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Feds Helped Coordinate Occupy X Crackdowns
Lawrence_Bird writes "The Feds helped break up the Occupy protests by providing advice and assistance from the FBI and DHS. From the article: 'Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said on Monday that her city and others across the country coordinated their crackdowns of Occupy Wall Street camps. Rick Ellis, a Minneapolis-based journalist for Examiner.com, reports that these cities also had the help of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation." In related conspiracy news, apcullen wrote in with a story by Time Magazine guest columnist Naomi Wolf who claims: "Instead of imminent safety issues, the timing of the crackdown was far more likely to do with the fact that the Occupy movement was planning something media-savvy at last: a 'carnival' on Wall Street on Thursday in which protesters would telegenically tell their individual stories of hardship, job loss and disenfranchisement. It is that event that posed a 'safety risk' — to the efforts of Wall Street and the Bloomberg administration to manage the narrative."
We see what our new POTUS, with his new administration, does as head of state. Not that this comes as any surprise considering every thing he's done so far. Naturally, our federal government will continue to make decisions that favor their corporate sponsors, everyone else be damned.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You don't get it. OWS is protesting fraudsters like Christy Mack and Susan Karches and the increasing disparity between wage growth between the upper and lower clases.
Did you really think you could threaten the powers-that-be and not have them turn the full force of the government they control on you at some point? Did you really think that just because they supported protests in the Middle East that they would tolerate them HERE against THEMSELVES? Come on.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You don't understand a thing about this protest do you?
I think you can blame the protesters for that
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
No, you can not go to any country in the world. See other countries are protective of their workers. Go ahead, try to go to India and work. Others have tried and found that it simply can not be done.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Huh? How is it even possible for a small group like that to be "threatening the economy"? No, don't answer that. Real terrorists might read your answer and use it against America.
How could crime have "ramped up" when there were so many cops standing around watching them?
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
They have disrupted wall street
They are gaining support, and crime ins't 'tamping up'. That's hyperbole generated by the media and repeated by people who take what the media says at face value.
When adjusts for the increase in population, crime is the same or lower.
No, they didn't.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This.
I've never seen so much negative press directed at a group of Americans exercising their first amendment rights. OWS clearly scares a lot of people. Even the Westboro Baptist Church doesn't generate this kind of negative publicity.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
having an organized approach and being advised by experts was a lot better then every group of police doing it themselves.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please explain how.
Note that this also implies that all that is left of "the economy" is Wall Street. How telling. How very appropriate.
This is nothing new to protests. They get cleared out all the time (even in the USA) and then regroup. Is the timing suspicious, a little, but you could have picked any day for the clearing and then said it was to harm a future event. I was never in the protests (none were near my location) but I hope they shrug this off and regroup. I also REALLY hope they get some fricken direction and organization. Simply being there isn't enough, they have to organize efforts on specific targets more than the few leaders have so far. Oh, and for the love of God take some control over the 'live feeds' and at least try to find someone with any amount of charisma and social skills to narrate them. The live streams I've watched so far were a painful raping of my eyes and ears.
It seems to me they'd have been more effective staging rallies every Saturday where normal people might show up. The whole Phish-concert-meets-homeless-shelter thing they had going only scares people away. But these are the same people who think giant puppets and drum circles are going to bring down the most powerful people in the world, so logic... isn't their strong suit.
There still exists a whole lot of anger at politicians(occupy K street, anyone?) and bankers, and hopefully someone will figure out how to tap into it and create real, lasting change.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
How could crime have "ramped up" when there were so many cops standing around watching them?
Watch the videos from Oakland. The protesters viciously assaulted the police nightsticks, shields, tear-gas cannisters, etc. with military-grade abdominal muscles, heads, and faces.
I'd tell you to watch the New York videos, but the media blackout was quite effective.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
How much did Michelle Obama's last vacation cost?
Less than GWB, the most frequent vacationer president of all time?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Or why doesn't the OWS crowd complain about the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac receiving millions in bonuses ... at the same time that they're asking the feds for another bailout? :)
I guess that doesn't count.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Oh, I didn't realize only "liberals" were in favor of free speech. Thanks for enlightening us.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Now that's no way to talk about Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.....
