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[johnslat]

"Scott Olsen, the Iraq war veteran who suffered serious head injuries after being hit by a projectile fired by police during the Occupy Oakland protests, has woken up and is lucid as he awaits surgery, hospital officials and family members have said.

Olsen, a 24-year-old former US Marine, was struck in the head during anti-Wall Street protests on Tuesday night. He has been upgraded from critical to fair condition.

Olsen "responded with a very large smile" to a visit from his parents, Highland General hospital spokesman Warren Lyons said. "He's able to understand what's going on. He's able to write and hear but has a little difficulty with his speech," Lyons said.

Doctors had not operated on Olsen yet and were waiting to see if swelling in his brain eased, Lyons said.

Olsen's aunt, Kathy Pacconi, told Reuters in an email that her nephew was showing signs of improvement.

Olsen, 24, has become a figurehead of the Occupy Wall Street movement and Oakland organisers have said they will stage a general strike over what a spokeswoman called the "brutal and vicious" treatment of protesters, including the former Marine.

Oakland's police chief, Howard Jordan, has promised a vigorous investigation into the incident which has provoked heavy criticism across the US, sparking solidarity marches in dozens of Occupy camps in the country.

This week's violent clashes with police in Oakland appear to have re-energised the Occupy movement in America, creating political liabilities for civic leaders across the United States, who had seemed poised to follow Oakland's lead and, in some cases, issued orders to clear the streets.

The White House said yesterday that Barack Obama understood the frustration of the Occupy Wall Street protesters but stressed the need to uphold the law.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, responding to reporters' questions about the Oakland violence, said he had not discussed protests in specifiic cities with the president, only the protests in general.

Obama has tried to maintain a balancing act as the protests have grown, leaning towards support while avoiding a full embrace of the movement. But it would be a huge step for the president to go on to criticise any police force.

Carney said the president could sympathised with the frustration over the role of Wall Street writ large in the worst recession since the Great Depression. There was a long and noble expression of free expression in the US, he said. But, as to the violence, he said the federal government obviously insisted that everyone behave in a lawful manner even as they expressed their frustration.

The Oakland protesters were back in force on Wednesday night, 24 hours after they were supposed to be gone for good, demanding the resignation of the city's mayor.

This time the police did nothing except circle around the demonstrators and discourage them from jumping on to an overhead freeway. More than 1000 protesters kept marching through the city streets until long after midnight, shouting an occasional "shame on you" at motorcycle cops and taking care to pick up their own litter. They even picked up pieces of a fence they had earlier pulled down and stacked them in neat piles around Frank Ogawa Plaza, in front of City Hall.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, herself a veteran of street protests from Berkeley in the 1960s to a public demonstration against police brutality in Oakland just lastyear, is facing demands for her recall or resignation. "Mayor Quan, you did more damage to Oakland in one evening than Occupy Oakland did in two weeks," one hastily scrawled slogan left near the entrance to her offices read.

In a news conference, Quan sought to distance herself from the police action, saying she was away in Washington at the time and had not expected it to unfold the way it did. "I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators," she said.

Her interim police chief, Howard Jordan, was similarly defensive when he spoke to reporters, denying that his men had used rubber bullets or flash-bang grenades, as some protesters alleged and adding: "It's unfortunate it happened. I wish that it didn't happen. Our goal, obviously, isn't to cause injury to anyone.""

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/27/occupy-oakland-scott-olsen-surgery?

But two police officers were also "injured"

" . . . two officers were hurt when protesters splattered them with paint."

OMG - paint-spattered!!!!!!!! Are they in Intensive Care? Will they pull through????

