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
Originally Posted By: The Shill Apologists
Liberal! Hippie! Failed pseudo-intellectual stab at sly commentary! Soros! G-Spin!!
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.
Originally Posted By: The G-Shills
They were sitting peacefully?! That's what dirty hippie Liberal Marxists do! SOROS!!!
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 threatwe’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.
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 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.
Monopoly Capitalism is un-Constitutional and must be opposed.
Tough tactics and intolerance favor the rich and flout the rule of law
Quote:
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.
Michael Tracey is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, Reason, The American Conservative, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey More Michael Tracey
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.
In the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street eviction from Zuccotti Park, a mayoral aide e-mailed reporters.
The aide, Stu Loeser, said that he had heard of journalists “supposedly” wearing police press badges who “allegedly encountered problems on the streets of New York.”
As I sling nouns and verbs for a living, I almost admired his artful euphemisms. A less refined sort might phrase it this way:
Over several days, New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers.
Reporters with The Associated Press and The Daily News were arrested while taking notes. A radio reporter was arrested as she recorded several blocks from the park.
All of this behavior “allegedly” occurred “on the streets of New York.”
This is the point in articles where it is customary to aver: the Police Department has done a fine, historic job battling crime. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is a brilliant tactician, and he deserves much credit. That is true.
Another truth co-exists. At least since the Republican National Convention of 2004, our police have grown accustomed to forcibly penning, arresting, and sometimes spraying and whacking protesters and reporters. On Monday, The New York Times and 12 other organizations sent a letter of protest to the Police Department. “The police actions of last week,” the authors said, “have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.”
Their letter offered five examples. I’ll mention one: As the police carried off a young protester whose head was covered in a crown of blood, a photographer stood behind a metal barricade and raised his camera. Two officers ran at him, grabbed the barrier and struck him in the chest, knees and shins. You are not permitted, the police yelled, to photograph on the sidewalk.
Covering New York can be a contact sport. We grunt, curse and toss elbows. I’ve run across the Brooklyn Bridge as protesters tossed bottles at cops, stood inside illegal squats on the Lower East Side as police massed outside, and walked through Crown Heights as communal tensions exploded. The rough rule was this: Treat cops reasonably and you can go about your business of recording and bearing witness.
Those feel like ancient days. Paul J. Browne, police deputy commissioner, denies what you see with your own eyes. “There’s no change in policy,” he wrote in an e-mail, saying the police establish lines for safety and to ensure that evidence is preserved.
As for the press secretary, Mr. Loeser, he and his staff took to Twitter like a cloud of gnats, insisting that the Associated Press and Daily News reporters had “clearly trespassed” by following demonstrators and the police through a fence into a vacant lot.
When I, as a columnist for The Times, questioned these arrests, a Bloomberg spokesman advised: “N.Y.T. policy does not allow breaking law to gather news as you know.”
My newspaper’s ethics policy instructs us to be law abiding; we cannot steal documents, break into offices or tap phones. We also follow the story. And nothing those reporters are seen doing on video, which is to say taking notes in broad daylight with press passes dangling from their necks, appears to violate those guidelines.
Last week, Mr. Loeser instructed his staff to compare the names of those arrested against the roster of reporters with police press passes. His resulting e-mail suggested Captain Renault discovering gambling in Casablanca.
“Imagine my surprise,” he wrote, “when we found that only five of the 26 arrested reporters actually have valid NYPD-issued press credentials.”
Here’s the rub. A majority of the city’s working reporters do not possess police passes. Leonard Levitt is a veteran reporter who writes the prodigiously well-sourced NYPD Confidential. “The police want to accredit as few reporters as possible, and they make it exceedingly hard for nonmainstream reporters to get press passes,” he said.
Mr. Levitt has tried to renew his pass for a year. “Needless to say,” he noted, “they are resisting.”
There is another problem: a police pass has become a ticket for a quick removal. My Times colleague Colin Moynihan stood on that darkened square last Tuesday morning when a police spokesman shouted, “Who has press credentials?”
Many reporters and photographers dutifully raised their hands. With that, the police removed the “credentialed” reporters, under threat of arrest, to a press pen, out of sight of the square. Only shouts and yells could be heard.
I was just reading an article about how a 19-yr-old pregnant teen miscarried because she got pepper-sprayed and beaten by the cops at OWS. Now, honestly...I have to ask....what the HELL was a pregnant 19-yr-old doing at a protest where's it's a known fact that cops arbitrarily beat people? She totally shouldn't have been there. Not preggers.
I can't say I approve of everything, honestly. the sort of shit going on right now is what mods are supposed to keep from happening, not help to create. I'm not annoyed by what pro is saying - of course I disagree but I try to keep my emotions out of what should be a purely cerebral exercise - so much as all the self-quoting and repetition and other things that are preventing an actual discussion. we are allowed to disagree without threads turning into shitstorms. one person's choice of talking heads is allowed to differ from someone else's without the whole damn thing devolving into a series of ad hominem broadsides. and for fuck's sake, when people have made up their minds about whatever 'point' you're trying to make, saying the exact same thing over again is not going to improve either the logical soundness or moral footing of your argument.
