RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Occupy Wall Street

I'm surprised you didn't spin the part about Greek farmers who abuse donkeys...

Fact is that hundreds of people eating and shitting in one place for two months is unhealthy.

Again, you miss the fact that camping on private property for months isn't a right.

and going home afterwards.

Camping out for this long isn't really doing anything for them. Public opinions polls prove that.

Before it might have been about changing how the government treats Wall Street. Now, it's a bunch of people wanting to feel good about themselves and thinking they own whatever they want.

In early stages of Occupy Wall Street, I sometimes encountered people who harbored a legitimate concern: Wouldn’t prolonged media attention to altercations between police and demonstrators distract from the movement’s message?

This apprehension always struck me as misguided. What could be more central to Occupy’s guiding philosophy than the idea that the rule of law has been subverted by corporate interests? In collusion with government functionaries and beyond meaningful accountability from the public, these interests have created a separate realm of law for themselves — one that orients the financial and political systems in their favor, to the detriment of everyone else. If this is indeed true, and the law itself is marred by a systemic corruption, then law enforcement — manifested physically in the form of police officers — is an appropriate focus for a social movement seeking redress of grievances.

As Occupy Wall Street grew, the New York Police Department’s “crowd control” tactics became increasingly bizarre and aggressive: historic mass arrests, motor scooter attacks, destruction of books, ramming horses into demonstrators, putting New York Post reporters in choke holds – to name only a few. And following Tuesday’s brazen raid of Zuccotti Park, carried out in the dead of night, the NYPD indicated that de-escalation is not on the horizon. Quite the opposite, in fact. Police officials at the highest ranks, under the direction of Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, have taken to simply making up the rules as they go along.

In the same way that financial elites rig the political system, law enforcement elites like Bloomberg and Kelly have rigged the criminal justice system. Occupy Wall Street is hardly the only victim. The NYPD is on pace to make 700,000 extralegal “stop-and-frisks” this year alone, while its own officers skirt accountability for their misconduct. Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who was sanctioned by NYPD Internal Affairs for pepper-spraying at least four demonstrators without provocation, received a maximum punishment of 10 lost vacation days on account of his actions.

If you’re an ordinary citizen, and you get caught on video dousing people with noxious gas like Bologna did, you get summarily locked up. And if you’re young and black, expect to receive the law’s full wrath. But when you’re an NYPD commanding officer responsible for all of Manhattan below 59th street, like Bologna was at the time of his attack, you get essentially a free pass.

Additionally, throughout my coverage of OWS, various police officials in plainclothes have refused to identify themselves upon request — a violation of NYPD patrol guide procedure 203-09, effective June 27, 2003, which states that all “members of the service” are required to “courteously and clearly state [their] rank, name, shield number and command, or otherwise provide them, to anyone who requests [they] do so. [They also must] allow the person ample time to note this information.”

Among the men who violated this directive are Lt. Daniel J. Albano, described in a 2009 court document as a “Lieutenant in the NYPD legal bureau and a high-level policy-making official for the NYPD.” When I asked Albano whether he was even with the NYPD, he replied, “I’m the plumber.”

Another is Sgt. Arthur Smarsch. On Tuesday morning, demonstrators were allowed back in post-powerwashed Zuccotti Park for a short time. Within what seemed like a half hour, officers began to force people out again. There was much confusion. Someone finally prodded Sgt. Arthur Smarsch to explain what was going on, and I heard him say that there was a “suspicious package” in the park. He then told an NBC4 reporter his last name upon request.

Smarsch was misinformed, because no other official ever mentioned anything about a “suspicious package,” nor was any search of the park ordered.

I recalled first seeing Smarsch at an early-morning march on Oct. 14, when he was unusually violent with demonstrators — even by NYPD standards — for no real discernible reason. He would not provide me (or several others who asked, including members of the National Lawyers Guild) with his name. I later retrieved it by other means. Smarsch is the director of Manhattan South Borough.

During the Zuccotti Park eviction, the NYPD enforced a strict no-public-access policy in both the park and its surrounding area, ensuring reporters would be virtually prohibited from observing the raid. Press, credentialed or not, were repeatedly barred from proceeding past the newly formed police line. Journalists associated with the Associated Press, the New York Times, the New York Daily News and other outlets were arrested.

At one point that morning, I got stuck in a chaotic mass of people, and was nearly battered with a baton while attempting to record video. Some NYPD officers seemed to enjoy all this immensely, especially Police Officer Toussaint — one of the several who laughed as they pummeled everyone in their path. I saw one man get smashed in the face with a riot shield; another was knocked over the hood of a taxi.

When I asked one officer why it had suddenly become unlawful to stand on that portion of the sidewalk, she answered, “You’re blocking pedestrian traffic.”

Someone called out, “We are pedestrian traffic!” The officer responded, “So are we.”

The officer’s remark, of course, was senseless. Taken at face value, it would presumably mean that those of us being impeded from standing on this normally open sidewalk were ourselves responsible for the ensuing obstruction of pedestrian traffic. As if the hundreds of amassed riot cops or newly erected metal barricades had nothing to do with the blockage that she so dryly referenced.

