A place to enjoy good music, drink in some knowledge, and watch a little sports. Where there is always food for thought, topped with choice grillings of right wing talking points.
I can't say I was on the forefront of Aaron Swartz' connection to internet freedom. I do know, NOW, what he was.
Can you say, "government bullying" that results in "death by suicide?"
There is really no other explanation. And just to say, this is not the only time our government's prosecution techniques resulted in a premature death by suicide.
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that
allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an
Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the
public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining
illegal access to JSTOR, a
subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary
journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the
entire library.
Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were
pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties
of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / July 13, 2012)
So, apparently chalk drawing on the street is now a matter of terrorist security such that the LAPD had to come out in full riot gear during the monthly L.A. Artwalk.
Occupy L.A. activists and their supporters accused Los Angeles police of overreacting Thursday to chalk protesters during downtown's monthly ArtWalk, which set the stage for the violent run-in that resulted in 17 arrests.
Cheryl Aichele, 34, an informal leader of Occupy L.A., said police were aggressive early and made their first arrest shortly after 7 p.m. "within 10 minutes of getting where we wanted to be."
"Police were pushing us -- I got pushed into a garbage can -- then we were being pushed into the street," Aichele said. "They would do all these intimidation tactics -- all before 9. They would come in and snatch somebody and pull them away. Or they'd push us. Or yell at us."
One of the guys she saw got arrested "was just walking by, took some chalk and drew a heart and wrote 'police' in it."
"We were being peaceful," she said. "In our meeting beforehand, we said our goals were: Have fun. Stay safe. Speak out. Stand up. Reach out. Make friends. Chalk."
Peter White of the Los Angeles Community Action Network said he was present at 5th and Spring streets as a legal observer and believed the heavy police presence played a role in the conflict.
"I firmly believe it was an over-saturation of the police earlier in the evening, the sort of aggressive behavior earlier, that bled into things that happened later in the night," White said. On Thursday night, people began amassing and drawing and writing with chalk at 6th and Spring streets.
Lest anyone think that the Occupy movement has gone silent, this tidbit should be of interest.
A Berkeley, California, man is dead and some residents say it's because police were focused on an Occupy march. Peter Cukor made a non-emergency call to police last Saturday night to report a suspicious man hanging around his home. He was told police were only responding to emergency calls because the department's officers were on standby to monitor an Occupy Oakland march to the UC Berkeley campus. Cukor walked to a nearby fire station for help and was beaten to death as he returned home. The suspect in custody Daniel DeWitt has a history of mental illness. An Occupy Oakland representative says people should be furious over Cukor's killing. He said Berkeley police officials made monitoring a non-violent march a higher priority than responding to what turned into a deadly crime.
(Copyright 2012 by VERTEXNews/Newsroom Solutions)
So, the police department in Berkeley is more concerned about what may happen with respect to a bunch of protestors, and are too busy concentrating on what may happen, to actually be effective and do their job when someone reports a suspicious person trying to get into your home.
Need I point out that police, who have unions, are part of the Republican strategy of eliminating collective bargaining, which is but one of the things the Occupy movement is concerned with. Although many police unions have been given the opportunity to be "exempt" from the right to work laws enacted as of recent in many states, and the stripping down of the collective bargaining powers of government employees, it is still distasteful to me that the police side on the part of protecting the 1% when, in fact, the police are part of the 99% across the board.
This may not rank among the most despicable conduct of police against the Occupy movement, but still ... cutting off the woman's clothes because she was wearing an improvised "tent?" Where in the stupid people's mind is that really a reasonable act?
There has been a lot of dismissive talk on the television as of late regarding the "pepper spraying" incident at UC Davis. In fact, the cop has become a famous meme now!
A lot has taken off from the now infamous Megyn Kelly Fox News program statement that "pepper spray" is essentially a "food product."
However, this piece from Daily Kos caught my eye, with this funny analogy.
Fox's Megyn Kelly has been taking some heat (hi-yo!) for what looks like her dismissal of the seriousness of the UC Davis pepper spraying incident and other similar incidents around the country by asserting that pepper spray, "is a food product, essentially." And that's undoubtedly an idea that deserves to be slapped down, so it's no surprise that it has been, with actual science, no less.
The ridicule has been plentiful, of course. (Mustard gas is a condiment! Bullets are nutritional supplements!) But if you watch the entire video, Kelly actually comes off as being at least within spitting distance of reasonable. Though it should be said that a poop-flinging monkey could likely do the same if he was sitting opposite Bill O'Reilly, who goes out of his way to imply both that the pepper spraying is OK because UC Davis is a liberal campus, and that say that people "don't... have the right to Monday morning quarterback the police." [my emphasis]
I swear, I am having deja vu moments daily reading about the police beating up the OWS/99% protesters across this country. Back in the Vietnam protest era, it was mostly a generational gap argument. But these current protests span age, gender, race and creed. And the police unions are part of the target of elimination by the 1%, so it is really, really difficult for me to understand the police "rage" that is apparent and directed at the protesters.
