Occupy Wall Street. Police vs people in NY.

The sad part was, watching Pool's video, he was talking about the people threatening and verbally bashing him, saying he's a plant because he's never been arrested or attacked by cops etc, when some lady in the march approaches him and says "it is kind of suspicious that you've never been arrested..." then walks away. Almost as if, at this point, being arrested at a protest is a barrier for entry into some inner circle of "true" OWS protesters. Combine that with some of the comments left by folks on the reddit page posted upthread re: Oakland arrests last week (paranoia about police monitoring and profiling protesters, how to remove video signatures so the cops can't trace protest footage back to you, etc), I can understand a lot of people's fears about being recorded. I just wish those people would understand not only personal accountability (you throw a bottle or misbehave socially, you suffer the consequences of your actions), but the simple fact that OWS has been about complete transparency throughout the movement, and trying to hide your actions is giving into the system against which they claim to fight.

It's almost as if some of the protesters are forgetting why social media and camera phones were so effective in the Arab Spring, the admitted source of inspiration and protest tactics of OWS. Or worse yet, as if American complacence is returning to a lot of the people that had stood up in anger and frustration with the system in the first place.

Bear wrote:
Duoae wrote:

I don't agree with that your sentence says - "OWS" does not agree with censorship. However, a few individuals within it want to act with impunity. Same way my mum gets confused with mainstream media reporting and ends up thinking that Occupy is anti-capitalism - it's no more anti-capitalism than liberals are communist or conservatives are slave-mongers.

A few bad apples doesn't mean the entire basket is rotten. There are bad cops, bad OWS protesters and bad people. Some are sensationalized in the media, others aren't.

Hence my post/point

Occupy DC Celebrates Camping Ban By Erecting Massive Tent [Crooks & Liars]

Occupy movement evicted from Miami camp [Sun Sentinel] The photographer mentioned in the 5th paragraph is my friend.

The United States is now ranked 47th in the world for press freedom. Almost 50 reporters have been arrested at Occupy. [Free Press]

If you are looking for a good source of news, I highly suggest this Twitter list.

is actually just a bog standard leftist protest group after all

You probably don't realize this, but that's a classic example of labeling and dismissing tens of thousands of people without having to actually think about the issues they're raising.

"Standard leftist protest group" means "I can safely ignore everything they're saying."

If the brain has an off switch, that's flipping it.

Malor wrote:

"Standard leftist protest group" means "I can safely ignore everything they're saying."

If the brain has an off switch, that's flipping it.

Well, yes, I can safely ignore standard leftist protest groups, not out of any kind of Homeresque bargain to prevent me from thinking, but simply because the appeal of those groups are limited and sometimes ends up self-defeating. There's a pretty big gulf between what the occupy movement (nominally) started as and what it is now. A true populist movement with economic equality as the central message has the potential for legs when the economy is so bad. Throwing glitter at elected officials because they don't approve of homosexuality? One percenters breathe a sigh of relief, return to organizing their yachts by size and color.

NormanTheIntern wrote:
Malor wrote:

"Standard leftist protest group" means "I can safely ignore everything they're saying."

If the brain has an off switch, that's flipping it.

Well, yes, I can safely ignore standard leftist protest groups, not out of any kind of Homeresque bargain to prevent me from thinking, but simply because the appeal of those groups are limited and sometimes ends up self-defeating. There's a pretty big gulf between what the occupy movement (nominally) started as and what it is now. A true populist movement with economic equality as the central message has the potential for legs when the economy is so bad. Throwing glitter at elected officials because they don't approve of homosexuality? One percenters breathe a sigh of relief, return to organizing their yachts by size and color.

Wait. Who is the stereotyped group I should hate and dismiss in that paragraph? People organizing their yachts or people protesting elected officials in silly ways?

NormanTheIntern wrote:
Malor wrote:

"Standard leftist protest group" means "I can safely ignore everything they're saying."

