OWS Presence In Zuccotti Park

8 Comments

1. 

   Oui on November 16, 2011 at 6:58 am

   .

   Former US Labor head Robert Reich addresses Occupy crowd

   BERKELEY, Calif. (FresnoBee) — Anti-Wall Street activists began rebuilding their tent encampment on the steps of the University of California, Berkeley student plaza and cheered wildly when former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich implored them to take a moral stand against the very rich owning so much of America’s wealth.

   The daylong strike and peaceful demonstrations against big banks and education cuts culminated in some 4,000 people rallying at the Reich speech on the steps of the same student plaza that first launched the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.

   “The days of apathy are over folks,” Reich, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, said to a roaring crowd at Sproul Hall. “We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy were built. There are some people out there who say we cannot afford education any longer, we cannot provide social services for the poor … but how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before?”

   …
   The Occupy Cal students were joined by hundreds of Occupy Oakland demonstrators who marched the five miles from Oakland to Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue, chanting, “Here comes Oakland!” Police cleared their tent city outside Oakland City Hall on Monday amid complaints about safety and sanitation, and arrested more than 50 people.

   On Nov. 9, police jabbed students with batons and arrested 40 people as the university sought to uphold a campus ban on camping.

   UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau launched an investigation into allegations that campus police used excessive force. He said videos of the protests were disturbing, and he plans to grant amnesty to all students who were arrested and cited for attempting to block police from removing the tents.

   • UC Berkeley shooting terrifies Occupy protestors, students

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

2. 

   Oui on November 16, 2011 at 8:08 am

   .

   Pregnant teen, elderly woman among pepper sprayed

   SEATTLE (AP/SeattlePI) — A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters — including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist — with blasts of pepper spray.

   Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters. The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for “a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital.” Dorli Rainey is an activist who has supported liberal causes in the Seattle area for decades.  

   Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said he didn’t have specifics on the Rainey incident, but he said pepper spray is “is not age specific. No more dangerous to someone who is 10 or someone who is 80.”

   Dorli Rainey, a longtime liberal activist who moved here from Austria in 1956, also sent us an email explaining how it happened.  

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

3. 

   Oui on November 16, 2011 at 8:58 am

   .

   DOCUMENT: Department of Homeland Security: “Occupy Pittsburgh Threat Assessment”
   h/t Balloon Juice

   From the document:

   “This product was created in response to a request for information (RFI) concerning impacts to the Pittsburgh area from the planned Occupy Pittsburgh set for October 15, 2011. This product is intended to provide the private sector and first responders information on the event and appropriate prevention and response measures. Information in this report was collected through open source materials only. Open sources used in this product may include bias and misleading information. This product is an update to a previous assessment disseminated on October 6, 2011.”

   Read article @NigelParry or download pdf here

   Cross-posted fron Geov Parrish’s fp story Still Occupied

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

4. 

   Arthur Gilroy on November 16, 2011 at 12:04 pm

   in a nascent police state?

   Please read this article.

   Police State Tactics

   Signs Point to a Coordinated National Program to Try and Unoccupy Wall Street and Other Cities

   by DAVE LINDORFF

   The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.

   Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, Dallas, TX, Atlanta, GA, and most recently New York, NY, where the Occupation Movement began on September 17. The two most recent eviction efforts, in Oakland and New York, have been the worst.

   The police attacks have had a lot in common. They have been “justified” based upon trumped up pre-textural claims that the occupiers are creating a health hazard, or a fire hazard, or a crime problem, generally on little or no evidence, or there has been a digging up of obscure and constitutionally questionable statutes, for example laws outlawing the homeless. Then the police come in, usually in dead of night, dressed in riot gear and heavily armed with mace weapons, batons, plastic cuffs and tear gas, or even assault rifles in some cases and so-called flash-bang stun grenades-all weapons to be used against peaceful demonstrators.