Photographer Kristyna Wentz-Graff was covering the rally, which began at noon in a plaza beside UWM's student center. The group left campus on E. Kenwood Blvd., marching westbound in the street and on the sidewalk, chanting and carrying signs.
[snip]
"I can tell you that no one at MPD had any idea (Wentz-Graff) was a journalist until she arrived here at the police station," Schwartz said. "She never identified herself as a journalist to officers."
[snip]
"At no time did Kristyna Wentz-Graff ignore any commands by any officer," Kaiser said. "She came upon the scene to do her job as a photojournalist. She was clearly not part of the protest. She was wearing her Journal Sentinel photo press credential. She was carrying photography equipment while taking photographs of police making arrests when she was grabbed by a police officer and handcuffed. Her arrest was completely uncalled for and violates the First Amendment. No reason for her arrest has been provided."
Then there is this from the San Francisco Chronicle:
A car struck two Occupy Oakland protesters tonight as they marched with a crowd along Broadway, and an angry mob surrounded the car as emergency workers tended to the injured.
The driver, who was not identified, sat in his silver Mercedes-Benz sedan after the 7:30 p.m. incident while hundreds of people screamed at him through his closed windows.
BART police officers who were guarding nearby transit stations responded, questioned the driver and several witnesses, then let the driver leave the scene at 11th Street and Broadway in his car.
Although the tone of violence has lessened since the Oakland police shot a projectile and dramatically injured Iraq Veteran Scott Thomas Olsen, (see video here), I still have no understanding of the police, part of the 99%, and their anger at the 99%.
First off, there were so many stories in so many forums, of the protesting all across the globe that it will be hard to attribute some of the numbers and cities to the articles where they came from. But, I will do my best.
In Frankfurt, continental Europe's financial hub, some 5,000 people protested at the European Central Bank, and some were setting up a tent camp aiming at permanently occupying the green space in front of the ECB building.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke to about 500 demonstrators outside St. Paul's cathedral in London, calling the international banking system a "recipient of corrupt money."
U.K. police contained most London demonstrators in the streets around the cathedral, near the city's financial district. Protesters erected tents and asked supporters to bring them blankets, food and water as they settled down for the evening.
Several hundreds more marched in the German cities of Berlin, Cologne and Munich and the Austrian capital of Vienna, while protesters in Zurich, Switzerland's financial hub, carried banners reading "We won't bail you out yet again" and "We are the 99 percent."
Protests were held in Helsinki, Madrid, Lisbon, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Berlin, Zurich, Hamburg, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Athens, London ....
In Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city, 3,000 people chanted and banged drums, denouncing corporate greed.
About 200 gathered in the capital Wellington and 50 in a park in the earthquake-hit southern city of Christchurch.
In Sydney, about 2,000 people, including representatives of Aboriginal groups, communists and trade unionists, protested outside the central Reserve Bank of Australia.
Hundreds marched in Tokyo, including anti-nuclear protesters. In Manila a few dozen marched on the U.S. embassy waving banners reading: "Down with U.S. imperialism" and "Philippines not for sale."
More than 100 people gathered at the Taipei stock exchange, chanting "we are Taiwan's 99 percent," and saying economic growth had only benefited companies while middle-class salaries barely covered soaring housing, education and health care costs.
[snip]
In Paris protests coincided with the G20 finance chiefs' meeting there. In the working class neighborhood of Belleville, drummers, trumpeters and a tuba revved up a crowd of a few hundred that began to march to the city hall.
Solidarity hero Lech Walesa is flying to New York to show his support for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
"How could I not respond," Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. "The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand."
A former shipyard worker who led Poland's successful revolt against Soviet communism, Walesa said "capitalism is in crisis" and not just in America.
"This is a worldwide problem," he told the Lublin-based Dziennik Wschodni newspaper. "The Wall Street protesters have focused a magnifying glass on the problem."
But, we are still dealing with the police run amok over these protests.
On the other hand, corporate America is going to be bombarded in another way, by a new site called Occupy the Board Room.
Today, you, the 99%, can make your voice heard directly to the Wall Street elites who wrecked the economy and made the rest of us pay. Find a pen pal below and tell them a story that explains why they need to listen to you after acting for so many years like your words don't matter.
-------- Rather than bumping my older post to the front page and adding the new stuff, you can read the older post by clicking to it, and I'll add my updates to this part two.
When this thing started out in New York on Wall Street, it was a rag tag group of people that, seriously, many on the left through their blogs, were quite skeptical of. Only a few hundred people, no real manifesto so to speak, blah, blah, blah. A lot of liberals had grown tired of the demonstrating the past few years as (1) media never covered it and (2) nothing was ever accomplished.