It is not good that NYPD officers now live in a world where coherency of argument is no longer even an aspiration. Having spoken to over a hundred police officers throughout Occupy Wall Street, about 70 percent respond to queries by saying nothing at all, another 15 percent grunt or mutter something inaudible, 10 percent make some kind of dismissive remark, and the remaining 5 percent are willing to have a human conversation.

If this is the reality of police behavior at a political demonstration in downtown New York City, what has happened to the reality of policing? The NYPD, ostensibly tasked with maintaining public order, has proven that it cannot handle political dissent without exerting anything less than military-style force. For two months, it has continuously abridged the rights of citizens to peaceably assemble, and of journalists to document these assemblies. It has lost its claim to legitimacy.

Big Corporations Have More Free Speech than REAL People

Robert Reich sums up the 1%’s hypocrisy towards the First Amendment:

• A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.

Of course, the Constitution is supposed to provide the right to free speech no matter what type of threat we’re supposedly under. That was the whole idea.

And the Founding Fathers hated big corporations. See this, this and this. They were as suspicious of big corporations as they were the monarchy. So they only allowed corporate charters for a very brief duration, in order to carry out a specific, time-limited project.

As James Madison noted:

• There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by…corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.

Indeed, while the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against taxation without representation, it largely centered on the British government’s crony capitalism – and disproportionate tax breaks – towards the East India Company, the giant company which dominated the tea market and hurt small American business.

Protesting against the government propping up today’s giant banks – who are ruining the chance for small businesses to have a fair chance at competing – is exactly the same idea.

Later presidents had a similar view. For example, Grover Cleveland said:

• As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.

And Teddy Roosevelt had to break up banking trusts which had taken over the country.

Adam Smith – the founder of free market capitalism – also railed against corporate monopolies.

And conservatives as well as liberals are war loudly warning against American corporations becoming overly powerful in relation to the people.

For example, as I noted last month:

• The Oathkeepers announcement zeroes in on this issue in a way that both conservatives and liberals can agree on:

• When a corporation becomes larger than is useful, and seeks to concentrate financial power into the political and governmental spheres, its likeness is no longer the King Snake, but instead is more like a Rattlesnake. At a point we call such corps “Monopoly Capitalists”. By the time a grouping of such Monopoly Capitalist corps are setting U.S. foreign policy, which the arms industry certainly does nowadays, the problem becomes unbearably apparent. Bechtel comes to mind, along with Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Monsanto, General Electric, et al.

Occupy Oakland: Iraq war veteran Kayvan Sabehgi beaten by police - video

• Protester and three-tour American veteran Kayvan Sabehgi was beaten by Oakland police during the Occupy protest's general strike on 2 November. Sabehgi, who was 'completely peaceful', according to witnesses, was left with a lacerated spleen

Rightwing Talking Points 101

Good thing that cop Pepper-Sprayed her right in the face. Her words might have gotten through the Kevlar-riot-gear.

Corporate Police, at their finest.

Rightwing Talking Points 101

SOROSPIRACY!! TERRORISTS!! MARXISTSOCIALIST!! LIBERALSCUM!! AYERS!! SOROS!! SOROS!!!!!!

Exhibit 1-8: The Media Elite Revisited


In 1995, Stanley Rothman and Amy E. Black “partially replicated the earlier Rothman-Lichter” survey of the media elite. (See previous entry, The Media Elite.) “The sample of journalists mirrors that from the earlier study, including reporters and editors at major national newspapers, news magazines and wire services,” the authors wrote in a Spring 2001 article for the journal Public Interest.

They found the media elite held strongly liberal views on abortion, homosexuality, and a range of economic issues. “Despite the discrediting of centrally planned economies produced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes, attitudes about government control of the economy have not changed very much since the 1980s,” the authors marveled.

KEY FINDINGS:


•More than three out of four “elite journalists,” 76 percent, reported voting for Michael Dukakis in 1988, compared to just 46 percent of the voting public.
•An even larger percentage of top journalists, 91 percent, said they cast ballots for Bill Clinton in 1992. That same year, only 43 percent of voters picked Clinton, who nevertheless won a three-way race.
•Nearly all of the media elite (97 percent) agreed that “it is a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have an abortion,” and five out of six (84 percent) agreed strongly.
•Three out of four journalists (73 percent) agreed that “homosexuality is as acceptable a lifestyle as heterosexuality,” and 40 percent agreed strongly.
•Seven out of ten journalists (71 percent) agreed that “government should work to ensure that everyone has a job,” and 30 percent said they strongly agreed with that statement.
•Three-fourths (75 percent) agreed that “government should work to reduce the income gap between the rich and the poor,” and more than a third (34 percent) strongly agreed.
•Relatively few journalists (39 percent) agreed that “less government regulation of business would be good for the economy,” and just five percent strongly agreed with this sentiment.

I aint calling no one a traitor but sorry when these clowns start injuring cops its no longer peaceful.


Plus these immature bums are NEVER impeding the 1% wealthy they wronglly accuse they actually hurt the 98% that are actually working and truly want naught to do with them!

