OCCUPY WALL STREET

[atomiczombie]

His asking everyone to stay non-violent is impressive. So glad he is getting his speech back and re-joining with Occupy Oakland!

[atomiczombie]

[Cin]

This article made me feel sad, a bit worried, and just little sick to my stomach. But then so many things I read lately have that effect. Maybe I need to read less and perhaps play more video games. Video games never make me sad or worried. Well, unless i'm losing badly.

How Zuccotti Park Became Zuccotti Prison: Creeping American Police State

America may not be a traditional police state (yet), but it is an increasingly militarized policed state in which rights are regularly tossed out the window.
November 28, 2011 |

When I arrived at Zuccotti Prison one afternoon last week, the “park” was in its now-usual lockdown mode. No more tents. No library. No kitchen. No medical area. Just about 30 leftover protesters and perhaps 100 of New York’s finest as well as private-security types in neon-green vests in or around a dead space enclosed by more movable police fencing than you can imagine. To the once open plaza, there were now only two small entrances in the fencing on the side streets, and to pass through either you had to run a gauntlet of police and private security types.

The park itself was bare of anything whatsoever and, that day, parts of it had been cordoned off, theoretically for yet more cleaning, with the kind of yellow police tape that would normally surround a crime scene, which was exactly how it seemed. In fact, as I walked in, a young protestor was being arrested, evidently for the crime of lying down on a bench. (No sleeping, or even prospective sleeping, allowed -- except in jail!)

Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg’s police assault on the park, OWS has largely decamped for spaces unknown and for the future. Left behind was a grim tableau of our distinctly up-armored, post-9/11 American world. To take an obvious example, the “police” who so notoriously pepper-sprayed non-violent, seated students at UC Davis were just campus cops, who in my college years, the 1960s, still generally wore civvies, carried no weapons, and were tasked with seeing whether students had broken curfew or locked themselves out of their rooms. Now, around the country, they are armed with chemical weapons, Tasers, tear gas, side arms, you name it. Meanwhile, some police departments, militarizing at a rapid rate, have tank-like vehicles, and the first police surveillance drones are taking to the air in field tests and capable of being weaponized.

And keep in mind, when it comes to that pepper-spraying incident, we’re talking about sleepy Davis, California, and a campus once renowned for its agronomy school. Al-Qaeda? I don’t think so.

Still, terror is what now makes our American world work, the trains run more or less on time, and the money flow in. So why should we be surprised that, having ripped Zuccotti Park apart, destroyed books, gotten a rep for pepper-spraying and roughing up protesters (and reporters, too), the NYPD should propitiously announce the arrest of yet another “lone wolf” terrorist. And can anyone be shocked that we’re talking about a disturbed, moneyless individual -- he couldn’t even pay his cell phone bill, no less rent a place to live -- under surveillance for two years, and palling around with an NYPD “informant” who smoked marijuana with him and may have given him not only a place to build a bomb but encouragement in doing so.

It was a police-developed terror case that evidently so reeked of coaching even the FBI refused to get involved. And yet this was Mayor Bloomberg’s shining moment of last week, as the NYPD declared his home a “frozen” zone, the equivalent of declaring martial law around his house. And who was endangering him? An OWS “drum circle.” In the United States, increasingly, those in power no longer observe the law. Instead, they make it up to suit their needs. In the process, the streets where you demonstrate, as (New York’s mayor keeps telling us) is our “right,” are regularly transformed into yet more fenced-in, heavily surveilled Zuccotti Prisons.

This may not be a traditional police state (yet), but it is an increasingly militarized policed state in which the blue coats, armed to the teeth, act with remarkable impunity -- and all in the name of our safety from a bunch of doofuses or unhinged individuals that its “informants” often seem to fund, put through basic terror courses, and encourage in every way until they are arrested as “terrorists.” This is essentially a scam on the basis of which rights are regularly abridged or tossed out the window.