If the brain has an off switch, that's flipping it.

Well, yes, I can safely ignore standard leftist protest groups, not out of any kind of Homeresque bargain to prevent me from thinking, but simply because the appeal of those groups are limited and sometimes ends up self-defeating. There's a pretty big gulf between what the occupy movement (nominally) started as and what it is now. A true populist movement with economic equality as the central message has the potential for legs when the economy is so bad. Throwing glitter at elected officials because they don't approve of homosexuality? One percenters breathe a sigh of relief, return to organizing their yachts by size and color.

I think you're also making an assumption that OWS is more unified and organized than it actually is. Plenty of OWS supporters are upset about a lot of things. Some of them dislike Santorum's stance on gay rights. It is, after all, still a multitude of individuals.

The Occupy Bills: Bills going through the WA legislator that will make it a Class C felony for a bank to foreclose on your home by engaging in "false swearing"—that is, claiming it's the owner of your mortgage when, in fact, it's not. [The Stranger] More of this please.

Why #OWS Needs to Denounce Violent Tactics on Display at Occupy Oakland [Alternet] Occupy is not an armed conflict – it's a PR war. And images of violence undermine the movement.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins, which I've heard people say inspired them to voice their concerns with OWS.

IMAGE(http://twistedsifter.sifter.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/greensboro-sit-in.jpg)

Edwin wrote:

The Occupy Bills: Bills going through the WA legislator that will make it a Class C felony for a bank to foreclose on your home by engaging in "false swearing"—that is, claiming it's the owner of your mortgage when, in fact, it's not. [The Stranger] More of this please.

Is this still still actively going on? I know it was rampant during the crash, but what about now?

I need to switch banks. Any advice on what I should consider in light of OWS? 'Cause I know people have been closing their Chase accounts, etc., but their ATMs are everywhere. It'd be a really convenient switch.

McChuck wrote:

I need to switch banks. Any advice on what I should consider in light of OWS? 'Cause I know people have been closing their Chase accounts, etc., but their ATMs are everywhere. It'd be a really convenient switch.

Do you have a local credit union?

McChuck wrote:

I need to switch banks. Any advice on what I should consider in light of OWS? 'Cause I know people have been closing their Chase accounts, etc., but their ATMs are everywhere. It'd be a really convenient switch.

A couple things because I looked into this and just haven't pulled the trigger yet.

#1 - If you have a strong credit union they frequently have reciprocity agreements that give them MORE ATM access than many banks.

#2 - You can use a credit union for most of your money and then shift it into an ING account and use that for your "walking around money".

This is roughly our plan. Join our local credit union and shift all of our autopay to that credit union. Then use ING as a debit card through which to make it easy to get at our budgeted spending.

Only reason we haven't executed on it yet it is because my wife has been out of town and US Bank, of all the banks out there, is one of the least odious. So there hasn't been urgency to run away from them the same as if we had Chase or US Bank.

We're currently switching to USAA (the process should be done soon) and they reimburse you for ATM fees so I actually have more access to ATMs by switching to a company with no ATMs.

ATM reimbursement is a huge plus. Many banks and CUs are catching on.

McChuck: Here are some good sites to help you find a credit union.

http://www.nerdwallet.com/credit-union/
http://lifehacker.com/5857091/how-do...

And now the news.

More news about the supression and intimidation of the media. The New York Times Has Had It with the NYPD Blocking its Photographers [The Atlantic Wire]

Occupy the Boardroom take on Verizon [Occupy the Boardroom]

In the last 90 days, 5.6 million Americans have switched banks.

Bill Moyers and John Reed on Big Banks' Power and Influence

Police evict Occupy Buffalo

At daybreak, the grassy outlines where tents stood and a cluster of flags fluttering in the wind were all that remained of the Occupy Buffalo encampment on a quadrant of Niagara Square that began October 8.

Hours earlier, a police descended, and after a brief warning, they tossed 17 tents and the contents into a top trailer and arrested 10 protesters who refused an order to cross the street.