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
I was just reading an article about how a 19-yr-old pregnant teen miscarried because she got pepper-sprayed and beaten by the cops at OWS. Now, honestly...I have to ask....what the HELL was a pregnant 19-yr-old doing at a protest where's it's a known fact that cops arbitrarily beat people? She totally shouldn't have been there. Not preggers.
In the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street eviction from Zuccotti Park, a mayoral aide e-mailed reporters.
The aide, Stu Loeser, said that he had heard of journalists “supposedly” wearing police press badges who “allegedly encountered problems on the streets of New York.”
As I sling nouns and verbs for a living, I almost admired his artful euphemisms. A less refined sort might phrase it this way:
Over several days, New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers.
Reporters with The Associated Press and The Daily News were arrested while taking notes. A radio reporter was arrested as she recorded several blocks from the park.
All of this behavior “allegedly” occurred “on the streets of New York.”
This is the point in articles where it is customary to aver: the Police Department has done a fine, historic job battling crime. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is a brilliant tactician, and he deserves much credit. That is true.
Another truth co-exists. At least since the Republican National Convention of 2004, our police have grown accustomed to forcibly penning, arresting, and sometimes spraying and whacking protesters and reporters. On Monday, The New York Times and 12 other organizations sent a letter of protest to the Police Department. “The police actions of last week,” the authors said, “have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory.”
Their letter offered five examples. I’ll mention one: As the police carried off a young protester whose head was covered in a crown of blood, a photographer stood behind a metal barricade and raised his camera. Two officers ran at him, grabbed the barrier and struck him in the chest, knees and shins. You are not permitted, the police yelled, to photograph on the sidewalk.
Covering New York can be a contact sport. We grunt, curse and toss elbows. I’ve run across the Brooklyn Bridge as protesters tossed bottles at cops, stood inside illegal squats on the Lower East Side as police massed outside, and walked through Crown Heights as communal tensions exploded. The rough rule was this: Treat cops reasonably and you can go about your business of recording and bearing witness.
Those feel like ancient days. Paul J. Browne, police deputy commissioner, denies what you see with your own eyes. “There’s no change in policy,” he wrote in an e-mail, saying the police establish lines for safety and to ensure that evidence is preserved.
As for the press secretary, Mr. Loeser, he and his staff took to Twitter like a cloud of gnats, insisting that the Associated Press and Daily News reporters had “clearly trespassed” by following demonstrators and the police through a fence into a vacant lot.
When I, as a columnist for The Times, questioned these arrests, a Bloomberg spokesman advised: “N.Y.T. policy does not allow breaking law to gather news as you know.”
My newspaper’s ethics policy instructs us to be law abiding; we cannot steal documents, break into offices or tap phones. We also follow the story. And nothing those reporters are seen doing on video, which is to say taking notes in broad daylight with press passes dangling from their necks, appears to violate those guidelines.
Last week, Mr. Loeser instructed his staff to compare the names of those arrested against the roster of reporters with police press passes. His resulting e-mail suggested Captain Renault discovering gambling in Casablanca.
“Imagine my surprise,” he wrote, “when we found that only five of the 26 arrested reporters actually have valid NYPD-issued press credentials.”
Here’s the rub. A majority of the city’s working reporters do not possess police passes. Leonard Levitt is a veteran reporter who writes the prodigiously well-sourced NYPD Confidential. “The police want to accredit as few reporters as possible, and they make it exceedingly hard for nonmainstream reporters to get press passes,” he said.
Mr. Levitt has tried to renew his pass for a year. “Needless to say,” he noted, “they are resisting.”
There is another problem: a police pass has become a ticket for a quick removal. My Times colleague Colin Moynihan stood on that darkened square last Tuesday morning when a police spokesman shouted, “Who has press credentials?”
Many reporters and photographers dutifully raised their hands. With that, the police removed the “credentialed” reporters, under threat of arrest, to a press pen, out of sight of the square. Only shouts and yells could be heard.
Apparently people are much more compliant when you pepper spray them, so the police will spay them before hand if they have to move them, so they won't have a lot of resistance.
I think Pro thinks that he has the OWS equivalent of that Vietnamese police chief executing the prisoner.
He doesn't.
Uhhh...you may want to let me decide what I think before you randomly do it for me.
Sorry the pics and video bothers you. Probably shouldn't look at them, then. It's just the illegal and unjust mistreatment of our citizens at the hands of Corporate Puppets. But, don't worry about it, no. You just go on and have your lovely beans-on-toast.
Heh. Doesn't change any of the facts, though. These pigs are brutal for no reason. They're little more than Corporate Soldiers, fighting for the Almighty Dollar...
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
But, of course, if we all just put The Pussy on IGNORE, it wouldn't matter and we could continue to discussion. But, I've never put anyone on IGNORE before. Not sure it's worth it.
Exactly.
So why did you abuse your authority?
Doing exactly what you alleged G-man did when he was a moderator. But at most, all G-man did was move a few off-topic posts. Whereas you --PUSSY-LIKE-- shut down the discussion and locked it to get the last word.
Every time you call Rex a pussy, he can give this example, to show who the REAL pussy is. Pussy.
YOU'RE the one who couldn't take it, so badly that you had to abuse your mod status.
Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.
EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
I'm a pussy! 