SOROSPIRACY!! TERRORISTS!! MARXISTSOCIALIST!! LIBERALSCUM!! AYERS!! SOROS!! SOROS!!!!!!

At the University of California at Davis this afternoon, police tore down down the tents of students inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and arrested those who stood in their way. Others peacefully demanded that police release the arrested.







In the video above, you see a police officer [Update: UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike] walk down a line of those young people seated quietly on the ground in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, and spray them all with pepper spray at very close range. He is clearing a path for fellow officers to walk through and arrest more students, but it's as if he's dousing a row of bugs with insecticide.

Wayne Tilcock of the Davis-Enterprise newspaper has a gallery of photographs from the incident, including the image thumbnailed above (larger size at davisenterprise.com). Ten people in this scene were arrested, nine of whom were current UC Davis students. At least one woman is reported to have been taken away in an ambulance with chemical burns.

This 8-minute video was uploaded just a few hours ago, and has already become something of an iconic, viral emblem accross the web. We're flooded with eyewitness footage from OWS protests right now, but this one certainly feels like an important one, in part because of what the crowd does after the kids are pepper-sprayed.

They were sitting peacefully?! That's what dirty hippie Liberal Marxists do! SOROS!!!

John Boehner’s lobbyist pals are so afraid of Occupy Wall Street that they are pitching a million dollar hit job to bring OWS down.



The memo admits both that Occupy Wall Street is political force, and Democrats are tougher on Wall Street than Republicans:




In short, they are going to run a smear campaign that would use the same Fox News talking points that haven’t worked so far. They are going to claim that George Soros is funding Occupy Wall Street, and that the movement is being run by the Democratic Party. Most troubling is their plan to carry surveillance on social media. They are going to monitor the social media used by OWS and what they intend to do that the memo didn’t directly state was spam social media with anti-Occupy Wall Street propaganda.

They won’t only use social media to monitor the message and tactics of Occupy Wall Street. They will try to infiltrate these social networks to disrupt the movement and plant smears against OWS. This is a favorite GOP tactic that goes right in line with their use of paid commenters to spam websites with pro-GOP messages.

By obtaining this memo and reporting on it, Chris Hayes and MSNBC made it likely that this campaign will never see the light of day. The memo does expose a very troubling development. The one percent is so worried about Occupy Wall Street that they are preparing to merge their financial, political and media resources into a giant propaganda campaign in order to halt this movement.

This memo is the most concrete evidence yet that Occupy Wall Street is winning and the one percent is terrified that the movement’s message is powerfully resonating with the American people. The greatest irony of all is that the OWS message would have never been this effective if the Republican Party wouldn’t have spent the last three years trying to sabotage the American economy.

The economic despair that they worked so hard to maintain may be the very thing that defeats them in 2012. Occupy Wall Street is their way to changing America, and there seems to be little that the one percent and their paid political puppets can do about it.

Occupy’s 84-year-old pepper spray victim
By Maura Judkis

When Occupy marched in downtown Seattle on Tuesday night, a priest, a pregnant teenager and an 84-year-old community activist were doused in pepper spray. Although there have been many striking images of violence and peace in Occupy encampments, and many faces of the movement, none may be as immediately striking as this image of Dorli Rainey, taken by Joshua Trujillo.



Rainey’s direct gaze at the camera as her face drips with pepper spray is a haunting, cinematic image of brutality, emphasized even more by the chiaroscuro of dark gloved hands holding her head up to lead her to safety. Dashiell Bennett of the Atlantic has speculated that this image may become the defining one of Occupy unrest.

Rainey, a community activist since the ’60s, decided to walk by the protest on her way to a transportation meeting in the Northgate neighborhood of Seattle. As she told the Stranger, Seattle’s alt-weekly paper, “Cops shoved their bicycles into the crowd . . . If it had not been for my Hero (Iraq Vet Caleb) I would have been down on the ground and trampled.”

When Philip Kennicott wrote in 2005 about the lack of iconic images from the Iraq war, he spoke to the qualities that make a photograph emblematic of a movement or era in history. Until now, many of the photos of Occupy focused on the signs carried by protesters, rather than the clashes with police. This is partially due to access — by many accounts, press were shut out from Monday night’s eviction of protesters from Zucottti Park. Yet, even though Occupy Wall Street and its branches across the country are not analogous to the war, the visual language of iconic imagery is the same.

Too often, Kennicott writes, photographers of conflict focus on objects — a sign, a tent, a mangled car — as a stand-in for people: “The sum total of these substitutions feels, at times, like a theater without actors, a set of props and costumes and extras milling about, without hint of what the real drama is meant to be.”

Rainey has now been unwittingly thrust into that starring role. Protest images that become iconic show us faces in anguish, such as John Filo’s Pulitzer-winning image of the shooting at Kent State. Thankfully, no image or incident quite as violent has emerged from Occupy. Nevertheless, wrote one commenter on the Stranger, “This is exactly the sort of picture that changes things.”

Liberal! Hippie! Failed pseudo-intellectual stab at sly commentary! Soros! G-Spin!!