The OWS movement in some form was inevitable. A movement to galvanize a response to economic inequality would have developed in some other way if OWS hadn't come along. Now they have a nice long winter to plan around kitchen tables across the USA.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
stolen 900 million dollars of customer money, and if you disagree with Occupy Wallstreet then all i can say is: "get yourself a jar of vaseline go to your bank and give them all your money and bend over"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Apparently you didnt follow any of the coverage of the Tea Party.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
You hope, I fear. I remember 1789 and 1917, I ain't been there, but I've read my history books.
I'd rather hope for a peaceful settlement and a renegotiation of terms.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As someone who works on Wall St (in financial services, but not for a bank/hedgefund/trading desk of any kind), I can tell you definitively that they have not disrupted "Wall St" in any way, other than vaguely disrupting foot traffic on the street that is named Wall. The fundamental thing people seem to not understand is that Wall St is really just a tourist attraction these days. Only a handful of guys still work on the stock exchange floor and almost no trading is done there. And the banks all moved their offices to midtown, Jersey City or Connecticut years ago. If they go through with their Wall St Carnival or whatever the hell they plan, it will accomplish nothing but getting a bunch of people arrested, as they've been told repeatedly that will happen if they do anything on Wall St itself without a proper permit.
During a war, our military can "embed" reporters with front-line combat units.
But with what appears to be a peaceful protest (in NYC), the police have to remove the media from the area.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to live in public or private spaces at the inconvenience of others, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Oh...there it is.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
I am, and I guess a lot of bankers are, too, happy that they decided to turn for the soap kind of liberty box first. They are at the point where they cannot grin and bear it anymore, so they start using the liberty boxes.
I hope they don't have to reach the fourth. I have a gut feeling that they would eventually use it if no other way to reach an agreement can be found.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wasn't this pretty predictable? I can't see how anyone participating in these protests could have imagined that they would be allowed to stay indefinitely without getting rousted by the cops. It's a form of civil disobedience. What is the point of arguing about whether DHS and FBI are involved, about details of the law, about various mayors' secret motivations, etc.? If you do civil disobedience, you expect to get hauled off to jail.
Find free books.
OWS protesters don't scare people. What scares people is what OWS protesters are doing to cities.
What Occupy protesters have done to our cities is insignificant compared to what those on Wall Street have done to our country.
However they aren't just protesting Wall Street, they are protesting capitalism.
Because they understand that in capitalism money makes money faster than honest labor. Capitalism will always end up pooling resources in the hands of the few. This will always give them undue influence in the political process. You can't have a government for the people when you have an economy for the few.
We tried democratic capitalism, it didn't work. We tried totalitarian socialism, it didn't work. We tried totalitarian capitalism, it didn't work. Isn't it about time we tried democratic socialism?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You say that as if it's a bad thing. Ponder it for a moment and realize how much more he could have messed up this country if he wasn't a slacker.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's an enormous difference from "some protest groups are retarded" and "the entire movement needs to be shut down".
There is also an enormous difference between truly resisting arrest and being cited for disorderly conduct/resisting arrest by a police guy who is just itching for a reason to jail you.
Granted, it's hard to keep up a protest, but I applaud them for doing what is constitutionally protected.
The utter refusal of the Occupy protesters to become politically engaged--as in, organizing, canvassing, petitioning, fundraising, and eventually voting--is what dooms them far beyond anything else.
The Tea Party would've been a footnote if not for the fact that they became highly politically organized and actually went after elections. I'm not going to hold my breath that Occupy protesters will try something novel like, say, primarying Congressmen next spring.
But they don't want to change the system from within, they want to destroy it and rebuild from scratch. Whether one agrees with that as a goal or not, it's simply not something that is going to happen by staging street rallies and sit-ins and camping in parks.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Here in the "Occupy Portland" camp, crime and related issues were ramping up significantly. Drug overdoses in the camp went from none, to one per week, to multiple per week. Reports of sexual assaults in the tents and makeshift structures were coming out almost daily. Vandalism to the parks and surrounding businesses went out of control (I haven't gone down there myself, but friends of mine that work for the city tell me the parks will require major repairs and some businesses were closed). There was a heavy police presence, but they couldn't be everywhere and where they weren't stuff happened. The last straw was the elements in the camp seeking confrontation stock piling shields and weapons including molatov cocktails, rocks, sticks and homemade frag grenades made with glass and fireworks. I heard people starting to talk about forming an angry mob with their own sticks and rocks to go down and confront the camps if the police didn't do anything. The police chief expressed much frustration with it being allowed to continue. The mayor was/is sympathetic to the protesters but simply had to go with the national effort to crack down because a mutiny in his own police department and community was brewing.
