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So what are you going to do about it?
How your country has declared war on you....
The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
.... The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."
In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.
I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.
Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.
That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.
The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the kicked out of them.
For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).
In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.
But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful cons uents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.
Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.
So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.
Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.
Guardian
We are at a turning point. The people are realizing that both parties are purchased, and our own government has taken sides against us
Last edited by Nbadan; 11-26-2011 at 06:52 PM.
So what are you going to do about it?
Why are that dude's pants pulled down?
maybe they sodomized him....wouldn't surprise me...
maybe he was trying to on a police car...wouldn't surprise me...
They touched the third rail of his venality.
Excellent..
So much for this facade that we are living in a free and open society....
What's funny, is most the people I talk to are disgusted by the movement. So many of those who supported it are turned off by the obvious setting of the stage.
Says chewing the scenery guy.
Tea party could be next, if they get pissed off enough.
A second term for Obama might do the trick.
How much wine have you drank so far tonight?
None. I drank a beer or two though.
i>a>u
perfect tenses take the participial form of the verb
however,
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1710580The past participle "drank" is an old alternative to "drunk". According to the OED:
from 17th to 19th cents. drank was intruded from the past tense into the past participle, probably to avoid the inebriate associations of drunk
Fowler 1926:
drink has past tense drank, p.p. drunk; the reverse uses (they drunk, have drank) were formerly not unusual, but are now blunders or con uous archaisms.
I figure he was mooning the cops.
This was a pretty good article. It's a shame most of you won't even consider what they're saying... it's like you guys are too lazy/narrow-minded/stubborn to question anything.
EDIT: or it could be that Nbadan posted it
welcome to communism fellas...
You know. I don't give the article much credit. I think most of us know the police can be brutal assholes and abuse their authority to the extreme. However, in these cases. they know they are being watched. Now maybe if the Occupy movement wasn't infiltrated by people trying to make an arrest scene happen, they wouldn't have lost their credibility.
I have a sister who is almost far left. Even she has pulled a 180 on this movement. The movement destroyed itself from within. Stop blaming the authorities who are attempting to protect the rights of the 99% who wish not look like the pretend 99% wannabe asses.
That does complicate things. After all, I call him propaganda Dan.
I think they're doing a terrible job of getting their point across (whether it's their fault or the media), and this article completely changed my view of the movement. If they can convey their agenda better and avoid looking like wanna be martyrs I would consider helping their cause (without sleeping in tents or risking my job).
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
-- John Philpot Curran
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
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The militarization of the local police renders posse commitatus moot.
The violence of the police against non-violent civil disobedience has certainly radicalized the dissenters, and shown the world (and you can bet the world has seen the Shining City of a Hill" beat and spray the out of its citizens) that America is once again NOT "exceptional". Power and wealth will always use that power to crush dissent and to maintain its power and wealth.
How about arrest and indefinite military detention without charge or trial (even by the military's kangaroo courts) for "terrorists", including US citizens on US soil? I read that some on the right are calling OWS "terrorists".
Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-se...y-define-being
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...YPN_story.html
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