And in NY

"NYPD officers�some of whom have been caught on video pepper spraying and beating Occupy Wall Street protesters, are getting fed up with all this senseless violence! And they've got a message you nogoodnik protesters who think you can injure their fists with your faces. Yesterday the five thousand member Sergeant�s Benevolent Association of the NYPD announced it will take legal action against Occupy Wall Street protesters who cause harm to any of its members.
Ed Mullins, president of the association, says, "In light of the growing violence attendant to the 'Occupy' movements across the country, particularly as evidenced by the recent events in Oakland, I am compelled to place these so-called 'occupiers' on notice that physical assaults on police officers will not be tolerated. Any assault on a police officer is not only punishable as a felony in the State of New York, but will also be met with swift and certain legal action by the SBA, which will seek monetary damages against any individual who causes injury to a New York City Sergeant."
But what are these "recent events" in Oakland of which he speaks? Oh right, the protesters who fired tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bangs and bean bag projectiles at those innocent, disrespected police. Oh and last night, Scott Olsen, a former Marine and two-time Iraq war veteran, "sustained a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a police projectile while peacefully participating in an Occupy Oakland march," according to a press release sent out by Occupy Wall Street�which of course fails to mention the blister that the officer sustained on his trigger finger.
"New York�s police officers are working around the clock as the already overburdened economy in New York is being drained by 'occupiers' who intentionally and maliciously instigate needless and violent confrontations with the police," Mullins says in his statement. "In response, I have instructed the SBA�s attorneys to pursue the harshest possible civil sanctions�including monetary damages�against any individual protester who causes injury to my members." Felix Rivera-Pitre better hope the sergeant who punched him in the face for giving him a dirty look doesn't come up positive for HIV!"


http://gothamist.com/2011/10/27/nypd_sergeants_vow_to_sue_occupy_wa.php

"One happy piece of news from yesterday, amid some ugly crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street.
Google informs us that an unnamed police agency asked it to remove videos from YouTube � videos that showed police brutality. Here�s what the say:
We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests."

http://redgreenandblue.org/2011/10/27/cops-ask-google-to-remove-videos-of-police-brutality-from-youtube-google-declines/

See for yourself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZCysXJqNYg

Boy - the police must really hate video cameras.

Regards,
John

[johnslat]

Statement by Oakland, California, Mayor Jean Quan on Wednesday's police action against Occupy Oakland protesters:

"We support the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement: we have high levels of unemployment and we have high levels of foreclosure that makes Oakland part of the 99% too. We are a progressive city and tolerant of many opinions. We may not always agree, but we all have a right to be heard.

I want to thank everyone for the peaceful demonstration at Frank Ogawa Park tonight, and thank the city employees who worked hard to clean up the plaza so that all activities can continue including Occupy Wall Street. We have decided to have a minimal police presence at the plaza for the short term and build a community effort to improve communications and dialogue with the demonstrators.

99% of our officers stayed professional during difficult and dangerous circumstances as did some of the demonstrators who dissuaded other protestors from vandalizing downtown and for helping to keep the demonstrations peaceful. For the most part, demonstrations over the past two weeks have been peaceful. We hope they continue to be so.

I want to express our deepest concern for all of those who were injured last night, and we are committed to ensuring this does not happen again. Investigations of certain incidents are underway and I will personally monitor them.

We understand and recognize the impact this event has had on the community and acknowledge what has happened. We cannot change the past, but we are committed to doing better.

Most of us are part of the 99%, and understand the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. We are committed to honoring their free speech right.

Finally, we understand the demonstrators want to meet with me and Chief Jordan. We welcome open dialogue with representatives of Occupy Wall Street members, and we are willing to meet with them as soon as possible."

http://blog.sfgate.com/aallison/2011/10/27/occupy-oakland-mayor-quan-issues-contrite-statement-after-police-crackdown/

Regards,
John

[gaijinalways]

[Captain_Fil]

After a violent night of riotous mobs, broken windows, spray-painted graffiti and attacks on police and small businesses - Oakland's newest folk hero has emerged.

Meet Phil Tagami...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/03/BACM1LQ5FU.DTL

PHIL TAGAMI FOR OAKLAND MAYOR!

RECALL JEAN QUAN!

[gaijinalways]

Hmm, doesn't seem to address my earlier questions. How much force is enough is always a question. Certainly what was produced in Oakland by the US cops was too much. If it was in another country, it might not have been enough. For example, in France it might depend on how many cars were burning and whose cars they were....