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, learned that the hard way. So did former Guantanamo prosecutor Morris Davis when he got fired from his job at the Library of Congress for writing an op-ed. So may we all.

http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst...te?page=entire

[persiphone]

Occupy L.A. protesters defy eviction
Occupy Wall Street protesters who defied a deadline to remove their weeks-old encampment on the Los Angeles City Hall lawn stood their ground Nov. 29 as they faced uncertainty over when or if police would push them out of the park


http://news.yahoo.com/photos/as-dead...191717305.html

that's a link to the slideshow, but i can't dig anything up on the story. how many rocks i gotta look under to get the news around here in this country?

[persiphone]

ok here we go.....geeeze....it was buried


Police hold off on eviction of Los Angeles Occupy camp
By Jason Kandel Reuters – 14 hrs ago


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Throngs of anti-Wall Street activists hunkered down in their Los Angeles camp for another night of uncertainty early on Tuesday as police stayed largely on the sidelines 24 hours after a deadline to vacate passed.

But crowds that had swelled to more than 2,000 at their peak late on Sunday as protesters from outside the City Hall encampment streamed in to help forestall a raid had dwindled to a core group of several hundred by late Monday night.

Compared with the raucous atmosphere at the encampment a day earlier, the mood was subdued on Tuesday, with campers milling about or playing drums and other instruments.

Police in riot gear had closed in on the Occupy LA compound early on Monday as protesters started blocking traffic, but a force of about 300 officers stopped short of clearing the camp and withdrew once they reopened streets for Monday commuters.

Four people were arrested on suspicion of being present at an unlawful assembly.

The Los Angeles encampment, which officials had tolerated for weeks even as other cities moved in to clear out similar camps, is among the largest on the West Coast aligned with a 2-month-old national Occupy Wall Street movement protesting economic inequality and excesses of the U.S. financial system.

Los Angeles Police Department Commander Andrew Smith said the number of tents had declined since the weekend to about 270, down from 500 pitched at their height.

"It's calm as can be over there," he said from a nearby corner on Monday night. Small clusters of officers stood by casually at various intersections at the fringes of the park, with no imminent sign of large-scale police action.

WAITING GAME

Smith declined to say when police might try to enforce the eviction order issued last week by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who gave the activists until 12:01 a.m. on Monday to dismantle their tents and clear out or face forcible removal and arrest.

Occupy campers seemed resigned to the fact that their 8-week-old presence was nearing an end.

"Now, it's like any time they could come in," said Elise Whitaker, 21, one of the organizers of the group. "They're going to come in, and I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be a lot of fun."

Attorneys for Occupy LA asked a federal judge on Monday for a court order barring police from evicting the camp, arguing that city officials had violated their civil rights by ordering it dismantled.

Villaraigosa initially had welcomed the protesters, going so far as to supply them with ponchos for inclement weather. But as city officials complained of crime, sanitation problems and property damage they blamed on the camp, the mayor decided the group had to go.

He issued his eviction notice last Friday after talks on a plan to induce the protesters to leave voluntarily collapsed, setting the stage for the latest showdown between leaders of a major U.S. city and the Occupy movement.

The mayor has promised to find alternative shelter for homeless people who had taken up residence at City Hall and were estimated to account for at least a third of those camped out there since the start of October.

Whitaker said there was widespread speculation that eviction by police might come after the city opens its winter shelters on December 1, a point at which homeless residents of the Occupy LA camp would drift away on their own.

[persiphone]

i thought this was interesting.....


Los Angeles Shows an Alternative Approach to Occupy
Tom Hayden
Posted: 11/29/11 09:31 AM ET on The Huffington Post


Compared with the brutal police crackdowns against the Occupy movement in New York City, Oakland and even the pacific Davis campus of the University of California, the Los Angeles eviction last night was almost entirely peaceful. The question is, why?

One reason was the leadership of the liberal Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who ordered the eviction but also no beatings, tear-gassing or police violence. Another was the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, eager to show a new approach after years of controversy. The City Council came out early in support. Organized labor and local clergy joined the Occupiers and insisted the mayor do the right thing. And the Occupiers themselves adhered to a code of non-violence in an effort to keep the focus on Wall Street.