The thing that annoys me about OWS (aside from their incredulous disbelief that their right to speak does not extend to impeding other people's ability to live their lives) is that they're not even protesting a tangible THING. They're setting up strawmen, knocking them down, and declaring moral victory. They're not arguing against anybody real, but percieved injustices against the abstract. And the bit about that that REALLY pisses me off is that any good points they make are therefor dismissed by 'the other side' as a result, battle lines are drawn, and after that point, and people rarely 'change teams'. Fucking douchebags, all...
So... pretty much politics as usual, eh?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
with an upfront investment of $15 million, [Christy Mack and Susan Karches] quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed
What the fuck?
Those securities were valued at $253.6 million, though the Fed refuses to explain how it arrived at that estimate.
What the fuck!?
Gary Aguirre, a former SEC official who was fired years ago after he tried to interview John Mack in an insider-trading case.
Seriously?
Muammar Qaddafi received more than 70 loans from the Federal Reserve
Holy what the flying shit!?
hundreds of millions of Fed dollars were given out to hedge funds and other investors with addresses in the Cayman Islands[hello, subsidized tax evasion]. Many of those addresses belong to companies with American affiliations, including prominent Wall Street names like Pimco, Blackstone and . . . Christy Mack.
I'm calling the gun store with all my phones at the same time
Create a spoof of the Rose Parade on the same day. For example, a Scooby-Doo float that says "Rax the Rich!". (Except RIAA will get to them before the FBI does.)
Table-ized A.I.
Why do you have to paint the OWS as a monolithic entitity? I am a protester, a peaceful one, and I certainly was not advocating violence just as 99.9% of the protesters were not. Why can you not get it through your thick skulls that a very tiny minority of troublemakers (some anarchists, some planted sabateurs) do NOT REPRESENT the rest of the group? The cause is a legitimate one, and you are using very stupid reasons to turn your brain off to what the movement is about. Your loss, as I don't see anyone else fighting for what is right in this country.
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
You do realize that the first amendment has no qualifiers such as "as long as you never inconvenience anyone", right.
Do us a favor, watch any news source that is not Fox News and come back to the table.
Either your satire is lost on me or more likely given what I've heard from a lots of folks, people actually believe what you're saying and think that is what they are protesting. They are protesting corruption on a never before seen scale, companies that have grown too large for even the federal government to control. Bringing attention to the laws that have been bought and paid for is a noble goal and I'm not sure why you feel the need to belittle people that have the audacity to stand up and speak about the core issues of what is wrong with America these days. Wallstreet has unprecedented control over the country but of course they are not alone which is why you are seeing protests happen all over the place. There are many guilty people.
You don't have to be jobless to see how banking laws have stacked the deck against American citizens. You don't have to be jobless to understand the ridiculous debt required to go into almost any professional field these days. Hell, I went almost 100k in debt to get my degree. I had no trouble paying it off because of a number of factors that simply don't apply to most people. When you are relying on the right people discovering you, landing a good job that actually let's you pay off a targeted college degree becomes like getting picked for the latest NBA draft when they aren't striking that is.
This I got mine so fuck off attitude is extremely prevalent these days and it makes me sad to see what was one of the most generous nations on earth turning on itself because times are tough due to retarded policy decisions targeted toward Reaganomics which was a concept proven false even before it was ever deployed. You have 30 years of bad laws that have been building to this point and a congress unwilling to do anything for the President even when the President is proposing Republican ideals. We're one country, we're supposed to be on the same team, not fighting each other. I hear class warfare again and again from the likes of Fox News and Rush, forgetting that the war has been going on for decades and only now are people disenfranchised enough to speak up about it.
Instead of drowning out their words try listening to them. It's a rally with lots of people so yeah, there are nut jobs, but that doesn't change the heart of the issue which is very real regardless of your membership status in the middle class or above.
> I've never seen so much negative press directed at a group of Americans exercising their first amendment rights.