[johnslat]

"Experts in police use of force shocked by Oakland video


By Josh Richman and Thomas Peele
Oakland Tribune
Posted: 11/07/2011 05:51:14 PM PST
Updated: 11/07/2011 09:07:39 PM PST

"A video clip is raising new questions about whether police used excessive force against Occupy Oakland participants during the fracas after last week's general strike.
The video by Scott Campbell, 30, of Oakland, shows a line of riot-gear-clad officers at Frank Ogawa Plaza's north end, near the foot of San Pablo Avenue. Campbell said the video was made shortly before 1 a.m. Thursday, around the time that police moved in after other protesters broke into and defaced a nearby building and erected and set fire to barricades in the street.
Campbell, holding the camera, moves slowly to his right, filming the line; Campbell is heard twice asking, "Is this OK?"
"When I was approaching the line, an officer told me to stop and step back, so I stepped back 5 or 10 feet and started filming, and I asked if that was OK," he explained Monday.
He said there was no reply until an officer raised a weapon and fired, striking him in the upper right thigh with a nonlethal projectile; the video ends with his crying out in pain.
"At first I was just stunned, and in an immense amount of pain," he said. "It was just shock. I was extremely shaken. And since then what I'm really wondering is what was going through that person's head that made him think it was OK to shoot another person with a less-than-lethal weapon for doing absolutely nothing wrong."
Oakland police and City Hall representatives didn't return emails seeking comment Monday.

Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminal justice professor who's an expert in police decision-making and use of force, said the video left him "astonished, amazed and embarrassed."
"Unless there's something we don't know, that's one of the most outrageous uses of a firearm that I've ever seen," he said. "Unless there's a threat that you can't see in the video, that just looks like absolute punishment, which is the worst type of excessive force."
Campbell said his friends saw him get hit and rushed him away to the shelter of a doorway. Someone brought an ice pack while a legal observer took down information, and then his friends helped him get to a taxi. He saw a doctor later Thursday, who told him to keep the wound bandaged and iced. He said Monday he has a 1� -inch wound with swelling and bruising around it.
Campbell said he does social and digital media work for a local nonprofit and supports Occupy Oakland. "I don't camp out there, I've been a participant but not an active organizer," he said. "I've come out for general assemblies and marches, and I came out that day for the general strike to show my support."
He said he brought his camera that night to document any excessive force used by police, never imagining that might make him a target. "I don't know if I was in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time."
He said he wants an independent, not internal, investigation of this and other reports of excessive force, and is considering whether to take legal action.
"I've been discussing it with some individuals from the National Lawyers Guild. So far nothing's been decided," Campbell said. "It's shocking that someone who is a police officer felt it was appropriate to do that. I'm not sure what the options are, but I would like to have the officer identified, and I would like for him to be held accountable."
"It looks terrible," agreed Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who consulted with Oakland police on the federal consent decree emerging from the Riders scandal. "It certainly looks like they singled him out to be shot ... and there does not appear to have been any sort of attack by the protester. Clearly, the camera is not approaching the officers, so they couldn't claim that he posed a threat."
Paul Chevigny, professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law, said it looks like "a violation of his First Amendment rights apart from being a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. He has a right to take a film of what the police do -- we've been over this thousands of times -- unless he's interfering in some way.
"The basic problem of police retaliating against people who are trying to record what's going on is perennial," said Chevigny, adding this occurs all over the nation. "They (officers) consider it a kind of 'contempt of cop.' It's an expression of the fact that people do not trust the police. The police read it as a criticism of them. It's not even necessarily that they're trying to prevent people from seeing what they're doing.
"But this extreme version (of retaliation) is very unfamiliar to me," he added. "I can't imagine what they're going to say about shooting this guy. Sounds like the Oakland police need a little brush-up on their training."
There have been other allegations of excessive force against Occupy Oakland participants. Best known is the case of Scott Olsen, 24, an ex-Marine and Iraq War veteran struck in the head by what witnesses said was a police projectile Oct. 25. He suffered a fractured skull but is expected to recover.
Another veteran, Kayvan Sabeghi, 32, of Oakland, claims officers beat him with batons and tackled him early Thursday, then denied him medical care for hours. He underwent surgery Friday to repair a lacerated spleen.
Oakland police and Alameda County sheriff's departments have said they're investigating the Olsen and Sabeghi incidents."

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_19284774

Regards,
John

[gaijinalways]

[johnslat]

Dear gaijinalways,

Cause and effect: The Occupiers are protesting are protesting against crony capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, corporate money (corporations are now people, according to the Supreme Court) corrupting politics (among other things.)

And the powers-that-be don't like that. They want the 99% to work, be quiet, produce (products and more workers,) consume, and die.

Regards,
John

[gaijinalways]

And you are part of the 99%? For some reason, I don't see my life that way, and hence why I find it difficult to agree with what they're stating.

Is it all companies they're against, even the ethical ones?

And are all politicians and hence politics itself, corrupt?

