasn't any common theme at all. If you look around the country, it's very idiosyncratic. It was not tactics or anything. It wasn't about how we should shut this thing down, it was more like, 'Here's the issues we're facing in our city.' "

The second call, on November 4, was much the same, he said, "only now some things had become contentious. Issues of sanitation, marching and blocking streets. One city said, 'The police aren't even involved at all, they have health and sanitation involved.'"

When I probed Wexler as to why people should trust his word, he made a reasonable point: "Listen, our last conference call was November 4. If we were involved in tactics, we'd be having conference calls every day. It wouldn't be two and a half weeks ago. Anyone that knows us knows we don't tell people what to do. We don't have that kind of authority, nor do we want that kind of authority. We don't actively tell police departments what to do."  

>> READ: Interview: Police Executives' Research Forum Director Chuck Wexler <<

Despite being uninterested in telling anyone what to do, Wexler expressed a desire to help increase the peace if police violence continues to be a problem at Occupy.

"We do what we can. We know it's getting bigger. We pull people together and ask them: what did you learn from the Olympics? What did you learn from RNC, DNC? We're going to always do what we think is right."

But conspiracy theories die hard. At the same time that PERF released a public declaration stating that it had no role in coordinating the attacks on Occupy protests, the National Lawyer's Guild filed a FOIA request for all documents related to the crackdowns. The Guild's request mentions PERF by name and requests any documents "pertaining to federal coordination of, or advice or consultation regarding" police crackdowns on Occupy.

The Guild suspects that Homeland Security collaborated with the FBI and local police to coordinate the increasingly systematic attacks on the Occupy movement. The Guild argues that if this is true — if 18 cities across America coordinated their tactics in attacking Occupy — the public deserves to know. Let's hope they find the truth soon.

Hours after publishing a scathing criticism of Naomi Wolf's conspiracy theory of a coordinated federal/local government crackdown on OWS, the Alternet.org editor declares that his own writing is not "writing" in order to evade criticisms of his comments on the assassination of Anwar Al-awlaki.
Author's note:
Ohtarzie, who is quoted extensively below, has asked me to make clear that his objections to Joshua Holland on some points should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Naomi Wolf article in the Guardian with which Joshua Holland took issue. Ohtarzie wrote on this topic when Michael Moore made similar allegations: "It Doesn’t Matter if Homeland Security Was Involved. Obama Owns The Crackdowns" by Ohtarzie [November 21, 2011].

- James J. Harker

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@ohtarzie @jamesjharker I never wrote about the Al-Alwaki killing -- you should apologize for wasting my time.
Joshua Holland
a day ago
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Below, in it's entirety, is the Alternet.org post Joshua Holland "never wrote". The majority of the related Twitter discussion follows.

examples of Mic Check-ing politicians.