But to believe the writer Naomi Wolf, who was arrested during one of the New York protests, the Occupy movement inevitably faced a brutal crackdown because of its threat to the status quo. Wolf has written in the UK's Guardian that the recent crackdowns on Occupy in multiple cities have been a coordinated conspiracy between local officials, police, the FBI and Homeland Security. As evidence, she points to conference calls between officials and police in 18 cities that preceded the raids. She claims that a "shocking truth" behind the crackdown is the vested interest of Congress in protecting its own insider stock dealings on Wall Street. In one passage, Wolf accuses the White House of blessing the "war on peaceful protesters."

Wolf is not entirely off the mark. But her monolithic conspiracy model needs more investigation and cannot explain the case of Los Angeles.

There is no doubt that the conference calls were conducted, and public records act requests may yet shed light on what was said. The mayor of Los Angeles was not on those calls, and says he didn't want to be.

What is naïve in the Wolf analysis is her notion that crackdowns coordinated by the FBI are new with the advent of Occupy Wall Street. Since the 1999 Seattle protests, the involvement of the FBI with local police has followed a repeated pattern. First, an FBI counter-terrorism task force warns local officials, media and the public that thousands of masked "anarchists" will be invading their cities to break the law, fight the police, break windows and destroy property. They then advise that all protesters be literally fenced into protest cages. To sweeten the coordination, tens of thousands of federal dollars are offered to local police forces for "security" (acquisition of the latest in gas grenades, launchers, surveillance cameras, even paper shredders in one case). Young people and their convergence centers are targeted for prior detention, with the assistance of informants and provocateurs.

The list of cities where this has occurred is a long one, starting with Seattle: Los Angeles (2000 DNC), Washington D.C. (2000 IMF/World Bank, 2002 anti-war/IMF/World Bank), Genoa (2001 G8), Quebec City (2001 FTAA), Oakland (2003 anti-war), Miami (2003 FTAA), New York (2003 anti-war, 2004 RNC), Minneapolis-St. Paul (2008 RNC), Denver (2008 DNC), to list only the most dramatic and recent. None of these are remembered in Wolf's inflated narrative, as if the Occupy movement has been unique in provoking the ruling class to order up repression.

Of course there were earlier eras of FBI-backed repression, deportations, and localized violence. But the current cycle began with Seattle and has morphed into the larger "war on terrorism."

There was one exception to this recent pattern: Mexico's handling of the anti-WTO protests held in Cancun in 2003. Instead of following the FBI's script, Mexico decided to de-escalate the police response, perhaps to protect Cancun's tourist economy, perhaps to improve their security forces' tattered reputation. It was quite remarkable to observe. In spite provocations by the so-called Black Bloc, in spite of protesters taking over the streets, in spite of a horrific ritual suicide by a South Korean farmer, the police and army remained largely disengaged or passive. When they arrested one group for sitting in an intersection, they placed them on an air-conditioned bus, which drove them back to the protest site.

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.

To return to the case Los Angeles, I am not arguing in favor of the Mayor's eviction order. There was no particular reason for the order to be imposed last night. Left alone, the Occupiers might have decided on their own that it was time to move on. Or they might have descended into negative feuding and folded their tents. There was a serious risk in forcing them out of their encampment. Nor do I believe the mayor bowed to pressure from downtown property owners to clear the encampment. His own explanation as an elected official makes more sense: that sooner or later, an incident would occur at the encampment -- a death, a rape, a fight -- for which he would be held accountable politically.

But the way the LA eviction has been handled so far is a very important achievement for a city plagued by fifty years of police scandals, brutality, corruption, and court-ordered reforms. Only four years ago the LAPD's fabled Metro Division went wild and trampled peaceful protesters and media at a huge immigrant rights rally. The LAPD still stops and frisks hundreds of thousands of inner city youth each year, a potential scandal that is so far invisible.

Under the direction of the mayor and Chief Charlie Beck, however, the LAPD officers last night were as "tactful" as could be, in the phrase one Occupy sympathizer who works at City Hall.

Once considered an "occupying army" projecting a threat against the least disturbance, the LAPD allowed Occupy LA to co-opt their former brand.