[johnslat]

Dear gaijinalways,


"Is it all companies they're against, even the ethical ones?"

Of course, they're not protesting the ethical ones (that WAS rhetorical, right?)

"Reuters) - Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010, said a study on Thursday that arrives as Congress faces rising demands for tax reform but seems unable or unwilling to act."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/03/us-usa-tax-corporate-idUSTRE7A261C20111103

"A new study shows that because of out of control corporate tax loopholes, most Americans can rightfully complain that they "pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, and Verizon, all put together."

Meanwhile, 1 in 4 children are experiencing food scarcity due to family economic limitations, and millions of Americans who are desperately looking for jobs are on the brink of losing unemployment benefits if Congress doesn't renew the federal unemployment insurance program by the time it expires on December 31st."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/big-corporations-use-loopholes-dodge-taxes-study/2011/11/02/gIQAIalngM_story.html?hpid=z1&wpisrc=nl_wonk


Are all politicians corrupt? (rhetorical, again, right?)

Not ALL - just most. Power does tend to corrupt, you know.

http://www.crewsmostcorrupt.org/mostcorrupt

50% of the members of Congress are millionaires:

"A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found the gap between the nation�s richest Americans and those within the middle class widened significantly over a period of 28 years. According to the report, between 1979 and 2007, the average income for the nation�s top 1 percent nearly tripled, while the household income of middle class Americans grew by less than 40 percent.
Top 1 Percent of Rich Show Income Grow of 275 Percent
The CBO report revealed staggering numbers this week as it showcased just how much the gap has widened between the top 1 percent of the population and the rest of the country in terms of wealth.
The highest-paid Americans saw their average inflation-adjusted household income grow by 275 percent over the 28-year period. In contrast, the remainder of the population�s richest one-fifth saw their incomes grow by about 65 percent.
As for middle class earners, incomes grew only 40 percent. Low-income Americans suffered the most, seeing a very slight increase of 18 percent between 1979 and 2007, according to the CBO study based on IRS and Census data.
Income Gap Saw No Redistribution of Wealth to Middle Class
In addition to calling to attention to the fact that there were large disparities in the growth of incomes across earning tiers, the CBO report revealed that government policy did little to redistribute wealth as high incomes ballooned in the country.
�The rapid growth in average real-household income for the top 1 percent of the population was a major factor contributing to the growing inequality in the distribution of household between 1979 and 2007,� the report noted. �Shifts in government transfers and federal taxes also contributed to that increase in inequality.�
This rising disparity between the rich and the rest of the nation�s middle and lower class is what, in part, spurred the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Manhattan on September 17. Continued movements raising awareness about the widening income gap have sent Occupy Wall Street international, in an effort to protest corporate greed and the unfair distribution of wealth.
Protesters are referring to themselves as �the other 99 percent,� suggesting they represent the population outside of the top 1 percent. The demonstrations are expected to continue until protestors are satisfied that lawmakers have recognized their demands for economic equality."

http://www.gobankingrates.com/economy/income-gap-widening-rich-middle-class/

Oh, by the way - you may not agree with or even like the Occupy Movement, but YOU are part of the 99% (unless, of course, you're secretly wealthy and are doing EFL just for the fun of it.)

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Louis D. Brandeis (Supreme Court Judge )

Regards,
John

[7969]

These protestors may claim to represent 99% of us but they don't and they certainly don't represent me.

Cities across Canada are starting to bring the hammer down on occupy XXXXX protests. I think city officials and the public in general are tired of having city property tied up by what increasingly appears to be a motley crew of unemployed, uneducated, drug using losers. At the occupy protest in Vancouver there have been a few heroin overdoses and one death. Fire officials had a hard time getting in to find and remove the body. I think Vancouver officials are finally getting with the program. They're having a city election soon and the mayor is dithering around trying to figure out what to do. After the hockey riots i don't think he wants to send in the cops, although I think that's exactly what they should do. I think the city obtained a court order to remove the protestors out but they in turn filed an injunction. the mayors opponent in the election has said she'd move them all out within a week if elected and her support seems to be growing.

in Halifax the city had to negotiate for protestors to leave the square in the city centre where Remembrance Day ceremonies were held yesterday. initially they weren't going to move and that disrespect to veterans and the ceremonies really riled people up. After negotiations the protestors vacated for a couple of days and the ceremonies went on as planned. Someone also came up with the idea that ordinary citizens who supported the protestors in various cities could sponsor a tent with a cash donation:

Hello. I'd like to sponsor the Occupy Vancouver Heroin tent with a $400 donation please. What? It's already taken? How about the crack cocaine tent then? It's available? Oh what a relief!