I don't know if I was ever in that group. I've always been supportive or protesting, even if it goes nowhere. Yes, there is the disappointment that after all that work, you go home and are depressed, but persistence pays off, and for the most part, over the last couple of years, there has been a lack of persistence with respect to protesting.
We saw a difference in Wisconsin, where persistence was beginning to pay off. In the end, Walker still passed his laws, but what followed were the recall elections (and Walker is still waiting for his). Court challenges followed. There was a bit of change in what Walker thought was going to be a cakewalk of dismantling the public sector and replacing it with his own private cronies. And Walker was but one of many governors that followed an eerily similar blueprint that was obviously orchestrated by people like the Koch brothers and others that are part of the 1%.
Occupy Wall Street morphed into Occupy Your Street (insert town) to the 99%. They are one in the same in that the protestors are the 99% that have been left out of any profits earned in the last few years, are part of the people fired by the 1% that kept making money by the firing, are part of the college graduates that are up to their ears in debt but can't get a job because of the 1% only paying shit wages so they can keep more of their 1%, and they are the millions who have lost their homes thanks to the 1% (some of whom not only profited by creating the housing bubble, but have actually picked up foreclosed homes and gloated about it, including one of the Republican candidates for POTUS job). For far too long this has been going on, and because our politicians are the puppets whose strings have been being pulled by the 1%, including both parties, but now even more so thanks to the SCOTUS' Citizens United ruling, you'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see something like Occupy Wall Street happen. When even Obama refuses to prosecute the bad guys (well, who couldn't see that coming when he refused to prosecute the bad guys from the Bush administration over the two wars we are in, the unlawful surveillance of American citizens, etc. - hell, Obama agrees with the Bush administration's practices as we have all found out by now), and kept throwing good money at bad money, the 99% finally found their voice.
The big news of course, has been the police brutality all across the nation, attacking the protestors with their batons and spraying them with tear gas. Never mind the fact that there are videos of this everywhere, as usual, the press (which are owned by the 1%) gloss over it, make light of it, blame the protestors as being hippie, 1960's anti-war like, (and that's the mild stuff, because they are also being called anti-American and a lot of disgusting untrue analogous references to the Vietnam era protestors), thus resulting in a "movement" that has no cohesion, therefore is deserving of the dismissive attitude by media.
The line being drawn in the sand was supposed to be Friday's clearing out of the Zuccotti Park by Mayor Bloomberg, ostensibly to "clean it up" but we all knew it was to get a foothold into the park and thereby not allow the people back in. They (the owners of the park and Bloomberg) have backed down it seems. This from AmericaBlog:
Late last night, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Brookfield Properties, the owners of Zuccotti Park, backed down from their attempt to evict #OccupyWallStreet. MoveOn shot a great video of the protesters getting the news and their reaction.
I was in Chicago on Monday and although did not see the protests on Sunday, I saw the Robin Hood protestors in their boats going up the river with their signs. Also, being in Los Angeles, our mayor has even issued a proclamation allowing the protestors here to remain on city property, and there have been no arrests or beatings like in New York, Portland and other areas. I'm not a fan of our mayor, but at least he's got some sense of what is going on across the country and he's not about to get besmirched by reacting negatively.
SEATTLE - Police experimented with a new tactic Friday night as they responded to a weeklong Occupy Seattle demonstration at Westlake Park - ticketing drivers who honked in support of protesters.
Yeah, that will stop the protestors, you morons. Honking in support of protestors is what people who drive by in their cars have done since I can remember! But now, that's a ticket, a tactic that these boneheads think will thwart support for OWS! And just what do the police anywhere think is wrong with OWS anyway? They are most certainly not part of the 1% and don't they realize that this movement represents THEM as well?
Still, it doesn't seem like the police are handling these protests very well. Not to mention, when the Teabaggers were just as belligerent during the Democratic health care town halls - and mind you, there were members of Congress present - the cops never reacted like this.
Occupy Wall Street is like the kid in the fairy story saying what everyone knows but is afraid to say: the emperor has no clothes. The system is broken. Think about the promise of global market capitalism. If we let the system work, if we let the rich get richer, if we let corporations focus on profit, if we let pollution go unpriced and unchecked, then we will all be better off. It may not be equally distributed, but the poor will get less poor, those who work hard will get jobs, those who study hard will get better jobs and we’ll have enough wealth to fix the environment.