The Occupy movement also showed an evolution in thinking about street tactics. A decade ago, the phrase "diversity of tactics" allowed a range of actions from strict nonviolence to "fucking shit up," as certain anarchist factions used to say. Experience showed that such "diversity" only allowed the most violent sensational tactics to dominate the media narrative, despite being employed by a tiny handful of activists (and provocateurs, in some cases).

So far the clearances in LA have been peaceful. Yesterday morning (Monday) the mayor met with a delegation of inter-faith leaders who have been joining the occupiers for several weeks. The clergy communiqué from the meeting commended Chief Beck for "the restraint shown so far by the LAPD," and made a "commitment to sustain the Occupy presence and message in LA going forward," including a promise by the Mayor to use his "bully pulpit" as head of the National Conference of Mayors to push the major themes of the national Occupy movement:

"the need to halt the avalanche of home foreclosures, the need to reverse corporate 'personhood', the need to fully enforce the Dodd-Frank law, and the need to gain needed federal and state tax revenue to support municipal services in LA and throughout the nation."
The dire scenario painted by Wolf in the international media does not tell the story of Los Angeles, where a crack of hope has been opened after one of the country's longest occupations.

[Ebon]

Originally Posted by persiphone

i thought this was interesting.....


Los Angeles Shows an Alternative Approach to Occupy
Tom Hayden
Posted: 11/29/11 09:31 AM ET on The Huffington Post


Compared with the brutal police crackdowns against the Occupy movement in New York City, Oakland and even the pacific Davis campus of the University of California, the Los Angeles eviction last night was almost entirely peaceful. The question is, why?

One reason was the leadership of the liberal Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who ordered the eviction but also no beatings, tear-gassing or police violence. Another was the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, eager to show a new approach after years of controversy. The City Council came out early in support. Organized labor and local clergy joined the Occupiers and insisted the mayor do the right thing. And the Occupiers themselves adhered to a code of non-violence in an effort to keep the focus on Wall Street.

But to believe the writer Naomi Wolf, who was arrested during one of the New York protests, the Occupy movement inevitably faced a brutal crackdown because of its threat to the status quo. Wolf has written in the UK's Guardian that the recent crackdowns on Occupy in multiple cities have been a coordinated conspiracy between local officials, police, the FBI and Homeland Security. As evidence, she points to conference calls between officials and police in 18 cities that preceded the raids. She claims that a "shocking truth" behind the crackdown is the vested interest of Congress in protecting its own insider stock dealings on Wall Street. In one passage, Wolf accuses the White House of blessing the "war on peaceful protesters."

Wolf is not entirely off the mark. But her monolithic conspiracy model needs more investigation and cannot explain the case of Los Angeles.

There is no doubt that the conference calls were conducted, and public records act requests may yet shed light on what was said. The mayor of Los Angeles was not on those calls, and says he didn't want to be.

What is naïve in the Wolf analysis is her notion that crackdowns coordinated by the FBI are new with the advent of Occupy Wall Street. Since the 1999 Seattle protests, the involvement of the FBI with local police has followed a repeated pattern. First, an FBI counter-terrorism task force warns local officials, media and the public that thousands of masked "anarchists" will be invading their cities to break the law, fight the police, break windows and destroy property. They then advise that all protesters be literally fenced into protest cages. To sweeten the coordination, tens of thousands of federal dollars are offered to local police forces for "security" (acquisition of the latest in gas grenades, launchers, surveillance cameras, even paper shredders in one case). Young people and their convergence centers are targeted for prior detention, with the assistance of informants and provocateurs.

The list of cities where this has occurred is a long one, starting with Seattle: Los Angeles (2000 DNC), Washington D.C. (2000 IMF/World Bank, 2002 anti-war/IMF/World Bank), Genoa (2001 G8), Quebec City (2001 FTAA), Oakland (2003 anti-war), Miami (2003 FTAA), New York (2003 anti-war, 2004 RNC), Minneapolis-St. Paul (2008 RNC), Denver (2008 DNC), to list only the most dramatic and recent. None of these are remembered in Wolf's inflated narrative, as if the Occupy movement has been unique in provoking the ruling class to order up repression.