OWS has pretty much zero to do with the 1st Amendment. So there is your first mistake. Nobody denied them the right to protest. Squatting on property that isn't yours isn't a speech issue, it is a trespass or theft issue. As for negative press, see the Tea Party for a real example of negative press. And they did it all within the system. They bought permits, paid for portapotties, etc. Hell, most left the place cleaner than when they arrived. There were no arrests that I'm aware of at any "tea" event nationwide which is pretty remarkable. They had a coherent agenda that a child could understand though you would never know that from most TV accounts.
Compare and contrast to OWS. No permits, even when they camped places the Tea Party had to buy permits to use. Yea the government really oppresses OWS. Instead of showing up, rallying for an afternoon and airing their grievances they camp in their own filth and would have stayed there until they all died of plague or got chased off. Nobody can clearly say what OWS objected to or what they wanted changed except it smelled of cluelessness and marxism. Well there was one theme strong enough to stand out, most seemed to be losers who were stupid enough to rack up insane debt majoring in things with no market value and now want their debt wiped clean. To which most sane people say "screw you."
> OWS clearly scares a lot of people.
Doubtful. Repels perhaps, disgust or ridicule at best. I see em and say "get a job!" Almost all of em have a degree and the unemployment rate for college grads is only 4% so odds are they could be doing SOMETHING productive.
Democrat delenda est
Apparently you didnt follow any of the coverage of the Tea Party.
The coverage of the Tea Party (at least for the first six-nine months, before people figured out they were a bunch of Koch-funded ex-Birchers) was mainly positive in the mainstream media and followed almost immediately, regardless of what you may have heard from your right-wing blogs.
Now look at the OWS coverage. It was almost completely ignored by the mainstream media for the first week, generally discounted thereafter (They don't have an agenda! They aren't serious!), and then actively denigrated by reprinting local government press releases (Homeless and ex-cons are taking over hippie-land! Something must be done!). Not to mention the fact that mainstream media is still using the Tea Party (and its advocates) as "the" representatives of conservative thought in this country - even though it's popularity even among self-identified conservatives has fallen through the floor.
Corporate, mainstream media is still giving conservatives blowjobs while lobbing brickbats at liberals. There is no "liberal media". Mainstream media is overwhelmingly in the pocket of conservatives and (more importantly) the corporate masters for whom they are the "useful idiots" (ala Stalin).
That is all.
Huh? I didn't see a lot of negative press about the tea party. I've seen a lot of negative news about some of their members, like Illinois' own Joe Walsh, a deadbeat dad who campaigned on "fiscal responsibility", Cain and Perry's tard moments (and Cain's sexual harrassment), stupidities like this. But not about the rallies themselves (well, except the one where they booed the wounded veteran because he wa gay).
Do you have some links to this negative coverage by established news outlets that isn't some blog or left wing rag like Mother Jones?
Free Martian Whores!
> They had a coherent agenda that a child could understand
It's amazing how eloquently that sums up everything that's wrong with the Tea Party.
Unless, you know, people actually pay attention to the behavior of their elected representatives, and refuse to vote for people who go to Washington and promptly start sucking at the corporate lobbying teat. We have ways of removing corrupt officials. We have more than 2 parties in the US. If "The 99%" ACTUALLY WANTED to elect somebody other than the same corporate shills and whores that we keep re-electing to office, it would happen. I don't care how rich the Koch brothers are, if 99% of the population voted for something, and 1% of the population votes for the opposite... by my count, that's a historic landslide win for the 99%.
But something like 60% of the voting-age "99%" don't bother to cast a vote. Because it's easier to bitch than it is to be informed, and involved with the political process.
If people exercised the merest shred of rational thought when it comes to politics, and exercised the barest iota of follow-through on holding their candidates accountable for results, then the government simply wouldn't be for sale to the rich, because it wouldn't matter how rich you are if you're always outvoted.
The root of the problem is the climate in Washington that allows corporations to run amok with impunity, and by extension, the problem is the self-satisfied laziness of the vast majority of "The 99%" that keeps electing the same cast of crooks, whores, and shills to run the government with the same results term after term.
> I can tell you definitively that they have not disrupted "Wall St"
Yet. They were planning to disrupt the major businesses on this Thursday to force Wall Street to close. That was when the hammer had to come down. Even if most actual business has moved elsewhere the imagery would have been bad and if the NYSE actually closed it would have been front page news.
