Showing posts with label NEW YORK CITY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NEW YORK CITY. Show all posts
Monday, November 5, 2012
Live. From new york. Its saturday night.
"Hello. Its louis here. I’m clacking this to you on my phone in my dressing room here at studio 8H, right in 30 rockefeller center, in Manhattan, new york city, new york, america, world, current snapshot of all existence everywhere.
- Louis CK, in am email sent Saturday afternoon, Nov. 3 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Police State Blues
Monday, March 19, 2012 by Common Dreams
"Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
"Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
by Phil Rockstroh
At mid-evening, on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD -- because the department suffered no ill consequences from their search and destroy mission launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty Square of liberty -- initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.
In a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the state's assaults on civil liberties and common decency.
Bear in mind, police agencies, devoid of oversight, comprise a legal form of gang activity; therefore, when one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as outraged protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of "shame, shame, shame" -- rather than experiencing feelings of remorse, brutish individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.
Why? Because they view OWS as a rival gang -- not a force of democratic passion and outrage.
The defining creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by the modus operandi of violently crushing perceived rivals.
If rank and file police officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this event will have come to pass because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse. Anything you can do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international superstate will, in turn, prove helpful in achieving the goal of ceasing the brutality inherent to the U.S. police state.
But, and I hope I'm wrong in positing this dismal augury, there will be much blood lacquering the pavements of the city of New York, and scores of other municipalities, worldwide, before that day arrives.
Although not widely acknowledged by mainstream opinion shapers, the struggle to retake the public commons by activists facing hostile local municipalities and their police enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind's destruction of the ecological balance of the earth are related issues, of which the implications extend far beyond the political realm. The unfolding of these matters determines how you spend your days…from when you rise in the morning, to what you eat, to which locations you proceed during the day, to when and how you sleep at night…right down to the state of your health and the condition of your soul.
To those who proffer the excuse, "in my heart, I know you're right, but I have to be a realist about this": you're letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely frame the matter. Given that the heart is more than a pump -- it is the alpha and omega point of the soul of the world i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are confused regarding the nature of reality.
Moreover, you sound like George F. Babbitt…giving a book report on Hannah Arrent's conception of the banality of evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and you have missed the point. Apropos: Evil is maintained by mundane means, by people who see themselves as normal and who live ordinary lives.
And it seems to be what you're actually trying to express is closer to the following: I feel overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it makes me feel uncomfortable, so I'll just accept the matter, maybe grouse about it a bit, but I'll continue to accept the small comforts the system proffers and I'll hope that will serve as balm to my empty, troubled soul.
The Cartesian fallacy that one's joy and suffering are almost exclusively a private matter -- the idea that the process all takes place in one's own mind and body and has no connection to any larger order -- has diminished perception and has stressed the environment to the tipping point. This is the dismal litany of Industrial/Commercial Age false consciousness: the paramount function of the intellect is to reduce the vast and proliferate criteria of life down to the "bottom line."
But anyone who posits the concept that life can and should be reduced to only self-serving, mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present day analogs of Auschwitz: the so-called industrial "farming industry"; the practices of deep sea "fishing" by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world's oceans); deep water oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds an analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.
Yet the agenda of the corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction. Withal, the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement from the very acts that maintain one's culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality.
To awaken to reality is to suffer…allowing oneself to experience feelings of despair, powerlessness, and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because emotion engenders motion.
If witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party with Adolf Eichmann.
To express indifference or to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like the "good Germans" of the 1930's, you might believe your codified hatreds and commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the state, will deliver and preserve freedom…but these beliefs, maintained by systems of mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold dear.
How can an individual gain a modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own degraded condition?
At this point, the awakening of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don't quite know where you're going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you wander off the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving rationalization -- then, even in moments of doubt and confusion, you can make a home in being lost.
"Show your wounds," exhorted artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us.
Pain and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order…to give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.
You can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed.
The earth's song, at this juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence.
This song needs you to lend your voice.
And I submit this lyric as the song's refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts of our men and woman uniformed in blue: "Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
At mid-evening, on Saturday, March 17, upon the six-month anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the NYPD -- because the department suffered no ill consequences from their search and destroy mission launched, in the late fall of 2011, to scour Liberty Square of liberty -- initiated another brutal operation to expel OWS activists from the premises, and to discourage, in general, those who might venture attempts to exercise their right to free assembly and free expression across the whole of the city of New York as winter proceeds into spring.
In a police state, unjust actions by authoritarian bullies, operating at the behest of privileged bullies in power, act by caprice and will escalate their level of brutality by the degree that the public at large reacts with support and indifference to the state's assaults on civil liberties and common decency.
Bear in mind, police agencies, devoid of oversight, comprise a legal form of gang activity; therefore, when one is witness to their acts of brutality, and, as outraged protesters are apt to do, shower their ranks with taunts of "shame, shame, shame" -- rather than experiencing feelings of remorse, brutish individual officers regard the scolding as a badge of honor.
Why? Because they view OWS as a rival gang -- not a force of democratic passion and outrage.
The defining creed of a violent gang, such as the NYPD, is to ensure their own survival by the modus operandi of violently crushing perceived rivals.
If rank and file police officers ever surrender their arms and change sides, this event will have come to pass because the institutions of power that direct their actions (and that issue their paychecks) will begin to collapse. Anything you can do to challenge and to help facilitate the end of the reign of exploitation and terror that is the neoliberal international superstate will, in turn, prove helpful in achieving the goal of ceasing the brutality inherent to the U.S. police state.
But, and I hope I'm wrong in positing this dismal augury, there will be much blood lacquering the pavements of the city of New York, and scores of other municipalities, worldwide, before that day arrives.
At our best, as a species, we human beings use our minds and imaginations to bring less suffering to the world; at our worst, we use said attributes to rationalize causing so much of it.
Although not widely acknowledged by mainstream opinion shapers, the struggle to retake the public commons by activists facing hostile local municipalities and their police enforcers and the imperative to reduce mankind's destruction of the ecological balance of the earth are related issues, of which the implications extend far beyond the political realm. The unfolding of these matters determines how you spend your days…from when you rise in the morning, to what you eat, to which locations you proceed during the day, to when and how you sleep at night…right down to the state of your health and the condition of your soul.
To those who proffer the excuse, "in my heart, I know you're right, but I have to be a realist about this": you're letting a crackpot realist mindset falsely frame the matter. Given that the heart is more than a pump -- it is the alpha and omega point of the soul of the world i.e., animus mundi, perhaps, you are confused regarding the nature of reality.
Moreover, you sound like George F. Babbitt…giving a book report on Hannah Arrent's conception of the banality of evil from Eichmann in Jerusalem, and you have missed the point. Apropos: Evil is maintained by mundane means, by people who see themselves as normal and who live ordinary lives.
And it seems to be what you're actually trying to express is closer to the following: I feel overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Addressing it makes me feel uncomfortable, so I'll just accept the matter, maybe grouse about it a bit, but I'll continue to accept the small comforts the system proffers and I'll hope that will serve as balm to my empty, troubled soul.
The Cartesian fallacy that one's joy and suffering are almost exclusively a private matter -- the idea that the process all takes place in one's own mind and body and has no connection to any larger order -- has diminished perception and has stressed the environment to the tipping point. This is the dismal litany of Industrial/Commercial Age false consciousness: the paramount function of the intellect is to reduce the vast and proliferate criteria of life down to the "bottom line."
But anyone who posits the concept that life can and should be reduced to only self-serving, mechanistically controllable verities has much to learn from 20th century death camps, and, moreover, should take note of our present day analogs of Auschwitz: the so-called industrial "farming industry"; the practices of deep sea "fishing" by trawlers (i.e, strip-mining the world's oceans); deep water oil-drilling practices; and fracking. The list goes on and on, and finds an analog in the mechanistic suppression of dissent by militarized police forces.
Yet the agenda of the corporate/police/commercial/militarist state is to preserve and expand these practices, the very practices that keep its populace alienated, locked into benumbing, destructive habits that leave individuals hollow, anomie-prone, and addicted to distraction. Withal, the acceptance of a way of life that is dependent on a habitual disengagement from the very acts that maintain one's culture necessitates the construction of an imprisoning wall of psychological separation between oneself and reality.
To awaken to reality is to suffer…allowing oneself to experience feelings of despair, powerlessness, and rage. Speaking the truth sets you free, because emotion engenders motion.
If witnessing peaceful protesters being beaten by police, manacled with zip cuffs (a device that by its structural makeup ensures a loss of circulation) and transported to jail on trumped-up charges, fails to get your blood up, then your absent soul can be located exchanging banalities at a mental dinner party with Adolf Eichmann.
To express indifference or to be an apologist for the quotidian evils of our time is reprehensible. Like the "good Germans" of the 1930's, you might believe your codified hatreds and commodified longings, manifested by the industrial and military power of the state, will deliver and preserve freedom…but these beliefs, maintained by systems of mechanized force, will, in time, come to debase everything you hold dear.
How can an individual gain a modicum of empathy for the plight of the planet and for those brutalized by the operatives of state oppression when he refuses to gaze upon his own degraded condition?
At this point, the awakening of your heart comes down to a cultural imperative. Even if you don't quite know where you're going at first, by moving in the direction of what your heart yearns for, you begin to reveal to yourself who you are. Thus, you wander off the banal path of empty obligation and self-serving rationalization -- then, even in moments of doubt and confusion, you can make a home in being lost.
"Show your wounds," exhorted artist Joseph Bueys. The wound becomes the womb, poets tell us.
Pain and sorrow can induce one to seek out and to join the chorus of a larger order…to give full-throated sorrow to songs emanating from the suffering earth.
You can join this chorus or elect to be self-cast as a supernumerary in a lethal farce that assigns you the dubious role of being both oppressor and oppressed.
The earth's song, at this juncture, is one of soul-rending lamentation and sacred vehemence.
This song needs you to lend your voice.
And I submit this lyric as the song's refrain, a riff of the blues inspired by the less than inspired acts of our men and woman uniformed in blue: "Our rights do not end where the caprice of authoritarian bullies begins."
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
New York City calls on Congress to overturn Citizens United ruling
(Montana, now NYC calling on Citizens United to be overturned. This rocks!--jef)
By Eric W. Dolan - RAW Story
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
John Bonifaz, the co-founder and director of Free Speech For People, said a New York City Council resolution calling for legislation to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling was a “great victory for democracy.”
New York City Council voted Wednesday to call on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the ruling, which held that corporations had the same First Amendment rights as U.S. citizens and that political spending was free speech. Los Angeles and other cities have passed similar resolutions.
“It shows that this movement is only going to continue to build as people across the nation stand up to protect our republic and our constitution,” Bonifaz said on MSBNC.
“We are already seeing traction from people across the political spectrum who want to stand up to and say it is time to get money out of politics, it is time to make clear that corporations are not people with constitutional rights.”