   So violent has been the response that some returned veterans have condemned the police for using weapons and tactics that are not even permitted by occupying troops in war-torn countries.

   “We definitely feel, especially in a movement like this that has arisen so quickly in a number of cities, that there will be a coordinated national effort to try and shut it down,” says Heidi Bogosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, which has been playing a key role providing legal services to the new movement.

   “We see the scapegoating of these movements, the attacks at night, and in general tactics designed to terrorize and to scare protesters away. I can’t see this as anything other than centrally coordinated.”

   One indication of that coordination may have been a conference call among 18 city mayors which was confirmed by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan in a radio interview on San Francisco station KALW. Dan Siegel, an Oakland attorney who worked as an advisor to Quan, but who resigned in disgust after Oakland police and law enforcement personnel from a number of surrounding jurisdictions brutally drove occupiers there out of their park using tear gas, supposedly non-lethal ammunition (bean bags and rubber bullets) and flash-bang grenades in a night-time raid in the early hours of November 14, says that phone conference call took place, significantly, while Quan was in Washington, DC.

   Shortly afterwards, on Oct. 25, Quan authorized the first brutal police assault on Occupy Oakland. It led, among other things, to the critical wounding of  Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran who was among the protesters, and was hit in the forehead by a police tear gas cannister fired at close range.

   Who organized that critical conference call? Was it Quan or one of the other mayors, or was it someone in the federal government? Siegel says he doesn’t know, and Quan  isn’t saying.

   But both Siegel and Boghosian say they strongly suspect federal involvement in the planning of the recent spate of police violence against occupiers. Says Siegel, “It’s only logical to assume that the `Fusion Centers’ are involved, especially after the Oakland occupiers shut down the port in Oakland.”

   Some  72  Fusion Centers, located around the US and funded by the US at a cost of half a billion dollars, are a post 9-11creation of the new Homeland Security Department. Bringing the FBI together with local law enforcement departments, they both collect and share domestic intelligence, and can serve as command centers to direct local law enforcement in helping implement national law enforcement goals. There are also many Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which directly link the FBI with urban police departments.

   —snip—

   And you lockstep leftiness sumbitches are going to back Obama…remember, this shit and the whole drone/assassination routine in foreign countries (Foreign countries so far. Check it out.) when this happened on his watch with his full consent and support…you are going to back Obama in the next election when there is a viable candidate available (Ron Paul) who is absolutely and totally opposed to the establishment of a security state of of any kind!!!???

   Get real.

   If you do this you are going to reap the whirlwind.

   Bet on it.

   Remember…Clausewitzmas is gonna be here soon!!!

   You better watch out   
   You better not cry   
   Better not pout   
   I’m telling you why   
   Obama Claus is coming to town   

   He’s making a list   
   And checking it twice;   
   Gonna find out Who’s naughty and nice   
   Obama Claus is coming to town   

   He sees you when you’re sleeping   
   He knows when you’re awake   
   He knows if you’ve been bad or good   
   So be good for goodness sake!   

   O! You better watch out!   
   You better not cry   
   Better not pout   
   I’m telling you why   
   Obama Claus is coming to town   
   Obama Claus is coming to town

   You been had.

   From the left rear quadrant.

   Wake the fuck up.

   AG

   • 

     Arthur Gilroy on November 16, 2011 at 12:33 pm

     While you’re at it, go read my late August post The beginnings Of A Domestic CIA? Could be… and the lonked Booman post as well.

     A little teaser:

     Regarding Booman’s post NYPD, a Domestic CIA:

     This is a very interesting topic, Booman. Thank you. Living in NYC and being observant in a certain kind of way…I like to play that lovely game “Spot The Security Guys” both on the street and in other places whenever possible and I have grown quite proficient at it… has already suggested to me that there is something happening along these lines, but I did not really know either the extent of it nor of its explicit CIA connections. Britain’s recent serious consideration regarding hiring U.S. “supercop” William Bratton (The ex-head of the NYC, Boston and LA police force…now there’s a trifecta!) as Scotland Yard’s boss said volumes about the international PermaGov and the links between and among various areas of local police work and a larger system of centralized police business that verges on traditional FBI/MI5 territory.