Democrat delenda est
OWS protesters don't intend to scare people. What should scare people is that the protesters are RIGHT.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
They aren't protesting capitalism - they are protesting the government having been totally corrupted by capitalism, to the point where the entire game is rigged. You can malign the OWS as much as you want, and please, by all means, have fun telling whatever stories you want about them. But if some kind of change doesn't happen, the situation for the 99% is only going to get worse.
Well, first off, the FBI and DHS were bound to get involved, the moment the OWS movement decided, or spontaneously morphed into, the occupation of more than 1 location. A national event, elicits a national response, from federal agencies, to some degree.
... all this chaos and conflict, for better or worse, misguided or spot on, was created by the canadian magazine leftists. I suppose they couldn't create nearly as big a mess in their home country, because as I understand it, Canada does not have freedom of speech. You can get arrested in Canada for saying things people don't like or that which could be considered hateful. Somewhat ironic don't you think ?
Certainly the overwhelming majority of the individual protesters, behaved peacefully, or at least, passively, but you cannot rightfully claim *all* participants in the protests, at the protest areas, behaved peacefully, because there is lots of video of protesters and/or people standing within 2 feet of the protesters, behaving violently. Violence has erupted, crimes have been committed, and regardless of whether you support the overall movement, to ignore that violence has not occurred is to ignore reality.
As for people claiming this is a crackdown on free speech, I would like to point out that free speech is safe. What is being cracked down upon, is the location the protesters have decided to exercise their free speech. The protesters, you, I, and anyone else, if given permission by a land owner, to hold an event, can still say whatever they want. Free speech of course, is not inconsequential speech, and there will be various reactions from the public, government, etc. based on what is said. This is normal and unavoidable. There would be no incentive to say anything, if people did not react to it.
When you begin to investigate property laws, you will find they provide the basis for the police taking actions like the eviction of protesters, and the park cleanup. If the protesters, evicted, voluntarily or forcefully, by the police, at the request of the landowner, left anything behind, then it is considered abandoned property. So for all the conspiracy theories and allegations concerning crackdowns, search and seizure, etc., its no different, except in scale, than what would happen if a vagrant pitched on a tent on your front lawn, and started making a mess.
One last reminder
Except the on-going accusations of a bunch of racists, Koch-funding ex-Birchers, "wingnut" birthers, violent milita types, and paid Republican plants?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
This is part of why you're polling worse than the tea party right now. No one listens to an argument while being insulted, even if the argument is correct. Also, nice use of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Are you stupid or do you just don't care? I've seen the videos of the "peaceful" OWS protesters shoving police riding motorcycles to the ground and then yelling "Police Brutality" when the cop arrests them.
There is no Constitutionally Protected right to fuck up the environment and crap in the streets, riot and commit vandalism, is there?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think they call it "Student loans"
You probably live within your means. Many don't.
Debt creates debt. It is very easy for those in debt for that debt to exponentially grow.
It is just like investments- your money will grow quicker than the money you put in it. Debt does the same thing in a negative way- only quicker because instead of 5% interest it is (for some) over 24%.
I feel the frustrations- in the world of marketing telling us we need this and that- it is tempting to feeling like you're entitled to certain lifestyles... ... but when over 50% of the people in the country classified as living below poverty level still manage to spend hundreds of dollars a year on cable-TV- it's easy to see a lot of the money that throw people into mega-debt is not the necessities it is silly luxuries that people feel they are entitled to.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
THe first amendment prohibits congress from regulating or restricting free speech (which one could take issue with free-speech zones over). It DOESNT say you can requisition an entire park for months and set up semi-permenant residences there, especially when the park owner tells you to stop (thats generally called "trespassing", and is NOT protected speech).
Too bad the 1%ers don't read history or they'd be a hell of a lot more scared than you are. But the fact that they (or rather, the government they bought) repeated the 1920s during the Bush years and almost repeated 1929 shows that they've never cracked open a history book in their lives.
BTW, the link is to a volume that was required reading in an undergrad history class I took in the '70s. It's a very good read. It's also scary how it mirrors the times we live in now.
Free Martian Whores!
Squatting on property that isn't yours isn't a speech issue, it is a trespass or theft issue.
That's simply a bogus argument:
1. The reason the protesters were on private property rather than public property is that they'd been barred from using public property.
2. The owners of the private property never objected to the protester's presence there. In order for being on someone else's property to be considered trespassing, the owner has to not want you to be there (e.g. if I walk through a church parking lot and nobody complains, that's not trespassing).