Bonifaz said the “biggest new development” was a recent Montana Supreme Court ruling, which upheld a ban on corporate political expenditures in state elections.
“Here you have out of a red state a five justice majority making there that they are not going to let their century old ban on corporate money be overturned.”
By Eric W. Dolan - RAW Story
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
John Bonifaz, the co-founder and director of Free Speech For People, said a New York City Council resolution calling for legislation to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling was a “great victory for democracy.”
New York City Council voted Wednesday to call on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the ruling, which held that corporations had the same First Amendment rights as U.S. citizens and that political spending was free speech. Los Angeles and other cities have passed similar resolutions.
“It shows that this movement is only going to continue to build as people across the nation stand up to protect our republic and our constitution,” Bonifaz said on MSBNC.
“We are already seeing traction from people across the political spectrum who want to stand up to and say it is time to get money out of politics, it is time to make clear that corporations are not people with constitutional rights.”
Bonifaz said the “biggest new development” was a recent Montana Supreme Court ruling, which upheld a ban on corporate political expenditures in state elections.
“Here you have out of a red state a five justice majority making there that they are not going to let their century old ban on corporate money be overturned.”
Occupy Wall Street's Livestream Operators Arrested
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 by The Atlantic Wire
Occupy Wall Street is in the middle of one of its day-long marches in New York Tuesday, protesting the National Defense Authorization Act,
but for those following along on the Global Revolution livestream (located in the column on the right--jef), the
real action is happening in the broadcast studio itself. That's because
police have apparently just raided the Brooklyn studio of Globalrevolution.tv and taken some of the project's key volunteers into custody.
The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others.
In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui.
If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left.
But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission.
Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick,
Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring
it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective:
There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved.
In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer."
By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn.
The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others.
In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui.
If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left.
But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission.
Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick,
Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring
it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective:There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved.
In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer."
By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
New Year’s Eve: OWS Retake Wall Street as NYPD focus on Times Square
Sunday, January 1, 2012 by the Sunday Mail/UK
'Whose Year? Our Year'
Celebration: Protesters returned to the park en masse shortly before midnight in downtown Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street movement made a surprise invasion of Zuccotti Park last night while the police focused on New Year's Eve celebrations elsewhere in New York.
Around 800 demonstators piled up metal barricades, hoisting American flags and banners while scuffles broke out between activists and police.
Shortly before midnight, 100 NYPD officers had surrounded the park in downtown Manhattan with reports of pepper spray being used.
One individual was arrested after an officer was stabbed in the hand with scissors. The policeman was taken to Bellevue Hospital and believed to be in a stable condition.
Zuccotti Park hasn't been occupied since police cleared it on November 15 in an early morning raid. The movement escalated at 8pm last night, when around 100 protesters entered the park and erected a small tent.
The New York Times reported: 'By about 10.30 pm, there were more than 300 people inside... One man carried a big white placard that read - New Years Revolution.'
Shortly before midnight, OWS protesters announced on Twitter that they had reclaimed the park and unfurled a huge hand-painted banner reading 'OCCUPY WALL STREET'.
They tweeted: 'Barricades being torn down at liberty [Zuccotti] park...Happy new years!!'
As the new year was welcomed around the city, demonstrators chanted: 'Whose year? Our year.'
On Occupy Wall Street's official website it stated: '2011 was an amazing awakening. Let's start 2012 off right! Come celebrate with thousands of other members of the 99%, at our park and in the streets, as we make our special New Years Revolution together.'
Police in riot gear entered the park at 1:30am where 150 people remained and arrested five demonstrators. Authorities closed the park until 9am this morning.
Activists had been camped out in Zuccotti Park since September 17 to protest against the unjust distribution of wealth in the U.S. and the excessive influence of big business on government.
The movement spread to other U.S. cities including Los Angeles and Portland as well as Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the protest to be cleared in November because health and safety conditions had become 'intolerable' in the crowded plaza.
One million revellers filled Times Square to welcome in the new year last night amid tight security. More than 1,500 members of the NYPD were patrolling the massive 17-block party to ensure everyone’s safety. They also used more than 3,000 cameras and numerous check-points with bag inspections. Alcohol was banned from the event.
'Whose Year? Our Year'
Celebration: Protesters returned to the park en masse shortly before midnight in downtown Manhattan. The Occupy Wall Street movement made a surprise invasion of Zuccotti Park last night while the police focused on New Year's Eve celebrations elsewhere in New York.
Around 800 demonstators piled up metal barricades, hoisting American flags and banners while scuffles broke out between activists and police.
Shortly before midnight, 100 NYPD officers had surrounded the park in downtown Manhattan with reports of pepper spray being used.
One individual was arrested after an officer was stabbed in the hand with scissors. The policeman was taken to Bellevue Hospital and believed to be in a stable condition.
Zuccotti Park hasn't been occupied since police cleared it on November 15 in an early morning raid. The movement escalated at 8pm last night, when around 100 protesters entered the park and erected a small tent.
The New York Times reported: 'By about 10.30 pm, there were more than 300 people inside... One man carried a big white placard that read - New Years Revolution.'
Shortly before midnight, OWS protesters announced on Twitter that they had reclaimed the park and unfurled a huge hand-painted banner reading 'OCCUPY WALL STREET'.
They tweeted: 'Barricades being torn down at liberty [Zuccotti] park...Happy new years!!'
As the new year was welcomed around the city, demonstrators chanted: 'Whose year? Our year.'
On Occupy Wall Street's official website it stated: '2011 was an amazing awakening. Let's start 2012 off right! Come celebrate with thousands of other members of the 99%, at our park and in the streets, as we make our special New Years Revolution together.'
Police in riot gear entered the park at 1:30am where 150 people remained and arrested five demonstrators. Authorities closed the park until 9am this morning.
Activists had been camped out in Zuccotti Park since September 17 to protest against the unjust distribution of wealth in the U.S. and the excessive influence of big business on government.
The movement spread to other U.S. cities including Los Angeles and Portland as well as Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the protest to be cleared in November because health and safety conditions had become 'intolerable' in the crowded plaza.
One million revellers filled Times Square to welcome in the new year last night amid tight security. More than 1,500 members of the NYPD were patrolling the massive 17-block party to ensure everyone’s safety. They also used more than 3,000 cameras and numerous check-points with bag inspections. Alcohol was banned from the event.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Wall Street Firms Spy on Protestors In Tax-Funded Center
Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs’ Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD “is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan…One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders.”
At the time, Goldman Sachs was in the process of extracting concessions from New York City just short of the Mayor’s first born in exchange for constructing its new headquarters building at 200 West Street, adjacent to the World Financial Center and in the general area of where the new World Trade Center complex would be built. According to the 2005 documents, Goldman’s deal included $1.65 billion in Liberty Bonds, up to $160 million in sales tax abatements for construction materials and tenant furnishings, and the deal-breaker requirement that a security plan that gave it a seat at the NYPD’s Coordination Center would be in place by no later than December 31, 2009.
The surveillance plan became known as the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative and the facility was eventually dubbed the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. It operates round-the-clock. Under the imprimatur of the largest police department in the United States, 2,000 private spy cameras owned by Wall Street firms, together with approximately 1,000 more owned by the NYPD, are relaying live video feeds of people on the streets in lower Manhattan to the center. Once at the center, they can be integrated for analysis. At least 700 cameras scour the midtown area and also relay their live feeds into the downtown center where low-wage NYPD, MTA and Port Authority crime stoppers sit alongside high-wage personnel from Wall Street firms that are currently under at least 51 Federal and state corruption probes for mortgage securitization fraud and other matters.
In addition to video analytics which can, for example, track a person based on the color of their hat or jacket, insiders say the NYPD either has or is working on face recognition software which could track individuals based on facial features. The center is also equipped with live feeds from license plate readers.
According to one person who has toured the center, there are three rows of computer workstations, with approximately two-thirds operated by non-NYPD personnel. The Chief-Leader, the weekly civil service newspaper, identified some of the outside entities that share the space: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the Federal Reserve, the New York Stock Exchange. Others say most of the major Wall Street firms have an on-site representative. Two calls and an email to Paul Browne, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, seeking the names of the other Wall Street firms at the center were not returned. An email seeking the same information to City Council Member, Peter Vallone, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, was not returned.
In a press release dated October 4, 2009 announcing the expansion of the surveillance territory, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly had this to say:
“The Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative will add additional cameras and license plate readers installed at key locations between 30th and 60th Streets from river to river. It will also identify additional private organizations who will work alongside NYPD personnel in the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, where corporate and other security representatives from Lower Manhattan have been co-located with police since June 2009. The Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center is the central hub for both initiatives, where all the collected data are analyzed.” [Italic emphasis added.]The project has been funded by New York City taxpayers as well as all U.S. taxpayers through grants from the Federal Department of Homeland Security. On March 26, 2009, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) wrote a letter to Commissioner Kelly, noting that even though the system involves “massive expenditures of public money, there have been no public hearings about any aspect of the system…we reject the Department’s assertion of ‘plenary power’ over all matters touching on public safety…the Department is of course subject to the laws and Constitution of the United States and of the State of New York as well as to regulation by the New York City Council.”
The NYCLU also noted in its letter that it rejected the privacy guidelines for the surveillance operation that the NYPD had posted on its web site for public comment, since there had been no public hearings to formulate these guidelines. It noted further that “the guidelines do not limit police surveillance and databases to suspicious activity…there is no independent oversight or monitoring of compliance with the guidelines.”
According to Commissioner Kelly in public remarks, the privacy guidelines were written by Jessica Tisch, the Director of Counterterrorism Policy and Planning for the NYPD who has played a significant role in developing the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. In 2006, Tisch was 25 years old and still working on her law degree and MBA at Harvard, according to a wedding announcement in the New York Times. Tisch is a friend to the Mayor’s daughter, Emma; her mother, Meryl, is a family friend to the Mayor.
Tisch is the granddaughter and one of the heirs to the now-deceased billionaire Laurence Tisch who built the Loews Corporation. Her father, James Tisch, is now the CEO of the Loews Corporation and was elected by Wall Street banks to sit on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York until 2013 representing the public’s interest. (Clearly, the 1 per cent think they know what’s best for the 99 per cent.)
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the entity which doled out the bulk of the $16 trillion in bailout loans to the U.S. and foreign financial community. Members of Tisch’s family work for Wall Street firms or hedge funds which have prime broker relationships with them. A division of Loews Corporation has a banking relationship with Citigroup.
The Tisch family stands to directly benefit from the surveillance program. In June of this year, Continental Casualty Company, the primary unit of the giant CNA Financial which is owned by Loew’s Corp., signed a 19-year lease for 81,296 square feet at 125 Broad Street – an area under surveillance by the downtown surveillance center.
Loews Corporation also owns the Loew’s Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in midtown, an area which is also now under round-the-clock surveillance on the taxpayer’s dime.