     The US is rapidly moving towards becoming an entirely new type of police state…media-enforced “consensus” (whatever “consensus” is desired by the Permanent Government at the moment)…backed up by high-level electronic, technological and on-the-ground undercover work against those who are not part of that consensus. In its initial stages this is not entirely a bad way to govern. It certainly beats having Gestapo and SS troops or KGB rounding up millions of members of ethnic and other societal groups that might serve to hide a dissident movement and summarily dispatching them to prisons or worse. But as it grows, the likelihood of real abuse of those powers increases geometrically.

     Which is where we are today.

     —snip—

     It’s on, folks.

     Bet on it.

     The good ol’ US of A

     The Unrelenting Surveillance of America

     Watch.

     They are.

     AG

   • 

     Arthur Gilroy on November 16, 2011 at 12:34 pm

     While you’re at it, go read my late August post The beginnings Of A Domestic CIA? Could be… and the lonked Booman post as well.

     A little teaser:

     Regarding Booman’s post NYPD, a Domestic CIA:

     This is a very interesting topic, Booman. Thank you. Living in NYC and being observant in a certain kind of way…I like to play that lovely game “Spot The Security Guys” both on the street and in other places whenever possible and I have grown quite proficient at it… has already suggested to me that there is something happening along these lines, but I did not really know either the extent of it nor of its explicit CIA connections. Britain’s recent serious consideration regarding hiring U.S. “supercop” William Bratton (The ex-head of the NYC, Boston and LA police force…now there’s a trifecta!) as Scotland Yard’s boss said volumes about the international PermaGov and the links between and among various areas of local police work and a larger system of centralized police business that verges on traditional FBI/MI5 territory.

     The US is rapidly moving towards becoming an entirely new type of police state…media-enforced “consensus” (whatever “consensus” is desired by the Permanent Government at the moment)…backed up by high-level electronic, technological and on-the-ground undercover work against those who are not part of that consensus. In its initial stages this is not entirely a bad way to govern. It certainly beats having Gestapo and SS troops or KGB rounding up millions of members of ethnic and other societal groups that might serve to hide a dissident movement and summarily dispatching them to prisons or worse. But as it grows, the likelihood of real abuse of those powers increases geometrically.

     Which is where we are today.

     —snip—

     It’s on, folks.

     Bet on it.

     The good ol’ US of A

     The Unrelenting Surveillance of America

     Watch.

     They are.

     AG

     • 

       Arthur Gilroy on November 16, 2011 at 12:53 pm

       That duplicate second comment was supposed to go to my article on the subject.

       AG

5. 

   Oui on November 16, 2011 at 4:42 pm

   .

   Thousands of Kuwaitis storm parliament

   (Al Jazeera) – Thousands of Kuwaitis have stormed parliamentary buildings after police and elite forces beat protesters. The protesters marched earlier to Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahmad Al-Sabah’s home to demand his resignation, an opposition MP said.

   “Now, we have entered the house of the people,” said Mussallam al-Barrak, who led the protest along with several other politicians and youth activists also calling for the dissolution of parliament over alleged corruption. The demonstrators broke open the parliament’s gates and entered the main chamber, where they sang the national anthem and left after a few minutes.

   Some activists said they will continue to camp outside parliament until the Al-Sabah is sacked.

   MP’s ACCUSED OF TAKING BRIBES

   (AFP) – This was the first political violence in the oil-rich Gulf state since December, when elite forces beat up protesters and MPs at a public rally, though activists have been holding protests since March. Tension has been building in Kuwait over the past three months after it was alleged that about 16 MPs in the 50-member parliament received about $350 million (259 million euros) in bribes.

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."