3. The private property in question was actually required, by city ordinance, to be open to the public at all times, so even if they had objected they weren't allowed to do anything about it.
No permits
You don't need a permit to stand on a sidewalk holding a sign, unless you are planning on blocking something. The initial protests were in places the protesters had every right to be without a permit. The police responded with pepper spray.
paid for portapotties, etc.
The Occupy Wall St general meeting which is more-or-less in charge requested permission to have portapotties brought in, paid for by the protesters. The police refused to allow that.
Hell, most left the place cleaner than when they arrived.
When Bloomberg first suggested that people would have to leave the park so it could be cleaned, the protesters responded by cleaning up the park before the deadline.
I am officially gone from
And you were worried that the Patriot Act would be turned on you. Oh wait....
are the last non-violent warning the 1% will get.
They may bottle it up for now (though I doubt they'll succeed at that), but the root causes of OWS and the Tea Party remain and they will build to the point where the 1% are publicly beheaded, mark my words.
The federal government has shown it cannot manage hurricane relief, which is something that was forecast and for which they supposedly train constantly. How will they fare when the country explodes along every fault line at once? Hint: the 1% will be lynched.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I'm going go to out on a limb here and say that the level of animosity directed at OWS is more telling about Slashdot than about the movement itself. Take a look in the mirror for a moment - have you all really had bad firsthand experience with "hippy rapists crapping in the streets downtown" or whatever - or is it more true that OWS has hit a nerve here?
The honest answer is a lot of Slashdotters are either IT people or programmers (or IT people wishing you were programmers) and you ARE part of the 99%. Your jobs CAN and HAVE been outsourced, to a large degree. Your current income level IS a product of outsourcing and capital flight. How much IT support comes from offshore?
How many of you paid a big chunk for a CS degree and are now wondering how you're ever going to pay it off? Still renting? Living with friends? Living at home? Living without health care? Not yet confronted down-the-road looming expenses like kids, a mortgage, your parents' end-of-life care?
Maybe put aside, for a moment, your epigrams about dirty hippies, and think about how OWS is relevant to your own situation.
I think that a lot of the opposition of the Occupy movement comes from exactly what you just said. As a movement, "Occupy" says that they represent the "99%" aka everyone who isn't a Wall Street fatcat. But as soon as anyone does something crazy or advocates violence, it's immediately "Oh, they're not part of us!" The movement seems to claim to be inclusive of everyone until someone does something that paints the movement in a bad light, in which case, they're not with you.
The problem with the structure of the movement (ie having no clear leadership as well as so many differing issues of concern) is that a single person's voice carries just as much weight as anyone elses, even the crazies.
So you're saying that, in the bottom 99% of the country, not a single electable candidate exists? They have to just vote for the Democrats or Republicans offered to them by the rich?
Because I'm pretty sure that if there's that much outrage in 99% of the people, they could easily defeat ANY major-party candidate they wanted to with ease. THEY HAVE 99% of the vote, and then they bitch that "nobody's worth voting for," when the powers-that-be offer them candidates who will (unsurprisingly) preserve the general status quo.
If the 99% can't field a single candidate, or find a way to support & run a candidate whose beliefs are in line with the desires of The 99%, then why are they bothering to protest? They've already conceded their political impotence.
EXACTLY.
How can someone demand that I pay their student loan debt but then get mad when someone else swipes their iPad? Both are just redistributions of wealth, right?
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Cling very, very tightly to that foaming patriotism. It's all you'll have left if things keep going like they are.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I beleive Wall st trading closed briefly when a carraige bomb was set off at the front doors. Since then, I don't think anyhting that's happened physically to the building has mattered, it's all electronic any more (though the 9/11 disaster did cause a great many failovers, the process largely worked).
Only the imagery would be relevent, and it's not the businessmen who would have been lauged at, believe me.
The NY OWSers were rousted because local businesses had had enough. That's how the world works - no vast conspiracy, just local cops knowing who's important when it comes to avoiding a stink.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Apparently you didnt follow any of the coverage of the Tea Party.
Did you? I recall a lot of positive coverage of the tea party, though most of it was from Fox News. Not only did they give them positive coverage, they intentionally tried to make event turn-out to be more substantial than it really was, provided information on their website in order to help people find rallies, and promoted this information on the air.