Wall Street is infamous for perverting everything it touches: from the Nasdaq stock market, to stock research issued to the public, to auction rate securities, mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, credit default swaps with AIG, and mortgage securitizations. Had a public hearing been held on this massive surveillance sweep of Manhattan by potential felons, hopefully someone might have pondered what was to prevent Wall Street from tracking its employee whistleblowers heading off to the FBI offices or meeting with a reporter.
One puzzle has at least been solved. Wall Street’s criminals have not been indicted or sent to jail because they have effectively become the police.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Cops For Sale
Alarms went off when it was revealed that the armed forces of the
United States were using increasing numbers of private contractors to
provide everything from transportation to security in war zones around
the globe.
Those alarms clanged louder when the indiscriminate slaughtering of unarmed Iraqi civilians by the notorious security firm formerly known as Blackwater were exposed.
Now, the war has come home as wealthy private corporations hire not only security firms, but also public law enforcement officers to ensure that the riff-raff, formerly known as citizens of the U.S., stay out of the way of their money-making schemes and political manipulations.
The Praetorian Guard was established by the emperors of Rome to ensure that neither citizens nor disgruntled military units could harm them. While it may have made sense at first, the story soon changed as the Praetorians became less of a security force to protect Rome’s rulers than hired killers for those who could afford them.
Now a new and dangerous Praetorian Guard is emerging in the U.S. What makes it even worse is that our new Praetorians are not simply hired killers like Blackwater, but officers of public police forces whose salaries and pensions are provided by taxpayers until such time as they are needed by those with the wealth to hire them for private purposes.
If that sounds far-fetched, consider the actions of the “white shirts” I mentioned in last week’s column, in the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests. A New York City policeman wearing a white shirt, which is supposed to differentiate supervisors from the blue-uniformed line officers, walked up to several women who were already corralled in a police barricade and blasted them in their faces with pepper spray. The women collapsed screaming in pain as the officer who sprayed them turned away smiling.
Shortly after that incident, it was revealed that JP Morgan Chase, one of Wall Street’s most powerful players, had donated $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, the largest such donation ever. JP Morgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon could not have been more revealing, saying, “These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe. We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”
The donation is supposed to pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops and security monitoring software for the NYPD main data center. Surely such a donation couldn’t buy off the cops, could it?
Consider that last week’s column also noted that 700 citizens were arrested trying to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Where were they headed? To protest in the Chase Manhattan Plaza.
Maybe the donation and the arrests aren’t connected. But if you believe that, perhaps you’d be interested in buying that bridge.
There’s no need for speculation as to whether those with enough money can buy public police protection. They can. In a program started by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani called the “Paid Detail Unit,” private corporations can hire New York City policemen to protect their interests for a mere $37 per hour each, with a 10 percent “administrative fee” paid directly to the police department.
According to a recent CounterPunch article by Pam Martens, not only do these hired cops get to carry guns and handcuffs, they also have the authority to arrest citizens at the behest of the private wealth that hired them. In 2010, corporations such as Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center and the New York Stock Exchange spent almost $12 million doing just that.
There’s no need to look to the East Coast, though, when we have examples right here at home.
Remember those mega-loads Exxon Mobil wanted to ship through Idaho and Montana on narrow, two-lane roads? Guess whom they hired to ensure that no protestors barred their way?
Our own Montana Highway Patrol.
Like most Montanans, I’ve always respected our Highway Patrol officers. So how is it that they are now for hire by anyone with the money to do so, and they can sweep the citizens who normally pay their wages out of the way of private corporations?
Exxon Mobil is “required to pay for a two-car safety escort by the Montana Highway Patrol,” the Missoulian noted recently. Yet the corporations aren’t even required to tell the Highway Patrol before they move their loads. “‘To be honest, we’re kind of lost, too,’” Montana Highway patrol Sgt. Jason Holdenstab told the paper. Holdenstab, based in Helena, is in charge of scheduling the safety escorts. “I’m at the mercy of [transport company Mammoet] when they send me a schedule,” he said.
Having our Highway Patrol “at the mercy” of a mega-corporation doesn’t sound like a very good idea.
Nor does getting beaten, gassed or arrested by privately hired cops.
But that’s the state of America today, as the new Praetorian Guard emerges to stand between citizens and the corporations who plunder them. And the silence from our political leaders is deafening.
Those alarms clanged louder when the indiscriminate slaughtering of unarmed Iraqi civilians by the notorious security firm formerly known as Blackwater were exposed.
Now, the war has come home as wealthy private corporations hire not only security firms, but also public law enforcement officers to ensure that the riff-raff, formerly known as citizens of the U.S., stay out of the way of their money-making schemes and political manipulations.
The Praetorian Guard was established by the emperors of Rome to ensure that neither citizens nor disgruntled military units could harm them. While it may have made sense at first, the story soon changed as the Praetorians became less of a security force to protect Rome’s rulers than hired killers for those who could afford them.
Now a new and dangerous Praetorian Guard is emerging in the U.S. What makes it even worse is that our new Praetorians are not simply hired killers like Blackwater, but officers of public police forces whose salaries and pensions are provided by taxpayers until such time as they are needed by those with the wealth to hire them for private purposes.
If that sounds far-fetched, consider the actions of the “white shirts” I mentioned in last week’s column, in the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests. A New York City policeman wearing a white shirt, which is supposed to differentiate supervisors from the blue-uniformed line officers, walked up to several women who were already corralled in a police barricade and blasted them in their faces with pepper spray. The women collapsed screaming in pain as the officer who sprayed them turned away smiling.
Shortly after that incident, it was revealed that JP Morgan Chase, one of Wall Street’s most powerful players, had donated $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, the largest such donation ever. JP Morgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon could not have been more revealing, saying, “These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe. We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”
The donation is supposed to pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops and security monitoring software for the NYPD main data center. Surely such a donation couldn’t buy off the cops, could it?
Consider that last week’s column also noted that 700 citizens were arrested trying to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Where were they headed? To protest in the Chase Manhattan Plaza.
Maybe the donation and the arrests aren’t connected. But if you believe that, perhaps you’d be interested in buying that bridge.
There’s no need for speculation as to whether those with enough money can buy public police protection. They can. In a program started by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani called the “Paid Detail Unit,” private corporations can hire New York City policemen to protect their interests for a mere $37 per hour each, with a 10 percent “administrative fee” paid directly to the police department.
According to a recent CounterPunch article by Pam Martens, not only do these hired cops get to carry guns and handcuffs, they also have the authority to arrest citizens at the behest of the private wealth that hired them. In 2010, corporations such as Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center and the New York Stock Exchange spent almost $12 million doing just that.
There’s no need to look to the East Coast, though, when we have examples right here at home.
Remember those mega-loads Exxon Mobil wanted to ship through Idaho and Montana on narrow, two-lane roads? Guess whom they hired to ensure that no protestors barred their way?
Our own Montana Highway Patrol.
Like most Montanans, I’ve always respected our Highway Patrol officers. So how is it that they are now for hire by anyone with the money to do so, and they can sweep the citizens who normally pay their wages out of the way of private corporations?
Exxon Mobil is “required to pay for a two-car safety escort by the Montana Highway Patrol,” the Missoulian noted recently. Yet the corporations aren’t even required to tell the Highway Patrol before they move their loads. “‘To be honest, we’re kind of lost, too,’” Montana Highway patrol Sgt. Jason Holdenstab told the paper. Holdenstab, based in Helena, is in charge of scheduling the safety escorts. “I’m at the mercy of [transport company Mammoet] when they send me a schedule,” he said.
Having our Highway Patrol “at the mercy” of a mega-corporation doesn’t sound like a very good idea.
Nor does getting beaten, gassed or arrested by privately hired cops.
But that’s the state of America today, as the new Praetorian Guard emerges to stand between citizens and the corporations who plunder them. And the silence from our political leaders is deafening.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Occupy Wall Street - NYPD Manhattan Precincts 1-23 and Citywide 1-3 Live Audio Feed
NYPD Manhattan Precincts 1-23 and Citywide 1-3 Live Audio Feed
Precinct 24 Central Park and Traffic also monitored. Precinct map can be found at the feed information link.
Precinct 24 Central Park and Traffic also monitored. Precinct map can be found at the feed information link.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Wall Street Occupiers in for the Long Haul / Pepper-Spray Inquiries Launched
Thursday, September 29, 2011 by the Huffington Post
Occupy Wall Street Protesters Settle In, Despite Weather And Police Clashes
That crowd, which in some ways resembles an indie-rock concert audience -- mostly young people, with a smattering of Baby Boomers, and a higher than average quotient of hair dye -- has been gathered here, steps from Wall Street, since September 17. They've been addressing a mishmash of concerns and causes -- from war to income inequality to corporate influence in politics -- that has left many onlookers bewildered.
The occupiers' speak-and-repeat technique is time-consuming, but their willingness to use it suggests a group not easily discouraged. Many of the protesters have been camped in this park for what is now nearly two weeks, sleeping on foam pads, cardboard boxes, and a ragtag collection of mattresses and furniture.
Despite lousy weather, media skepticism and clashes with the police -- including an ugly incident this past Saturday in which an officer pepper-sprayed several young women during a march -- the faithful seem to be in it for the long haul.
"Indefinitely," said Shon Botado, one of the protesters staffing the first aid station, a couple of tables spilling over with donated cold medicine, vitamins, tampons and other paraphernalia, when asked how long he was planning to be there. "Until change is made to the financial structure."
What that change might look like, no one can say for sure.
Whatever one might say about Occupy Wall Street, it's hard to accuse it of being a single-issue movement. The crowds of people in and around Zuccotti Park have as many different reasons for being there as you can name.
Some said they have come to register their dismay over the environment. Some are there to protest military occupations in other countries. At least a few were moved to attend after the September 21 execution of Troy Davis.
But economic concerns seem paramount for many. Several hand-lettered placards express outrage that banks and bankers weren't punished more severely in the wake of the financial crisis. And the protesters speak often of the national wealth gap -- the vast differences in income that separate the richest 1 percent of Americans from everybody else.
But the group is also devoting considerable energy simply to keeping itself going.
There are about 200 people sleeping in this one-block park every night, eating donated food and running into nearby restaurants to use the bathroom. An internal structure has emerged, one that seems to be getting more sophisticated every day.
At a megaphone-free meeting Wednesday afternoon, delegates from various committees stood and offered updates, assessments, encouragement and advice.
The Comfort committee, which handles bedding and clothing, needed donations. A woman from the Food committee said that her group was just fine on donations, but asked if anyone was willing to make their kitchen available.
"We have a lot of food that could be cooked and brought back here," she said. It was not an outlandish request: A number of New Yorkers have opened their apartments to the protesters, letting them shower and charge their electronics indoors.
Someone from Community Relations reported that local Financial District residents had voted down a resolution against the protesters at a community board meeting -- a welcome signal of support. But, the speaker added, some locals were still concerned about noise at night, so members of Occupy Wall Street were going to sit down and meet with them.