More here.

City of Chapel Hill Apologizes, Sort of

Town council says sorry to Raleigh News & Observer for arresting, handcuffing and placing reporter Katelyn Ferral facedown on pavement; doesn't apologize for SWAT-style response to Occupy Chapel Hill's non-violent occupation of building that had been vacant for ten years.

More here.

The New York Times fired off another letter to the Police Department today on behalf of 13 New York-based news organizations about police treatment of the press over the last several months.

Occupy Tulsa protesters reject plea deal

Occupy Tulsa supporters who were arrested in November on park curfew violations appeared in court Tuesday to reject the city's plea deal and vow to fight on.

More here.

Occupy Oakland: 12 barred from City Hall

Police confiscated my journalist's friend's video camera and deleted his video. Being the smart guy he is, he recovered parts of the video. Here is more from the eviction of Occupy Miami.

According to the consulting firm cg42, the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose as much as $185 billion in deposits this year due to customer defections. Of those banks, “Bank of America is the most vulnerable and could lose up to 10% of its customers and $42 billion in consumer deposits.” (HT: Business Insider)

I know that sentence says "could" lose but still those are huge numbers. Earlier when discussing the bank transfers people commented on how the hundreds of thousands of accounts that moved were still drops in the ocean of the banking world. $185 billion is quite a big drop.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. Thanks for the links, Edwin.

One of our new EVPs is personable with the CEO of B of A, and he......umm. well let's say he's excited he doesn't work for B of A.

I should point out that "losing 185 billion in deposits" doesn't really matter much. The big banks are capitalized enough and spreads on deposits are low enough that they're almost a liability. At least, till the Fed raises rates, which won't be till 2014 at the absolute earliest.

The Oakland Police Department tried their best to keep certain things from being filmed, like close-ups of them assaulting peaceful protesters, they missed this one.

As kettled activists beg the Oakland Police to please issue a dispersal order so that they can leave, batons come out swinging for no apparent reason and allegedly someone's grandmother is struck. Shocked occupiers tell police that they've hurt a grandmother, and one man is even on his knees begging for a dispersal order. Again, for no apparent reason, an officer grabs a young black man at the front of the crowd by his ears and drags him away.

However, the female cop, who appears to be a high-ranking major, committed a major blunder when she stopped me on the sidewalk and had me arrested after letting several other journalists walk past her.

The recovered video is not perfectly in sequence. There are some clips missing. But it’s enough to show what happened in the moments leading up to my arrest.

It shows that police had already fallen out of their military formation, which they had been in all night as they dispersed the activists. The operation was pretty much over.

AT :23 seconds into the video, you will seen a group of Miami-Dade cops walking past me, ensuring that all the activists had been dispersed. None appeared concerned with presence.

At :37 seconds into the video, you will see a television cameraman dressed in blue standing on the sidewalk. I believe he is the one who recorded my arrest. I need to figure out who he works for because I have not seen that footage.

At :39, you will see a television cameraman in white shorts and blue shirt stepping up on the sidewalk after having recorded a close-up of the cops marching back.

At :43, you will see Miami Herald reporter Glenn Garvin in a white beard and glasses talking on the phone as he walks toward me on the sidewalk. He also witnessed my arrest, but did not know my name. He mentioned it in the fifth paragraph of this story.

At :47, you will see the female officer who had me arrested. She had just allowed the above-mentioned videographer in white shorts walk past her without stopping him. You will also see two more television news videographers behind her.

At :51, you will also see another television news videographer crouching down behind her video recording the marching cops from a low angle.

At :51, you will also see her step in front of me to detain me.

I explained to her that I was walking back to my car.

She said, “No, it doesn’t work that way,” and began calling other officers to have me arrested.

More here.