There wasn't a universal support from the media of course, but Fox made for quite an effective cheerleader.
" especially when the park owner tells you to stop (thats generally called "trespassing", and is NOT protected speech)."
Private parks? If that's the case, then yes, but if they're public parks, then no.
Side note.. I've never seen a private park before(other than theme/fun parks).
GAH! You are willfully ignorant if you don't know what their agenda is at this point.
They are NOT! pissed off about people making money. Communists are the extreme minority of the protesters.
They are pissed about corruption in the system that disenfranchises the vast majority of people for the personal gain of a handful of plutocrats.
The vast majority of them don't give a damn about rich people being rich. The problem is that being rich means you can make other people poor.
What do we want done about it? Campaign finance reform for one. Balancing the budget by eliminating tax breaks and raising taxes on those most capable of providing the burden. Cutting graft and corrupt influences from the government.
Not an occupier, but have been down there at Occupy Portland on and off almost since it began.
>Drug overdoses in the camp went from none, to one per week, to multiple per week.
This could be true. It reflects Portland's general drug problems, and is not really high for the number of people there. Trying to pin it on the protest is not really honest.
>Reports of sexual assaults in the tents and makeshift structures were coming out almost daily.
Were these reports from within the camp, or from opponents outside of it? We are talking about regular camping tents set up in a public space, not really the kind of place where sexual assault would go easily unnoticed.
>Vandalism to the parks and surrounding businesses went out of control
I saw one spray paint graffiti on a wall, which is unfortunate but not out of character for the area. The protesters brought plenty of cardboard to make signs with, and almost all the messages and art were done on boards, not surrounding structures.
>I haven't gone down there myself
Well, that explains a lot
>the parks will require major repairs and some businesses were closed
The grass in the park died due to the tents, and I think the restrooms were clogged. However, the occupation did set up a fund to pay for that, I have no idea whether they have paid out of it though. As for businesses, I don't know of any that closed, though the 7-11 reported some shoplifting.
>The last straw was the elements in the camp seeking confrontation stock piling shields and weapons including molatov cocktails, rocks, sticks and homemade frag grenades made with glass and fireworks.
Where did you hear this, on Fox News? I did not see anything of that sort going on. The fuel for the generators was placed in a locked cage at the suggestion of the fire marshal a couple of weeks ago.
>I heard people starting to talk about forming an angry mob with their own sticks and rocks to go down and confront the camps if the police didn't do anything.
Do your friends beat up homeless people for fun?
>The mayor was/is sympathetic to the protesters but simply had to go with the national effort to crack down because a mutiny in his own police department and community was brewing.
The mayor and powers that be are simply trying to sweep problems of the city under the rug, or disperse them where they don't have to see them. The homeless problem, the drug problem, the unemployment problem are all problems of the city as a whole, but they want to be able to ignore that so they don't want a single, highly visible concentration of it.
they served a purpose for those who started them (an outfit in Canada of all places). The Democratic party needed something which they could take over to present the idea that there was an actual liberal version of the Tea Party. Unfortunately they did not get this. Why? Simple, it was not a true spontaneous movement, it was fabricated and being such it was susceptible to being corrupted by those who wanted it for something else.
So yeah, it only went on as long as it got GOOD press. As soon as the seedy side started being published everywhere it was toast.
You cannot fabricate a change in politics. You can certainly try to co-opt one as Republicans attempted to do with the Tea Party but the Tea Party's genuineness is provable by the fact that old school politicians (Read Washington Republicans) despise its influence.
There may truly be a liberal equivalent but we will never know because the powers that be on the Left refuse to allow it to rise on its own because they cannot allow to happen to them what the Tea Party did to the Republican establishment which is, the people are more important than the party.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Read his post again,
I haven't gone down there myself, but friends of mine that work for the city tell me
He hasn't been down there, but he seems to have been modded to +5 at this time anyways. Let's see if my reply to him will, given that I HAVE been there.
I suspect that anything that doesnt mesh with people's conception of "rag tag group of oppressed and innocent protesters" will never get modded up
Apparently not. Look at the MS or Apple threads, there are always people who get modded up for having a contrarian view.
Fox of course was promoting the Tea Party activists as much as possible, but the rest were either apathetic, or downright hostile like MSNBC (Keith Olbermann was particularly vile).