One young woman weighed in with a grim weather report: The forecast called for rain, followed by plummeting temperatures on Friday. "We are going to have to pick some useful strategies to deal with this weather that we know is coming," she said.
Someone stood up to announce a group meditation session happening later that afternoon. Someone tried to lead the group in a song, which was tabled for after the meeting. Someone else declared that his ukulele had gone missing.
It wasn't exactly a Parliamentary session -- and with everything first being said, then repeated en masse, it took twice as long as it otherwise might have -- but most of those present seemed committed to the process.
With the group's priorities so diverse, it's unclear how long the Occupy Wall Street movement will actually stick around. The group has yet to formalize a list of demands or conditions under which it might disperse.
Yet the protesters seem to be thinking in terms of months, not days. Botado, who has been in Zuccotti Park since the movement launched on September 17, said that the group is open to the idea of spending the winter there.
And while the protesters' run-ins with law enforcement seem like they might deter curious outsiders -- in addition to the pepper-spraying incident, at least 80 members of Occupy Wall Street have been arrested in the past two weeks, and several people have been injured by police batons -- many of the people present on Wednesday said they didn't get involved until after these confrontations.
While this is going on, the cause is gaining momentum outside New York. Similar protests have been held or are being planned in dozens of other cities.
The lack of clear direction may eventually prove a stumbling block to the occupiers, but the mood in lower Manhattan this week was one of cheerful energy. A sign -- one of perhaps 100 strewn about the square, or being waved to and fro by demonstrators -- read, "DEMOCRACY MAY BE HARD BUT AT LEAST WE ARE DOING IT."
"What's change?" said Rob, a protester who said he has worked in minimum wage jobs all his life, and asked not to be identified by his full name. "What isn't change? We're here. That's change.""We're here for the long haul," said Patrick Bruner, a protester and student at Skidmore College in upstate New York, who is among those camped out in a private park near One World Trade Center.
Thursday, September 29, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Occupy Wall Street: Inquiries Launched as New Pepper-Spray Video Emerges
NYPD officer Anthony Bologna faces two investigations as video emerges of a second pepper-spray incident
The senior New York police officer at the centre of the Occupy Wall Street pepper spray controversy fired the gas at protesters a second time just moments later.
After new video emerged on Wednesday showing the second incident, New York police commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters that the Civilian Complaint Review Board would investigate the officer, deputy inspector Anthony Bologna.
The New York Police Department's own internal affairs bureau also plans to open an investigation, the New York Times reports.
The investigations were announced after bloggers and activists drew attention to video posted online which showed that Bologna fired pepper spray on two occasions last Saturday as officers broke up a protest march through Greenwich Village.
The first footage shows him targeting a group of female protesters who were being penned in by officers on East 12th Street. The latest video shows another incident on the same street, shortly after the first, when he fired more pepper spray towards at least one of the same women, after they were recovering from the first incident.
On both occasions, the officer appears to have violated New York Police Department guidance on how the gas should be used.
In response to the Guardian's appeal to readers to help us reconstruct Saturday's events on East 12th Street, one protester wrote to say that she was sprayed with gas by the officer both times.
The protester, Ashley Drzymala, also sent us a link to this raw footage, which shows - at about the 3:56 mark - the officer spraying protesters as they retreated from the area of West 12th Street where he had used the gas on another group about a minute earlier.
Drzymala, 21, a student at a state university outside New York, told the Guardian that she had also been sprayed in the first incident.
"I was watching her and then I looked up and I saw the police officer, the one in the white shirt coming up with his hand up and he had a vial in his hand."
Her own video shows the first use of pepper spray quite clearly, although her camera was pointing away from inspector Bologna when he sprayed her the second time.
Drzymala added that since she was in Cairo as an exchange student in January and took part in the Tahrir Square protests, she managed to escape the worst of the pepper spray. Being teargassed in Egypt had taught her to turn her head away, she said.
Asked about the first, more highly-publicized use of pepper spray by Bologna, the NYPD commissioner said on Wednesday, "I don't know what precipitated that specific incident."
Chelsea Elliott, who was among the first group to be sprayed, drew our attention to this raw footage, which shows more of what the women were doing moments before the gas was fired at them - arguing with police officers.
The section of the NYPD patrol guide that outlines how pepper spray should, and should not, be used, was posted online in a 2000 report on the matter by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that examines allegations of police misconduct.
According to the guidance, officers are permitted to use pepper spray when "necessary to effect an arrest of a resisting suspect, for self-defense or defense of another from unlawful force, or to take a resisting emotionally disturbed person into custody." The patrol guide also specifies that officers should "not use pepper spray on subjects who passively resist."
Officers with special training, however, do have latitude "in the use of pepper spray for disorder control."
Donna Lieberman, director of New York Civil Liberties Union, said: "There's no excuse for using pepper spray in the faces of peaceful demonstrators whether or not they are engaging in minor disorderly conduct. The use of pepper spray appears to be gratuitous and in violation of police department rules. What the video demonstrates how harmful it is for the police to engage in excessive force against protesters because it causes fear and how harmful it is for the police department itself."
The NYPD were forced to change some of their policing practices during demonstrations, specifically their use of pens, after a lawsuit brought by NYCLU which accused them of excessive restrictions in movements of protesters during the February 2003 anti-war protests in New York.
According to recent statistics, 1722 people complained of being wrongfully pepper-sprayed by New York police officers between 2006 and 2010. Of that number, the civilian review board substantiated just 22 complaints.
Occupy Wall Street Protesters Settle In, Despite Weather And Police Clashes
NEW YORK -- The members of Occupy Wall Street are not allowed to use megaphones, so they've adopted a low-tech workaround.
At their twice-daily general meetings in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan's financial district, whoever has an announcement to make speaks slowly and clearly, with a pause every few seconds, so that everyone within earshot of the speaker can repeat back what he or she just said -- amplifying it for the crowd of hundreds to hear.
At their twice-daily general meetings in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan's financial district, whoever has an announcement to make speaks slowly and clearly, with a pause every few seconds, so that everyone within earshot of the speaker can repeat back what he or she just said -- amplifying it for the crowd of hundreds to hear.
That crowd, which in some ways resembles an indie-rock concert audience -- mostly young people, with a smattering of Baby Boomers, and a higher than average quotient of hair dye -- has been gathered here, steps from Wall Street, since September 17. They've been addressing a mishmash of concerns and causes -- from war to income inequality to corporate influence in politics -- that has left many onlookers bewildered.
The occupiers' speak-and-repeat technique is time-consuming, but their willingness to use it suggests a group not easily discouraged. Many of the protesters have been camped in this park for what is now nearly two weeks, sleeping on foam pads, cardboard boxes, and a ragtag collection of mattresses and furniture.
Despite lousy weather, media skepticism and clashes with the police -- including an ugly incident this past Saturday in which an officer pepper-sprayed several young women during a march -- the faithful seem to be in it for the long haul.
"Indefinitely," said Shon Botado, one of the protesters staffing the first aid station, a couple of tables spilling over with donated cold medicine, vitamins, tampons and other paraphernalia, when asked how long he was planning to be there. "Until change is made to the financial structure."
What that change might look like, no one can say for sure.
Whatever one might say about Occupy Wall Street, it's hard to accuse it of being a single-issue movement. The crowds of people in and around Zuccotti Park have as many different reasons for being there as you can name.
Some said they have come to register their dismay over the environment. Some are there to protest military occupations in other countries. At least a few were moved to attend after the September 21 execution of Troy Davis.
But economic concerns seem paramount for many. Several hand-lettered placards express outrage that banks and bankers weren't punished more severely in the wake of the financial crisis. And the protesters speak often of the national wealth gap -- the vast differences in income that separate the richest 1 percent of Americans from everybody else.
But the group is also devoting considerable energy simply to keeping itself going.
There are about 200 people sleeping in this one-block park every night, eating donated food and running into nearby restaurants to use the bathroom. An internal structure has emerged, one that seems to be getting more sophisticated every day.
At a megaphone-free meeting Wednesday afternoon, delegates from various committees stood and offered updates, assessments, encouragement and advice.
The Comfort committee, which handles bedding and clothing, needed donations. A woman from the Food committee said that her group was just fine on donations, but asked if anyone was willing to make their kitchen available.
"We have a lot of food that could be cooked and brought back here," she said. It was not an outlandish request: A number of New Yorkers have opened their apartments to the protesters, letting them shower and charge their electronics indoors.
Someone from Community Relations reported that local Financial District residents had voted down a resolution against the protesters at a community board meeting -- a welcome signal of support. But, the speaker added, some locals were still concerned about noise at night, so members of Occupy Wall Street were going to sit down and meet with them.
One young woman weighed in with a grim weather report: The forecast called for rain, followed by plummeting temperatures on Friday. "We are going to have to pick some useful strategies to deal with this weather that we know is coming," she said.
Someone stood up to announce a group meditation session happening later that afternoon. Someone tried to lead the group in a song, which was tabled for after the meeting. Someone else declared that his ukulele had gone missing.
It wasn't exactly a Parliamentary session -- and with everything first being said, then repeated en masse, it took twice as long as it otherwise might have -- but most of those present seemed committed to the process.
With the group's priorities so diverse, it's unclear how long the Occupy Wall Street movement will actually stick around. The group has yet to formalize a list of demands or conditions under which it might disperse.
Yet the protesters seem to be thinking in terms of months, not days. Botado, who has been in Zuccotti Park since the movement launched on September 17, said that the group is open to the idea of spending the winter there.
And while the protesters' run-ins with law enforcement seem like they might deter curious outsiders -- in addition to the pepper-spraying incident, at least 80 members of Occupy Wall Street have been arrested in the past two weeks, and several people have been injured by police batons -- many of the people present on Wednesday said they didn't get involved until after these confrontations.
While this is going on, the cause is gaining momentum outside New York. Similar protests have been held or are being planned in dozens of other cities.
The lack of clear direction may eventually prove a stumbling block to the occupiers, but the mood in lower Manhattan this week was one of cheerful energy. A sign -- one of perhaps 100 strewn about the square, or being waved to and fro by demonstrators -- read, "DEMOCRACY MAY BE HARD BUT AT LEAST WE ARE DOING IT."
"What's change?" said Rob, a protester who said he has worked in minimum wage jobs all his life, and asked not to be identified by his full name. "What isn't change? We're here. That's change.""We're here for the long haul," said Patrick Bruner, a protester and student at Skidmore College in upstate New York, who is among those camped out in a private park near One World Trade Center.
******
Thursday, September 29, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Occupy Wall Street: Inquiries Launched as New Pepper-Spray Video Emerges
NYPD officer Anthony Bologna faces two investigations as video emerges of a second pepper-spray incident
The senior New York police officer at the centre of the Occupy Wall Street pepper spray controversy fired the gas at protesters a second time just moments later.