Of course there were earlier eras of FBI-backed repression, deportations, and localized violence. But the current cycle began with Seattle and has morphed into the larger "war on terrorism."

There was one exception to this recent pattern: Mexico's handling of the anti-WTO protests held in Cancun in 2003. Instead of following the FBI's script, Mexico decided to de-escalate the police response, perhaps to protect Cancun's tourist economy, perhaps to improve their security forces' tattered reputation. It was quite remarkable to observe. In spite provocations by the so-called Black Bloc, in spite of protesters taking over the streets, in spite of a horrific ritual suicide by a South Korean farmer, the police and army remained largely disengaged or passive. When they arrested one group for sitting in an intersection, they placed them on an air-conditioned bus, which drove them back to the protest site.

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.

To return to the case Los Angeles, I am not arguing in favor of the Mayor's eviction order. There was no particular reason for the order to be imposed last night. Left alone, the Occupiers might have decided on their own that it was time to move on. Or they might have descended into negative feuding and folded their tents. There was a serious risk in forcing them out of their encampment. Nor do I believe the mayor bowed to pressure from downtown property owners to clear the encampment. His own explanation as an elected official makes more sense: that sooner or later, an incident would occur at the encampment -- a death, a rape, a fight -- for which he would be held accountable politically.

But the way the LA eviction has been handled so far is a very important achievement for a city plagued by fifty years of police scandals, brutality, corruption, and court-ordered reforms. Only four years ago the LAPD's fabled Metro Division went wild and trampled peaceful protesters and media at a huge immigrant rights rally. The LAPD still stops and frisks hundreds of thousands of inner city youth each year, a potential scandal that is so far invisible.

Under the direction of the mayor and Chief Charlie Beck, however, the LAPD officers last night were as "tactful" as could be, in the phrase one Occupy sympathizer who works at City Hall.

Once considered an "occupying army" projecting a threat against the least disturbance, the LAPD allowed Occupy LA to co-opt their former brand.

The Occupy movement also showed an evolution in thinking about street tactics. A decade ago, the phrase "diversity of tactics" allowed a range of actions from strict nonviolence to "fucking shit up," as certain anarchist factions used to say. Experience showed that such "diversity" only allowed the most violent sensational tactics to dominate the media narrative, despite being employed by a tiny handful of activists (and provocateurs, in some cases).

So far the clearances in LA have been peaceful. Yesterday morning (Monday) the mayor met with a delegation of inter-faith leaders who have been joining the occupiers for several weeks. The clergy communiqué from the meeting commended Chief Beck for "the restraint shown so far by the LAPD," and made a "commitment to sustain the Occupy presence and message in LA going forward," including a promise by the Mayor to use his "bully pulpit" as head of the National Conference of Mayors to push the major themes of the national Occupy movement:

"the need to halt the avalanche of home foreclosures, the need to reverse corporate 'personhood', the need to fully enforce the Dodd-Frank law, and the need to gain needed federal and state tax revenue to support municipal services in LA and throughout the nation."
The dire scenario painted by Wolf in the international media does not tell the story of Los Angeles, where a crack of hope has been opened after one of the country's longest occupations.

Sorry I'm with Naomi on this one. I think she put shit out into the open, now the cops want to act right or "learn" how to deal with peaceful protests in a peaceful manner when they should have been doing that in the first place. Why are they evicting them anyway for a peaceful protest? So it's ok for the cops to shut down our freedom of speech as long as they do it peacefully? I call BS.

[SoNotHer]

Wow just wow... thank you for posting this.

Originally Posted by atomiczombie

[VintageFemme]

[SoNotHer]

"The table is tilted. The game is rigged." You think? I miss him.

And yes, Ruff Ryder, we should be talking about the money involved in the policing of protests. And in fact at some point America should be discussing how much it wants to spend proactively in the form of decent and quality education and health for all or re-actively in the form of maintaining our status as the world's number one incarcerator.

Originally Posted by VintageFemme