Edwin wrote:

As kettled activists beg the Oakland Police to please issue a dispersal order so that they can leave, batons come out swinging for no apparent reason and allegedly someone's grandmother is struck. Shocked occupiers tell police that they've hurt a grandmother, and one man is even on his knees begging for a dispersal order. Again, for no apparent reason, an officer grabs a young black man at the front of the crowd by his ears and drags him away.

I think that the first cop to lunge is going after the camera. If you listen carefully, you might even hear something like "Give me that..."

Grumpicus wrote:
Edwin wrote:

As kettled activists beg the Oakland Police to please issue a dispersal order so that they can leave, batons come out swinging for no apparent reason and allegedly someone's grandmother is struck. Shocked occupiers tell police that they've hurt a grandmother, and one man is even on his knees begging for a dispersal order. Again, for no apparent reason, an officer grabs a young black man at the front of the crowd by his ears and drags him away.

I think that the first cop to lunge is going after the camera. If you listen carefully, you might even hear something like "Give me that..."

She called him a 39, I wonder what that means. I'm guessing something like "fake Journalist".

Yonder wrote:
Grumpicus wrote:
Edwin wrote:

As kettled activists beg the Oakland Police to please issue a dispersal order so that they can leave, batons come out swinging for no apparent reason and allegedly someone's grandmother is struck. Shocked occupiers tell police that they've hurt a grandmother, and one man is even on his knees begging for a dispersal order. Again, for no apparent reason, an officer grabs a young black man at the front of the crowd by his ears and drags him away.

I think that the first cop to lunge is going after the camera. If you listen carefully, you might even hear something like "Give me that..."

She called him a 39, I wonder what that means. I'm guessing something like "fake Journalist".

Sorry if I caused confusion; I was referring to the first video.

Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy Truth-Out

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

Some of the independent media that have been covering Occupy since the beginning with long term views agree with this analysis, from what I am seeing of their writings. Some of us here mention the same thing.

Thanks for that, Edwin. Good read. This goes back to something a few of us have said before. The distinct lack of leadership and the antipathy towards having the movement be more organized is why something like this can happen. Mic checks and heat checks won't allow you to make hard decisions on saying that some faction can't participate because they're harming the overall movement.

Oregon Republican Wants to Outlaw Online Organizing [The Stranger]

(2) A person commits the crime of aggravated solicitation if, with the intent of causing two or more other persons to engage in specific conduct constituting a crime, the person uses an electronic communication to command or solicit other persons to engage in that conduct at a specific time and at a specific location.
(3) In a prosecution under this section, the state need not prove that the electronic communication was received by specific persons or that the defendant intended for specific persons to engage in the criminal activity.

Westboro Church threatens to picket Powell boys' funeral as anti-gay protest [The News Tribune]. Occupy Seattle will be there trying to block them much like other groups have in the past.

Anonymous exposes e-mails of Syrian presidential aides [ArsTechnica]

Jaafari suggested comparing what was happening in Syria to US law enforcement's response to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

I thought this would be appropriate to link, Occupy Cleveland.

Full video of the Dec 16 port shutdown in Seattle was released.

  • Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous [BBC News] It's an op-ed written by Alan Moore
  • Occupy Y'All Street: Occupy Charlotte Activist Gambles Everything On The Movement [Huffington Post]
  • Occupy DC Evicted From a Winter of Communal Discontent [Wired Magazine]
  • Sarah Palin and Occupy Could Be Friends [Crooks and Liars] That was an unexpected title and article.
  • Occupy Seattle protests incinerator [Seattle PI]

I don't endorse the Black Bloc's tactics, but I understand their political stance. Ultimately any new system of power is going to run into problems, the same as happened with capitalism and the US government. I can appreciate their resistance to organization in that theoretical light, even if I note the social organization that they currently use and would hope for in the future.

I'll just leave this here as an example of why OWS is losing steam. My oh my.

I think OWS has been good at raising the issues surrounding problems in society.. However, out of that, actual, focused groups need to arise. The above stuff is just too wishy-washy.