After new video emerged on Wednesday showing the second incident, New York police commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters that the Civilian Complaint Review Board would investigate the officer, deputy inspector Anthony Bologna.
The New York Police Department's own internal affairs bureau also plans to open an investigation, the New York Times reports.
The investigations were announced after bloggers and activists drew attention to video posted online which showed that Bologna fired pepper spray on two occasions last Saturday as officers broke up a protest march through Greenwich Village.
The first footage shows him targeting a group of female protesters who were being penned in by officers on East 12th Street. The latest video shows another incident on the same street, shortly after the first, when he fired more pepper spray towards at least one of the same women, after they were recovering from the first incident.
On both occasions, the officer appears to have violated New York Police Department guidance on how the gas should be used.
In response to the Guardian's appeal to readers to help us reconstruct Saturday's events on East 12th Street, one protester wrote to say that she was sprayed with gas by the officer both times.
The protester, Ashley Drzymala, also sent us a link to this raw footage, which shows - at about the 3:56 mark - the officer spraying protesters as they retreated from the area of West 12th Street where he had used the gas on another group about a minute earlier.
Drzymala, 21, a student at a state university outside New York, told the Guardian that she had also been sprayed in the first incident.
We saw police throw a guy who had a video camera into a car. I remembered a police officer pushed the kid and he was trying to get away he was just videotaping, he was not inciting anything. I was saying "What are you doing? Stop it, we're peaceful" I kept saying "what are you doing" They shoved him into a car, they just attacked him, it was uncalled for." Then the girl next to me was pulled through the net by police. She had a black-t-short and black curly hair. Then she was dragged across the ground.Drzymala, who was also shooting video, said she captured an image the woman in the black t-shirt before the attack, when she was calling police fascists and she was uninjured, and afterwards, when they were trying to leave the pavement, her mouth was bloody.
"I was watching her and then I looked up and I saw the police officer, the one in the white shirt coming up with his hand up and he had a vial in his hand."
Her own video shows the first use of pepper spray quite clearly, although her camera was pointing away from inspector Bologna when he sprayed her the second time.
Drzymala added that since she was in Cairo as an exchange student in January and took part in the Tahrir Square protests, she managed to escape the worst of the pepper spray. Being teargassed in Egypt had taught her to turn her head away, she said.
Asked about the first, more highly-publicized use of pepper spray by Bologna, the NYPD commissioner said on Wednesday, "I don't know what precipitated that specific incident."
Chelsea Elliott, who was among the first group to be sprayed, drew our attention to this raw footage, which shows more of what the women were doing moments before the gas was fired at them - arguing with police officers.
The section of the NYPD patrol guide that outlines how pepper spray should, and should not, be used, was posted online in a 2000 report on the matter by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that examines allegations of police misconduct.
According to the guidance, officers are permitted to use pepper spray when "necessary to effect an arrest of a resisting suspect, for self-defense or defense of another from unlawful force, or to take a resisting emotionally disturbed person into custody." The patrol guide also specifies that officers should "not use pepper spray on subjects who passively resist."
Officers with special training, however, do have latitude "in the use of pepper spray for disorder control."
Donna Lieberman, director of New York Civil Liberties Union, said: "There's no excuse for using pepper spray in the faces of peaceful demonstrators whether or not they are engaging in minor disorderly conduct. The use of pepper spray appears to be gratuitous and in violation of police department rules. What the video demonstrates how harmful it is for the police to engage in excessive force against protesters because it causes fear and how harmful it is for the police department itself."
The NYPD were forced to change some of their policing practices during demonstrations, specifically their use of pens, after a lawsuit brought by NYCLU which accused them of excessive restrictions in movements of protesters during the February 2003 anti-war protests in New York.
According to recent statistics, 1722 people complained of being wrongfully pepper-sprayed by New York police officers between 2006 and 2010. Of that number, the civilian review board substantiated just 22 complaints.
Is the US a Police State?
Honorable people like to debate whether the United States of America
is a “police state,” but when it comes to shutting down the expression
of ideas on the political left, there’s little room for argument.
We are inundated in this country with propaganda boilerplate about being the greatest democracy in the world. No, we’re not a police state like our friends in Saudi Arabia or our former friends, and current enemies, in Iran. Our police agencies have figured out how to accomplish police state repression in a “softer,” more sophisticated manner.
Look at the video in the September 26 report by Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC on what he describes as a “violent burst of chaos” caused by armed “troublemakers” from the New York Police Department.
It was a peaceful demonstration against Wall Street greed. At least it started out that way. All evidence suggests it was, then, sent careening into chaos by the police strong-arming of young protesters who had done nothing but express their views in public.
In one incident, young women on the sidewalk observing the arrest of a young man in the street are corralled by cops using orange plastic nets. White-shirted Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, then, walks up, un-holsters his pepper spray gun and shoots one of the women full in the face. He re-holsters his weapon and walks away. Another video shows him doing the same thing indiscriminately to others in a clear violation of NYPD rules that say the spray is only authorized to disable someone resisting arrest. Over 100 people were arrested in the melee.
The MSNBC video also shows a young man with a camera being violently slammed into a parked Volvo for videotaping the actions of the police. As O’Donnell emphasizes, videotaping cops is a completely legal activity. In fact, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month on exactly this situation in a case involving a man who videotaped cops beating a man in Boston Commons. (For a PDF of the ruling, go to:www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/10-1764P-01A.pdf )
The case is instructive. It began with a federal lawsuit brought by Simon Glik, a Russian immigrant who had become a lawyer in the US. He saw cops beating a man and took out his cell phone to videotape them. He was told to stop and he refused. Police arrested him, confiscated his phone and deleted the video. They charged him with illegal wiretapping since his recording included audio.
The district court scoffed at the wiretapping charge and concluded just because “officers were unhappy they were being recorded during an arrest … does not make a lawful exercise of First Amendment rights a crime. … [The] First Amendment right publicly to record the activities of police officers on public business is established.”
The City of Boston and the individual police officers involved appealed the ruling, and the 1st Circuit upheld the district court. The justices pointedly demolished the notion often used by police officers that the law on the matter is unclear.
As to whether videotaping cops beating people on a public street is constitutionally protected behavior, they wrote: “Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative.”
And this protection applies to everyone – including “bloggers” and other private citizens with cameras or cell phones. Again, contrary to what police agencies like to say when confronted with cameras in embarrassing situations, one does not have to be a credentialed mainstream media journalist with a government-obtained “press badge” to qualify for First Amendment protection.
As to citizens making their displeasure about police actions known, the 1st Circuit cites a Houston case from 1987: “The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principle characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.” That is, one has a clear right to make faces or express disfavor at police actions – as long as one doesn’t physically interfere with those actions.
The justices emphasized “the fundamental and virtually self-evident nature of the First Amendment’s protections in this area.” Citing another 1st Circuit ruling from 2009, they wrote: “We thus have no trouble concluding that ‘the state of the law at the time of the alleged violation gave the defendants [the police officers] fair warning that their particular conduct was unconstitutional.’ ”
The court is saying all this is so clear cops should know slamming a man against a Volvo for videotaping is a violation of law.
In the Wall Street melee, white-shirted commanders popped up a lot in videos as the worst abusers. As leaders, these officers should be informing their subordinates that this sort of “police state” activity is culpable behavior and, as frustrating as it may be, cops simply have to learn to live under the gaze of citizens’ cameras.
MSNBC’s O’Donnell was dogged in his coverage of the story. About the man with the video camera being slammed against the Volvo by a white-shirted commander, he said: “There’s a very brave man in this picture and it’s not the guy in the white shirt.”
Thanks to all the coverage, the NYPD has had to back off its initial dismissals that all the pepper spraying was “appropriate” and declare it will open an investigation, especially of Deputy Inspector Bologna. O’Donnell was rightfully skeptical such an investigation would be anything but a traditional whitewash.
What’s going on here?
The best explanation for all this is in a 1990 book called The Police Mystique: An Insider’s Look At Cops, Crime and the Criminal Justice System by Anthony Bouza, a man who served in a host of leadership roles in the NYPD, closing his career as chief of police in Minneapolis. The “mystique” he describes involves the ironic power of the cops at the bottom of the police hierarchy and the great discretion extended to them to accomplish their mission.
Here’s some of Bouza’s insights gained from 36 years managing cops:
When Deputy Inspector Bologna walks up and, absolutely unprovoked, sprays a young woman bystander in the face with pepper spray, besides any personal unsavory and sadistic impulses he might have harbored, he is undertaking a variant of the “favorite ploy” to provoke that Chief Bouza describes.
In fact, the whole Monday melee can be seen as a case of cops poking and shoving citizens to “cow” them and “push the target over an imaginary line” — using rude provocation to turn a peaceful protest into a scene of chaos and havoc that, then, can be blamed on the “underclass.” In this case, that underclass is young, non-affluent Americans fed up with the direction of their society and the absence of venues to do anything about it — and courageous enough to speak out in public.
The result is a peaceful protest is turned into a melee justifying arrests.
How did we get to this place?
Anthony Bouza wrote his book in 1990, a much more “innocent” time of relative peace after the fall of the Soviet Union and before the Gulf War. Then came the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration’s declaration of a Global War On Terror (“You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.”) and the astonishing rise of a globally based Homeland Security apparatus noted for the unprecedented linkage of military forces, civilian contractors and federal, state and local police agencies into a massive and frightening leviathan that operates in secret and is totally out of control.
On Sunday September 25th, 60 Minutes, a journalistic enterprise that more and more does shameless flak for the Pentagon and the Homeland Security leviathan, did a piece on NYPD Chief Raymond Kelly and the department’s vast anti-terrorism capacities. The story was the exact opposite in tone from Chief Bouza’s honest realism. Chief Kelly and his police were national heroes working to secure New Yorkers from another horror like 9/11. No questions about civil liberty issues were raised.
In such a climate of military/police paranoia, it’s not surprising that the day after the 60 Minutes fluff piece the NYPD is seen whacking citizens around for expressing views contrary to the flag-waving norm.
Those on the top in this society are trying desperately to hold onto all the power and wealth they’ve accumulated. They’re like deer caught in the headlights of history. So it’s not surprising to see NYPD cops who, by now, must be so thoroughly brainwashed in post-9/11 paranoia they’re ready to play out the things Chief Bouza speaks of on a scale he could not have imagined in 1990. We see NYPD cops near Wall Street attacking harmless, peaceful street protesters simply expressing a desire for economic justice. When have we seen a right wing Tea Party demonstration calling for an end to taxes and programs for the poor attacked like this?
Which takes us back to the opening of this story. Whether a society is seen as a “police state” depends entirely on whose ox is being gored. To cite an egregious example, the powerful and elite in Guatemala during the 1970s and ‘80s did not see their society as a police state – at least not in a critical way. Instead, this class saw what the police and military were doing (in this case, slaughtering and “disappearing” thousands) as necessary for their security, necessary to keep a massive, poor Native American population and their leftist supporters in check.