“What we now have — most extremely in the U.S. but pretty much everywhere — is the mother of all broken promises,” Gilding adds. “Yes, the rich are getting richer and the corporations are making profits — with their executives richly rewarded. But, meanwhile, the people are getting worse off — drowning in housing debt and/or tuition debt — many who worked hard are unemployed; many who studied hard are unable to get good work; the environment is getting more and more damaged; and people are realizing their kids will be even worse off than they are. This particular round of protests may build or may not, but what will not go away is the broad coalition of those to whom the system lied and who have now woken up. It’s not just the environmentalists, or the poor, or the unemployed. It’s most people, including the highly educated middle class, who are feeling the results of a system that saw all the growth of the last three decades go to the top 1 percent.”
CAIN: I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! [...] It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.
No, Mr. Cain. It is corporate greed and Wall Street that did this to Americans. The unemployed need not apply is the current mantra for many companies that are actually hiring. Being unemployed is not a choice you stupid dirt bag. It's what has happened all across America thanks to corporations FIRING their workers and sending the jobs out of the country, along with closing down factories and FIRING the workers. All so the CEO's and shareholders can make more money by not having to pay living wages to AMERICANS. Dumb people like this is a true example of where we are going in this country, because a lot of people (with money) really believe this crap. And that is why I still feel there will be actual riots and violence in the future, by the have nots against the haves. "If you don't have a job and are not rich, blame yourself." That's a good one, Herman.
From AMERICAblog, entitled: "New York Observer: Exclusive "Occupy Wall Street" Unaired Fox Footage"
Great, articulate and spot on comments from a "protestor" filmed by Fox News that never saw the light of day on that network!
Workers Union is going to court today in hopes of blocking New York City from forcing bus drivers to transport any Occupy Wall Street protesters after the New York police department commandeered at least three buses to take many of the 700 protesters off the Brooklyn Bridge this weekend. Last week, the TWU voted to support the Occupy Wall Street movement and called the order to bus prisoners “a blatant act of political retaliation.” “TWU Local 100 supports the protesters on Wall Street and takes great offense that the mayor and NYPD have ordered operators to transport citizens who were exercising their constitutional right to protest — and shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” TWU President John Samuelsen said. Samuelson said that by instructing the drivers to follow the police directive, the Metropolitan Transit Authority violated its contract with the Local 100.
Earlier updates.
Credit: Ian Murphy's cell phone
LIBERTY SQUARE, NY--despite the early morning rain, morale is high. A reported 100,000 copies of The Occupied Wall Street Journal have just arrived. The young occupiers are busy handing out the four page broadsheet to curious passersby and the protest tourists, who linger on the outskirts of Zuccotti Park, snapping photos of signs and the occasional blue-haired hippie.
Oh, and let's not forget the mantra "class warfare!" Let them eat cake (or in this case, drink champagne).
A picture is worth a thousand words.
It seems the movement is spreading; Video of Americans in Boston, courtesy of Think Progress.
The occupation of Wall Street appear to be organically spreading, as similar movements are popping up across the nation, in locations as varied as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street firms will be the target of a nonviolent demonstration in which organizers say they want 20,000 people to participate with tents, kitchens and “peaceful barricades” in lower Manhattan.
Dubbed “#OccupyWallStreet,” the goal of the protest scheduled to start today is to get President Barack Obama to establish a commission to end “the influence money has over our representatives in Washington,” according to the website of Adbusters, a group promoting the demonstration. Organizers want participants to “occupy” the area for “a few months,” according to the website.
“People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we'll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Sept. 15 at a press conference. “As long as they do it where other people's rights are respected, this is the place where people can speak their minds, and that's what makes New York New York.”
Wow, this is pretty awful to watch. I don't know if it was a flash mob that went wrong or never got off the ground, but seriously, folks, arresting people at the Jefferson Memorial for dancing?
How much more bizarre does this country have to get for Americans to realize the magnitude of civil liberties that have been slowly taken away from us? Dancing? I think I need to put on the movie "Footloose." I thought we had progressed from that attitude, but now I find out that "dancing" in the eyes of D.C. police is "protesting!"
Every last Friday of the month, bikers from all over the world amass and ride. They are known as Critical Mass. I took a video two years ago, at a staging area before they took off. Over the years, there have been two major ones that have gone down 6th street in front of my apartment building. The last one, they all turned left on La Brea heading up to Hollywood.
There have been a number of incidents with these events, some including police officers that intentionally trip the bicyclists, and some have even been caught on tape and posted on YouTube.
Tonight was something visually stunning, and I wish I had put new batteries in my video camera. This group that was going down 6th Street (and remember, they do not YIELD TO STOP SIGNS OR LIGHTS, THEY MAKE THE CARS HAVE TO STOP AND YIELD TO THEM) they were accompanied by cops on bikes, cops on motorcycles and some cops in patrol cars as well as unmarked cars. This was also the largest one I've seen, it took a full five minutes to get past my house. Must have been a few thousand bicycle riders.
Nice to see our men in uniform for once standing up and supporting people over cars!