Winter is setting in soon. A lot of protestors will soon be moving on I think.

[Sashadroogie]

Ach! It will all come to its historically determined natural end...

[johnslat]

Dear 7969,

Ever visited an Occupy camp? I'd be willing to bet that all/most of those claiming the camps aren't "safe" have never even been to one - the same mentality that demands that books they're never read be banned because they're "obscene."

I've been to two; they're safe, a lot safer than many of the streets are.

But I do agree that they don't represent you.

Regards,
John

[johnslat]

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests

By Matt Taibbi
November 10, 2011 8:00 AM ET

I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clich�s, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves � their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product � not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee � if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of a$$holes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-$hitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FOCK THIS $HIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state � like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar � the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.

And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat � and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110#ixzz1dVmMAh53

Regards,
John

[johnslat]

Ten Ways the Occupy Movement Changes Everything
Thursday 10 November 2011
by: Sarah van Gelder, David Korten and Steve Piersanti, YES! Magazine | News Analysis


Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was little discussion of the outsized power of Wall Street and the diminishing fortunes of the middle class.

The media blackout was especially remarkable given that issues like jobs and corporate influence on elections topped the list of concerns for most Americans.

Occupy Wall Street changed that. In fact, it may represent the best hope in years that �we the people� will step up to take on the critical challenges of our time. Here�s how the Occupy movement is already changing everything:

1. It names the source of the crisis.
Political insiders have avoided this simple reality: The problems of the 99% are caused in large part by Wall Street greed, perverse financial incentives, and a corporate takeover of the political system. Now that this is understood, the genie is out of the bottle and it can�t be put back in.

2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want.
We can create a world that works for everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%. And we, the 99%, are using the spaces opened up by the Occupy movement to conduct a dialogue about the world we want.

3. It sets a new standard for public debate.
Those advocating policies and proposals must now demonstrate that their ideas will benefit the 99%. Serving only the 1% will not suffice, nor will claims that the subsidies and policies that benefit the 1% will eventually �trickle down.�

4. It presents a new narrative.
The solution is not to starve government or impose harsh austerity measures that further harm middle-class and poor people already reeling from a bad economy. Instead, the solution is to free society and government from corporate dominance. A functioning democracy is our best shot at addressing critical social, environmental, and economic crises.

5. It creates a big tent.
We, the 99%, are people of all ages, races, occupations, and political beliefs. We will resist being divided or marginalized. We are learning to work together with respect.

6. It offers everyone a chance to create change.
No one is in charge; no organization or political party calls the shots. Anyone can get involved, offer proposals, support the occupations, and build the movement. Because leadership is everywhere and new supporters keep turning up, there is a flowering of creativity and a resilience that makes the movement nearly impossible to shut down.

7. It is a movement, not a list of demands.
The call for deep change�not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms�is the movement�s sustaining power. The movement is sometimes criticized for failing to issue a list of demands, but doing so could keep it tied to status quo power relationships and policy options. The occupiers and their supporters will not be boxed in.

8. It combines the local and the global.
People in cities and towns around the world are setting their own local agendas, tactics, and aims. What they share in common is a critique of corporate power and an identification with the 99%, creating an extraordinary wave of global solidarity.

9. It offers an ethic and practice of deep democracy and community.
Slow, patient decision-making in which every voice is heard translates into wisdom, common commitment, and power. Occupy sites are set up as communities in which anyone can discuss grievances, hopes, and dreams, and where all can experiment with living in a space built around mutual support.

10. We have reclaimed our power.
Instead of looking to politicians and leaders to bring about change, we can see now that the power rests with us. Instead of being victims to the forces upending our lives, we are claiming our sovereign right to remake the world.

Like all human endeavors, Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of variations and spin-offs will be imperfect. There have already been setbacks and divisions, hardships and injury. But as our world faces extraordinary challenges�from climate change to soaring inequality�our best hope is the ordinary people, gathered in imperfect democracies, who are finding ways to fix a broken world."

http://www.truth-out.org/ten-ways-occupy-movement-changes-everything/1321111931

Regards,
John