Right wing police defenders might take this as a reason to praise this country. See! Our police and military are not slaughtering people by the thousands. That’s because, again, we’re a sophisticated, “soft” police state. But the identical dynamic works here: The police use the power they have and the discretion they are given, as Chief Bouza makes clear, to do what cops feel is necessary to check “the group they’ve been pressured, implicitly, to control.”
Chief Bouza clearly sympathizes with cops in how they are placed by society between a rock and a hard place. Some cops clearly take personal joy in abusing leftists who would publicly demand justice. But cops are necessary in a society, and the job is not an easy one. Most cops are decent working men and women simply caught in the vice. That seems to have been the case in New York, with a few cops stirring things up to create a chaotic situation good cops were, then, compelled to address.
But it’s also tough being a leftist in America. The media is bought and sold by huge, cold-blooded, profit-making corporations and money runs our democracy to the point we have a government dominated by bullshitters and panderers. When a concerned citizens has had enough and takes to the streets, these days he or she is corralled and humiliated by a range of sophisticated and well-funded police agencies. Marginalization is assured.
What’s an American leftist to do?
What the young activists in New York are doing is a good model. You turn into Howard Beal and declare, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Everybody gets cameras and puts quotes from the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on posters or t-shirts. You realize the poor slob in uniform in front of you with the can of pepper spray is also a working man or woman and it’s him breaking the law when he pepper sprays you or slams you into a Volvo for using your First Amendment rights.
Since it’s against the law to employ your own pepper spray, you just have to take it like a Gandhi would. There’s no such thing as self-defense when it comes to cops, even when they are blatantly breaking the law.
The political left in America is on the ropes, and contrary to what some leftists would like to see, revolution does not seem on the horizon in America. That said, something is indeed happening, and the world is seeing more examples of bottom up expression.
Here’s what I think: The only thing that can save the United States of America from a dismal future the political right wants to lock us into is to rigorously debunk the slander of the left so the nation can begin to create a more healthy, economically just structure. That goes for ending the bankrupting state of endless war these same forces have collared us with.
Such a shift will do two important things: It will empower working people with health care and jobs so they’ll have security and money to spend, which will re-energize a capitalist engine; and in the spirit of a mixed economy, it will also mean a much needed injection of socialism into the economy – the sort of things Franklin Roosevelt had the courage to do.
Even one of the right wing’s most revered free-market economic gurus, Friedrich Hayek, conceded the healthy nature of a mixed economy in his famous 1944 polemic, The Road To Serfdom.
I plan to stand up for more economic justice with others in Washington DC starting on October 6th in Freedom Plaza, three blocks from the White House. Like others, I’ll have my camera with me. I hope DC cops don’t feel it’s necessary to slam me into a Volvo or shoot me in the face with pepper spray.
But if that’s how it has to be, that’s the cost of living free in a US police state.
We are inundated in this country with propaganda boilerplate about being the greatest democracy in the world. No, we’re not a police state like our friends in Saudi Arabia or our former friends, and current enemies, in Iran. Our police agencies have figured out how to accomplish police state repression in a “softer,” more sophisticated manner.
Look at the video in the September 26 report by Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC on what he describes as a “violent burst of chaos” caused by armed “troublemakers” from the New York Police Department.
It was a peaceful demonstration against Wall Street greed. At least it started out that way. All evidence suggests it was, then, sent careening into chaos by the police strong-arming of young protesters who had done nothing but express their views in public.
In one incident, young women on the sidewalk observing the arrest of a young man in the street are corralled by cops using orange plastic nets. White-shirted Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, then, walks up, un-holsters his pepper spray gun and shoots one of the women full in the face. He re-holsters his weapon and walks away. Another video shows him doing the same thing indiscriminately to others in a clear violation of NYPD rules that say the spray is only authorized to disable someone resisting arrest. Over 100 people were arrested in the melee.
The MSNBC video also shows a young man with a camera being violently slammed into a parked Volvo for videotaping the actions of the police. As O’Donnell emphasizes, videotaping cops is a completely legal activity. In fact, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month on exactly this situation in a case involving a man who videotaped cops beating a man in Boston Commons. (For a PDF of the ruling, go to:www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/10-1764P-01A.pdf )
The case is instructive. It began with a federal lawsuit brought by Simon Glik, a Russian immigrant who had become a lawyer in the US. He saw cops beating a man and took out his cell phone to videotape them. He was told to stop and he refused. Police arrested him, confiscated his phone and deleted the video. They charged him with illegal wiretapping since his recording included audio.
The district court scoffed at the wiretapping charge and concluded just because “officers were unhappy they were being recorded during an arrest … does not make a lawful exercise of First Amendment rights a crime. … [The] First Amendment right publicly to record the activities of police officers on public business is established.”
The City of Boston and the individual police officers involved appealed the ruling, and the 1st Circuit upheld the district court. The justices pointedly demolished the notion often used by police officers that the law on the matter is unclear.
As to whether videotaping cops beating people on a public street is constitutionally protected behavior, they wrote: “Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative.”
And this protection applies to everyone – including “bloggers” and other private citizens with cameras or cell phones. Again, contrary to what police agencies like to say when confronted with cameras in embarrassing situations, one does not have to be a credentialed mainstream media journalist with a government-obtained “press badge” to qualify for First Amendment protection.
As to citizens making their displeasure about police actions known, the 1st Circuit cites a Houston case from 1987: “The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principle characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.” That is, one has a clear right to make faces or express disfavor at police actions – as long as one doesn’t physically interfere with those actions.
The justices emphasized “the fundamental and virtually self-evident nature of the First Amendment’s protections in this area.” Citing another 1st Circuit ruling from 2009, they wrote: “We thus have no trouble concluding that ‘the state of the law at the time of the alleged violation gave the defendants [the police officers] fair warning that their particular conduct was unconstitutional.’ ”
The court is saying all this is so clear cops should know slamming a man against a Volvo for videotaping is a violation of law.
In the Wall Street melee, white-shirted commanders popped up a lot in videos as the worst abusers. As leaders, these officers should be informing their subordinates that this sort of “police state” activity is culpable behavior and, as frustrating as it may be, cops simply have to learn to live under the gaze of citizens’ cameras.
MSNBC’s O’Donnell was dogged in his coverage of the story. About the man with the video camera being slammed against the Volvo by a white-shirted commander, he said: “There’s a very brave man in this picture and it’s not the guy in the white shirt.”
Thanks to all the coverage, the NYPD has had to back off its initial dismissals that all the pepper spraying was “appropriate” and declare it will open an investigation, especially of Deputy Inspector Bologna. O’Donnell was rightfully skeptical such an investigation would be anything but a traditional whitewash.
What’s going on here?
The best explanation for all this is in a 1990 book called The Police Mystique: An Insider’s Look At Cops, Crime and the Criminal Justice System by Anthony Bouza, a man who served in a host of leadership roles in the NYPD, closing his career as chief of police in Minneapolis. The “mystique” he describes involves the ironic power of the cops at the bottom of the police hierarchy and the great discretion extended to them to accomplish their mission.
Here’s some of Bouza’s insights gained from 36 years managing cops:
“[Police] work is peculiar in that the greatest power and autonomy exists at the lowest rank level. … The system, in order to accommodate the need for action, is notably understanding of the errors that are bound to occur. Thus cops develop the sense that they can exercise power without too great a risk of being called too strictly into account for its use.”
… Their temptation to cow those whose behavior they’re trying to control into compliance often proves irresistible.”
“Cops don’t take real or imagined assaults on their authority lightly. … A favorite ploy [of experienced cops] is to provoke an angry citizen into sufficiently loud outbursts to justify an arrest for disorderly conduct. The challenge is to push the target over an imaginary line that instinct will tell him or her constitutes a breach of something. The ability to maneuver the unwary into a trap is well known to cops but rarely realized by outsiders.
“[Cops have] the additional comfort of being able to rely on the substantial tolerance of a system that wants action and knows that it must be willing to tolerate errors in order to get it.”
“Police power assumes its most formidable aspect when cops deal with the underclass. This is the group they’ve been pressured, implicitly, to control. … A society, for example, that permits scores of millions to be undereducated and unemployed will not be patient with those who call upon it to attack these ills with more equitable distributions of wealth, social programs, and other ‘liberal’ schemes. … The overclass prefers to see the problems attacked through the highly visible ‘law-and-order’ methods that promise easy solutions.”
“The people’s power, normally hard to define and difficult to see, can be a fearful thing once unleashed, particularly when aimed at the police department.”Watch the MSNBC video again and you’ll see all of this played out in the streets near Wall Street.
When Deputy Inspector Bologna walks up and, absolutely unprovoked, sprays a young woman bystander in the face with pepper spray, besides any personal unsavory and sadistic impulses he might have harbored, he is undertaking a variant of the “favorite ploy” to provoke that Chief Bouza describes.
In fact, the whole Monday melee can be seen as a case of cops poking and shoving citizens to “cow” them and “push the target over an imaginary line” — using rude provocation to turn a peaceful protest into a scene of chaos and havoc that, then, can be blamed on the “underclass.” In this case, that underclass is young, non-affluent Americans fed up with the direction of their society and the absence of venues to do anything about it — and courageous enough to speak out in public.
The result is a peaceful protest is turned into a melee justifying arrests.
How did we get to this place?
Anthony Bouza wrote his book in 1990, a much more “innocent” time of relative peace after the fall of the Soviet Union and before the Gulf War. Then came the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration’s declaration of a Global War On Terror (“You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.”) and the astonishing rise of a globally based Homeland Security apparatus noted for the unprecedented linkage of military forces, civilian contractors and federal, state and local police agencies into a massive and frightening leviathan that operates in secret and is totally out of control.
On Sunday September 25th, 60 Minutes, a journalistic enterprise that more and more does shameless flak for the Pentagon and the Homeland Security leviathan, did a piece on NYPD Chief Raymond Kelly and the department’s vast anti-terrorism capacities. The story was the exact opposite in tone from Chief Bouza’s honest realism. Chief Kelly and his police were national heroes working to secure New Yorkers from another horror like 9/11. No questions about civil liberty issues were raised.
In such a climate of military/police paranoia, it’s not surprising that the day after the 60 Minutes fluff piece the NYPD is seen whacking citizens around for expressing views contrary to the flag-waving norm.
Those on the top in this society are trying desperately to hold onto all the power and wealth they’ve accumulated. They’re like deer caught in the headlights of history. So it’s not surprising to see NYPD cops who, by now, must be so thoroughly brainwashed in post-9/11 paranoia they’re ready to play out the things Chief Bouza speaks of on a scale he could not have imagined in 1990. We see NYPD cops near Wall Street attacking harmless, peaceful street protesters simply expressing a desire for economic justice. When have we seen a right wing Tea Party demonstration calling for an end to taxes and programs for the poor attacked like this?
Which takes us back to the opening of this story. Whether a society is seen as a “police state” depends entirely on whose ox is being gored. To cite an egregious example, the powerful and elite in Guatemala during the 1970s and ‘80s did not see their society as a police state – at least not in a critical way. Instead, this class saw what the police and military were doing (in this case, slaughtering and “disappearing” thousands) as necessary for their security, necessary to keep a massive, poor Native American population and their leftist supporters in check.
Right wing police defenders might take this as a reason to praise this country. See! Our police and military are not slaughtering people by the thousands. That’s because, again, we’re a sophisticated, “soft” police state. But the identical dynamic works here: The police use the power they have and the discretion they are given, as Chief Bouza makes clear, to do what cops feel is necessary to check “the group they’ve been pressured, implicitly, to control.”
Chief Bouza clearly sympathizes with cops in how they are placed by society between a rock and a hard place. Some cops clearly take personal joy in abusing leftists who would publicly demand justice. But cops are necessary in a society, and the job is not an easy one. Most cops are decent working men and women simply caught in the vice. That seems to have been the case in New York, with a few cops stirring things up to create a chaotic situation good cops were, then, compelled to address.
But it’s also tough being a leftist in America. The media is bought and sold by huge, cold-blooded, profit-making corporations and money runs our democracy to the point we have a government dominated by bullshitters and panderers. When a concerned citizens has had enough and takes to the streets, these days he or she is corralled and humiliated by a range of sophisticated and well-funded police agencies. Marginalization is assured.
What’s an American leftist to do?
What the young activists in New York are doing is a good model. You turn into Howard Beal and declare, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Everybody gets cameras and puts quotes from the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on posters or t-shirts. You realize the poor slob in uniform in front of you with the can of pepper spray is also a working man or woman and it’s him breaking the law when he pepper sprays you or slams you into a Volvo for using your First Amendment rights.
Since it’s against the law to employ your own pepper spray, you just have to take it like a Gandhi would. There’s no such thing as self-defense when it comes to cops, even when they are blatantly breaking the law.
The political left in America is on the ropes, and contrary to what some leftists would like to see, revolution does not seem on the horizon in America. That said, something is indeed happening, and the world is seeing more examples of bottom up expression.
Here’s what I think: The only thing that can save the United States of America from a dismal future the political right wants to lock us into is to rigorously debunk the slander of the left so the nation can begin to create a more healthy, economically just structure. That goes for ending the bankrupting state of endless war these same forces have collared us with.
Such a shift will do two important things: It will empower working people with health care and jobs so they’ll have security and money to spend, which will re-energize a capitalist engine; and in the spirit of a mixed economy, it will also mean a much needed injection of socialism into the economy – the sort of things Franklin Roosevelt had the courage to do.
Even one of the right wing’s most revered free-market economic gurus, Friedrich Hayek, conceded the healthy nature of a mixed economy in his famous 1944 polemic, The Road To Serfdom.
“There is no reason why,” he wrote, “in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom.” He defined that security as “security against severe physical deprivation (and) the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all.” He went on further to say: “[S]ome minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. … [T]he case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”Hayek’s view of a balanced economy sounds almost reasonable today and shows how very far to the right current thinking has gone after his beloved free market economy was driven into a ditch by greedy Wall Street pirates.
I plan to stand up for more economic justice with others in Washington DC starting on October 6th in Freedom Plaza, three blocks from the White House. Like others, I’ll have my camera with me. I hope DC cops don’t feel it’s necessary to slam me into a Volvo or shoot me in the face with pepper spray.
But if that’s how it has to be, that’s the cost of living free in a US police state.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The Wall Street Occupation
(A peaceful protest doesn't keep cops from being assholes. They live for that shit! Looks like a police state to me.--jef)
Monday, September 19, 2011 by The Indypendent
A Sleep-In Protest in the Shadow of Power
by Manny Jalonschi
++++
Monday, September 19, 2011 by The Indypendent
A Sleep-In Protest in the Shadow of Power
by Manny Jalonschi
Surrounded by the headquarters of some of the world’s most powerful financial players, over two thousand protesters converged on Wall Street this Saturday. By the end of the second day, those occupying Liberty Park, formerly known as Zuccotti Park on Broadway and Liberty St., had settled in, partially helped by pizza, hot chocolate and blankets paid for and delivered by their supporters in New York City and across the country.
The Wall Street occupation began on Sept. 17 after months of planning and encouragement by Adbusters, who originally called for the occupation in response to a corporate-controlled political system that is no longer serving the needs of the majority of its people. They were soon joined by the hacktivist organization Anonymous in calling for a general people’s assembly. While the meetings leading up to the protest focused on dozens of smaller goals, Saturday morning, in the dozen or so people’s assemblies that broke down in Zuccotti Park now renamed Liberty Square, the protesters identified their key goals as liberating America from the death-grip of finance and creating a sustainable, just future for every member of the country. Specifics ranged from a progressive tax system, ending the wars and creating universal healthcare to more localized solutions like supporting and participating in a variety of worker owned cooperatives. Even with a heavy police presence, which included over 200 officers in the immediate area by Monday afternoon, protesters remained unmoved in their demands for a fairer political system.
The protest began around noon in Bowling Green Park with approximately 3,000 people filing in from various ad hoc rallies across the Financial District — including a crowd that swarmed around the Wall Street Bull earlier in the day. The crowd then began marching towards 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. While the group’s original goal had been to occupy the sidewalk in front of the building, the area was cordoned off and surrounded by more than 40 police cars and 80 police officers. Instead, the crowd, which had decreased to less than 2,000 by 3 p.m., marched to Zuccotti Park on the Corner of Liberty St. and Broadway.
Once they were assembled, dozens of organizers stood on park benches and tables urging the general assembly, now numbering around 2,000, to break down into smaller assemblies. Within about ten minutes, a dozen or so general assemblies had broken out — but not without the drowning sound of a brass band, hired by an unknown group to disrupt the protesters. The brass band ended its performance within a half-hour, by which time most of the general assemblies had already progressed with their agenda.
The general assemblies, who began their meetings in circles, sitting on the concrete, broke down discussions into three general areas — problems, solutions and strategies. Most discussions began with an open session for assembly participants to vocalize what they viewed as the biggest challenges the country faces in freeing itself from the power of finance. While much discussion focused on the corruption and collusion between Wall Street and Washington, many assembly members also noted that general apathy was also a problem of education.
The second part of the general assemblies focused on developing general solutions for the problems just identified. Regulation, transparency and again education became the hot talking points for this session. By the third session, assemblies were working on exchanging strategies for local, national and international action.
And in fact, those occupying Wall Street were not alone. News flooded in throughout the weekend of sister-rallies across the United States, including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The international presence was heavy at the rally itself. Not only had protesters driven in from across the country, but activists we spoke to also arrived from as far as Mexico and Tunisia.
“This is my first protest, my first movement,” explained Kyle from Buffalo, New York, donning the Guy Fawkes mask symbolic of the Anon hacktivist collective. “A system that’s only focuses on rewarding greed should be challenged,” he said on Saturday, echoing the feelings of many protesters at the occupation who confessed the enormity of the problem requires an equally enormous series of solutions.
The open mic on the North side of the park gave air to many of the ideas. Sidney, a 50-year-old office worker from Connecticut, grabbed the microphone on Saturday and demanded an end to what he described as a “permanent tax holiday for the banks.”
While Saturday saw the most activity in terms of rallies, assemblies and marches, Sunday became a day of support for the occupation. Thousands of New Yorkers stopped in to either see or support the growing city of sleeping bags, signs and popular assemblies. The highlight of the day was when over $2,000 in pizza was ordered in less than an hour by supporters from around the world for the protesters in Zuccotti Plaza. By the second evening, the call went out for blankets as temperatures dipped into the 50’s.
By Monday afternoon reports of police interference were growing, as officers began arresting people who were using chalk to write goals and slogans on the concrete they occupied. But even with a heavy police presence, which included over 200 officers in the immediate area by Monday afternoon, protesters remained unmoved in their demands for a fairer political system. @Anon_support, a leading Twitter organizer of the event, even began organizing after-work parties in the vicinity to draw out more supporters from the New York City area.
The Wall Street occupation began on Sept. 17 after months of planning and encouragement by Adbusters, who originally called for the occupation in response to a corporate-controlled political system that is no longer serving the needs of the majority of its people. They were soon joined by the hacktivist organization Anonymous in calling for a general people’s assembly. While the meetings leading up to the protest focused on dozens of smaller goals, Saturday morning, in the dozen or so people’s assemblies that broke down in Zuccotti Park now renamed Liberty Square, the protesters identified their key goals as liberating America from the death-grip of finance and creating a sustainable, just future for every member of the country. Specifics ranged from a progressive tax system, ending the wars and creating universal healthcare to more localized solutions like supporting and participating in a variety of worker owned cooperatives. Even with a heavy police presence, which included over 200 officers in the immediate area by Monday afternoon, protesters remained unmoved in their demands for a fairer political system.
The protest began around noon in Bowling Green Park with approximately 3,000 people filing in from various ad hoc rallies across the Financial District — including a crowd that swarmed around the Wall Street Bull earlier in the day. The crowd then began marching towards 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. While the group’s original goal had been to occupy the sidewalk in front of the building, the area was cordoned off and surrounded by more than 40 police cars and 80 police officers. Instead, the crowd, which had decreased to less than 2,000 by 3 p.m., marched to Zuccotti Park on the Corner of Liberty St. and Broadway.
Once they were assembled, dozens of organizers stood on park benches and tables urging the general assembly, now numbering around 2,000, to break down into smaller assemblies. Within about ten minutes, a dozen or so general assemblies had broken out — but not without the drowning sound of a brass band, hired by an unknown group to disrupt the protesters. The brass band ended its performance within a half-hour, by which time most of the general assemblies had already progressed with their agenda.
The general assemblies, who began their meetings in circles, sitting on the concrete, broke down discussions into three general areas — problems, solutions and strategies. Most discussions began with an open session for assembly participants to vocalize what they viewed as the biggest challenges the country faces in freeing itself from the power of finance. While much discussion focused on the corruption and collusion between Wall Street and Washington, many assembly members also noted that general apathy was also a problem of education.
The second part of the general assemblies focused on developing general solutions for the problems just identified. Regulation, transparency and again education became the hot talking points for this session. By the third session, assemblies were working on exchanging strategies for local, national and international action.
And in fact, those occupying Wall Street were not alone. News flooded in throughout the weekend of sister-rallies across the United States, including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The international presence was heavy at the rally itself. Not only had protesters driven in from across the country, but activists we spoke to also arrived from as far as Mexico and Tunisia.
“This is my first protest, my first movement,” explained Kyle from Buffalo, New York, donning the Guy Fawkes mask symbolic of the Anon hacktivist collective. “A system that’s only focuses on rewarding greed should be challenged,” he said on Saturday, echoing the feelings of many protesters at the occupation who confessed the enormity of the problem requires an equally enormous series of solutions.
The open mic on the North side of the park gave air to many of the ideas. Sidney, a 50-year-old office worker from Connecticut, grabbed the microphone on Saturday and demanded an end to what he described as a “permanent tax holiday for the banks.”
While Saturday saw the most activity in terms of rallies, assemblies and marches, Sunday became a day of support for the occupation. Thousands of New Yorkers stopped in to either see or support the growing city of sleeping bags, signs and popular assemblies. The highlight of the day was when over $2,000 in pizza was ordered in less than an hour by supporters from around the world for the protesters in Zuccotti Plaza. By the second evening, the call went out for blankets as temperatures dipped into the 50’s.
By Monday afternoon reports of police interference were growing, as officers began arresting people who were using chalk to write goals and slogans on the concrete they occupied. But even with a heavy police presence, which included over 200 officers in the immediate area by Monday afternoon, protesters remained unmoved in their demands for a fairer political system. @Anon_support, a leading Twitter organizer of the event, even began organizing after-work parties in the vicinity to draw out more supporters from the New York City area.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Return of Debtors' Prisons
Reservations for the Poor
By STEVE BREYMAN
Spent any time recently (voluntarily or not) in an urban courtroom? After an hour or two, you’re quite certain that debtors’ prisons are back with a vengeance, and a twist. As to the vengeance: In New York City alone, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch, thousands of misdemeanor defendants are held in pre-trial detention every year because they’re unable to throw bail. Note the “pre-trial” part: these are folks merely accused rather than convicted of any offense. The situation is even worse than debtors’ prison because the accused don’t even owe a debt. They end up doing time in advance of a trial for the crime of being poor. It’s like a down payment on a sentence that may or may not include incarceration (but that’s not all the sentences may include, as we’ll see). What working poor person has $1000 lying around to invest in a municipal court as bail when they can’t make the rent, feed themselves or their children, or pay for heat? Nobody I’ve ever met. And what of the rest of our cities’ human flotsam, the unskilled unemployed, homeless, seriously mentally ill, or substance-dependent?
By STEVE BREYMAN
Spent any time recently (voluntarily or not) in an urban courtroom? After an hour or two, you’re quite certain that debtors’ prisons are back with a vengeance, and a twist. As to the vengeance: In New York City alone, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch, thousands of misdemeanor defendants are held in pre-trial detention every year because they’re unable to throw bail. Note the “pre-trial” part: these are folks merely accused rather than convicted of any offense. The situation is even worse than debtors’ prison because the accused don’t even owe a debt. They end up doing time in advance of a trial for the crime of being poor. It’s like a down payment on a sentence that may or may not include incarceration (but that’s not all the sentences may include, as we’ll see). What working poor person has $1000 lying around to invest in a municipal court as bail when they can’t make the rent, feed themselves or their children, or pay for heat? Nobody I’ve ever met. And what of the rest of our cities’ human flotsam, the unskilled unemployed, homeless, seriously mentally ill, or substance-dependent?
The details are striking.
Among defendants arrested in 2008 on nonfelony charges who had bail set at $1,000 or less, 87 percent were incarcerated because they were unable to post the bail amount at their arraignment. On average, they spent almost 16 days in pretrial detention for low-level offenses. Most were accused of nonviolent minor crimes such as shoplifting, turnstile jumping, smoking marijuana in public, drug possession, trespassing, and prostitution.
Nearly a quarter of the people spending time behind bars on Riker’s Island in 2008, one in four inmates were there because they didn’t have the money to pay bail on a misdemeanor charge. These unfortunate souls may have been presumed innocent of the criminal charges by the judge, but they were nonetheless jailed for being poor. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), “pretrial supervision” of misdemeanor defendants is an all-around superior alternative to jailing the poor. But New York City has no such program.
Bail exists to force a defendant back into the courtroom as a case progresses. Apart from establishing a pretrial supervision program, HRW recommends judges might replace cash bail by unsecured appearance bonds (a promise to pay a certain amount upon failure to appear). Failure to appear is hardly rampant in the City’s courts. HRW found that “84 percent of released defendants show up for all their court proceedings; and most of those who miss a scheduled court appearance come back to court within 30 days.”
Then there are the joys of imprisonment for New Yorkers presumed innocent.
Jail can be dehumanizing, unpleasant, and even violent . . . It exacts a high toll on those who are incarcerated as well as on their families, who suffer from reduced income and absent parents or caregivers. Many defendants plead guilty simply to avoid or end pretrial detention. Indeed, guilty pleas account for 99.6 percent of the convictions of New York City misdemeanor defendants.
As if this routine injustice were not enough, there’s the twist, a problem not addressed by the HRW report. It concerns the sentences following the legal proceeding. Judges often sentence those convicted of nonviolent misdemeanors to some combination of community service and a fine. But if you didn’t have the wherewithal to prevent pre-trial detention, where will you find it to pay the fine? Perhaps Human Rights Watch will follow up the current study with one of this problem. How many people spend how much time behind bars because they fail to pay their court-ordered fines on time? Debtors’ prisons were common in the United States until the 1830s. Robert E. Lee’s father, and Declaration of Independence signatories James Wilson and Robert Morris spent time in prison for inability to repay debts. Gentlemen of such lofty station would not likely be incarcerated today for failure to pay (see the case last month of the hit-and-run hedge fund manager allowed a misdemeanor plea by a Colorado judge). Today, incarceration for inability to pay is reserved for the poor.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
More Cities on Brink of Bankruptcy
Posted By: Kate Kelly | CNBC Reporter
26 May 2010 | 11:01 AM ET
The possibility of a bankruptcy filing by the city of Harrisburg, Pa., the state capital, looms large these days—and it could be the first in a series, say some Wall Street traders.
Harrisburg, population 55,000, owes nearly $70 million in debt payments this year, and it's unclear where that money will come from.
Harrisburg now has one of the lowest credit ratings of any municipality in the United States.
Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson told CNBC Wednesday that she had assembled a group of bond stakeholders, the city council and other interested parties to work out the crisis "so that we don't become the poster child of the world in terms of bankruptcy."
Municipal bond underwriters are monitoring Harrisburg, which has struggled to contain the costs of financing a troubled incinerator project.
In 2003, the city borrowed $125 million to expand and retrofit its incinerator, which officials thought would make money for Harrisburg. The incinerator re-opened five years later, but it's turned out to be nothing but a money drain.
On May 1, the city missed a $452,282 loan payment related to the incinerator.
Raising taxes or selling assets, like real estate or parking lots, are options for Harrisburg. So is a restructuring plan—either inside or outside of bankruptcy.
If Harrisburg does file for bankruptcy, it would do so under Chapter 9—which is employed by cities, but rarely. In one closely watched case, the city of Vallejo, Calif., has been in Chapter 9 since 2008.
About the Harrisburg situation, Jim Lebenthal, head of public affairs for the longtime municipal-bond underwriter, Lebenthal & Co., said that while filing for Chapter 9 would be a small matter in the scheme of things, it's "emblematic" of the larger economic struggles that cities face right now. "If it can happen in a state capital, my God, it can happen anywhere," said Lebenthal.
The overall problem is that the $2.8 trillion muni bond market, long considered one of the safest havens for investors, now faces a daunting level of debt, as cities from Los Angeles to New York struggle with an array of headaches, including less tax revenue and high labor costs.
According to remarks made by Harrisburg mayor Thompson in April, the city spends rought 70 percent of its annual budget on labor.
Cities can always raise taxes to fight a budget shortfall. But costly projects, fewer people in the workforce and more demand for city services can make budgets tough to square these days.
Financial firms underwrite bond offerings for cities and public-works projects, and the default rate on muni bonds has historically been quite low—less than 1 percent—compared to nearly 13 percent for corporate bonds, according to ratings agency figures.
In that sense, the Street encourages investors to go long municipalities.
But investors and the Street can also short munis through credit default swaps, or CDS policies that pay out if an entity defaults.
The Markit MCDX, an index that tracks the cost of insuring against default of a basket of 50 municipalities, is on a recent high of $173,000 for $10 million of protection on a five-year bond—a point last reached near the beginning of this year. A swap that would pay out if the state of Pennsylvania defaults cost $112,000 for the same $10 million amount.
26 May 2010 | 11:01 AM ET
The possibility of a bankruptcy filing by the city of Harrisburg, Pa., the state capital, looms large these days—and it could be the first in a series, say some Wall Street traders.
Harrisburg, population 55,000, owes nearly $70 million in debt payments this year, and it's unclear where that money will come from.
Harrisburg now has one of the lowest credit ratings of any municipality in the United States.
Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson told CNBC Wednesday that she had assembled a group of bond stakeholders, the city council and other interested parties to work out the crisis "so that we don't become the poster child of the world in terms of bankruptcy."
Municipal bond underwriters are monitoring Harrisburg, which has struggled to contain the costs of financing a troubled incinerator project.
In 2003, the city borrowed $125 million to expand and retrofit its incinerator, which officials thought would make money for Harrisburg. The incinerator re-opened five years later, but it's turned out to be nothing but a money drain.
On May 1, the city missed a $452,282 loan payment related to the incinerator.
Raising taxes or selling assets, like real estate or parking lots, are options for Harrisburg. So is a restructuring plan—either inside or outside of bankruptcy.
If Harrisburg does file for bankruptcy, it would do so under Chapter 9—which is employed by cities, but rarely. In one closely watched case, the city of Vallejo, Calif., has been in Chapter 9 since 2008.
About the Harrisburg situation, Jim Lebenthal, head of public affairs for the longtime municipal-bond underwriter, Lebenthal & Co., said that while filing for Chapter 9 would be a small matter in the scheme of things, it's "emblematic" of the larger economic struggles that cities face right now. "If it can happen in a state capital, my God, it can happen anywhere," said Lebenthal.
The overall problem is that the $2.8 trillion muni bond market, long considered one of the safest havens for investors, now faces a daunting level of debt, as cities from Los Angeles to New York struggle with an array of headaches, including less tax revenue and high labor costs.
According to remarks made by Harrisburg mayor Thompson in April, the city spends rought 70 percent of its annual budget on labor.
Cities can always raise taxes to fight a budget shortfall. But costly projects, fewer people in the workforce and more demand for city services can make budgets tough to square these days.
Financial firms underwrite bond offerings for cities and public-works projects, and the default rate on muni bonds has historically been quite low—less than 1 percent—compared to nearly 13 percent for corporate bonds, according to ratings agency figures.
In that sense, the Street encourages investors to go long municipalities.
But investors and the Street can also short munis through credit default swaps, or CDS policies that pay out if an entity defaults.
The Markit MCDX, an index that tracks the cost of insuring against default of a basket of 50 municipalities, is on a recent high of $173,000 for $10 million of protection on a five-year bond—a point last reached near the beginning of this year. A swap that would pay out if the state of Pennsylvania defaults cost $112,000 for the same $10 million amount.
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