Be honest, it was hard to get the same statement from two OWS protesters as to what the protests were about in the beginning. Since it is a centralized movement, they had a committee finally agree to a list of demands a month after the protests started.
The Tea Party, founded as grassroots, has no command structure. However, various people have donated money for events and tried to influence or coopt it. Occupy Wall Street was started by Adbusters with other liberal help, and underwent three months of planning before the first protest (the domain was registered in June). George Soros' money is showing itself everywhere in the Occupy movement, with the likes of MoveOn.org, Res Publica and the Tides Foundation coordinating financial and material support and publicity nationwide. Leftist union money and support has been there from the beginning, ordering members to show for protests and providing other material support.
> How can someone demand that I pay their student loan debt but then get mad when someone else swipes their iPad?
Want an even funnier one? They have an OWS event ongoing at Harvard... only Harvard students involved. What are the odds of finding ONE student there who isn't a member in good standing of the 1%? To be admitted to Harvard is to automatically be admitted to the ranks of the 1%.
Democrat delenda est
It sounds like they need to disrupt wallstreet digitally.
this would actually be something good for anonymous's army of script kiddies to apply themselves to.
Essentially, you flood the automatic trade daemons with false quote data. You don't do this the way your typical con-man does, which is to selectively quote false prices to change the aggregate stock prices in such a way as to sweeten his own investment opportunities; instead, you selectively quote false prices to initiate a bear market, and drive down trading, if not encourage wholesale shorting of major stocks. Banks create money from thin air, this would return that conjured money back to the void whence it came.
Alternatively, if you don't want to have a hand in destroying the world economy on such a drastic scale, you could instead work from the standpoint of simply creating congestion. Remember those stories of new fiber runs being laid for wallstreet traffic, because a few ms of latency can translate to millions of dollars of lost trades? Bingo. Latency would injure wallstreet.
Both approaches lend themselves well to scriptkiddies. Anonymous is missing an epic opportunity.
Your statements are asinine and you should probably reconsider before making yourself look more like a fool.
Given that we're on Slashdot and have had many stories about engineers jumping over to IT because all the work is being outsourced your view of reality is stunning. Given that I went 100k in debt getting a software engineering degree, and that I actually landed a job that paid well enough to justify it. I can't comprehend how you could imagine a world in which that makes sense? People don't have a choice of schools, they all cost a lot if you want a quality education. This is why you're seeing the rise of community colleges which are more cost effective. Certifications cost a lot so schools get more and more expensive as they have to hire PHDs to achieve certain levels of certifications. Community colleges are already getting a lot more expensive so all the options are disappearing fast. Then of course their is ever more dwindling support for federal funding of public universities causing them to raise tuition further.
I have several friends that graduated med school over the last few years and they are similar freaking out with 180k in debt on the light side.
Education and healthcare never make sense as for profit ventures, this is always the end result. Only the rich can then afford an education and then we're back to where we started.
Fortunately we're talking about fundamental issues which have been grossly neglected. Perhaps with enough light getting shined on the situation people will start to realize that it doesn't have to be that way and we don't even have to be communists to change it!
Well, others have already responded to most of your post, but I wanted to respond to the pervasive myth that there's no clear goals. There are. But the media refuses to cover them. Just like you said they did to the Tea Party.
Go down to Wall Street or any of these other occupations and you will figure out the goals pretty quickly. Increase taxes on the wealthiest 1% and on major corporations (or at least close loopholes.) End the wars and bring our troops home. And end unlimited corporate campaign contributions (or possibly private campaign funding entirely.) Those are the goals. And they're extremely obvious if you set foot in any of the Occupy protests I've been to (Pittsburgh and NYC)
But then, I've sat there and watched the mainstream media -- I've watched cameramen literally walk up, ignore the hundred gathered around while someone is speaking about all these national issues, and instead spend ten or twenty minutes taking various shots of the five people playing drums and dancing, intentionally constructing their shots so that the people actually talking about these issues won't even appear in the background.
The movement has a clear message. But of course the media doesn't want you to see it.
"The owners of the private property never objected to the protester's presence there." This is completely untrue. Brookfield Properties, owner of the property, constantly objected and pled for the city to do something about the squatting. The rest of your post makes good points, but you're not entitled to make up facts.
I'm unaware of this "attitude problem" that is apparently keeping you from supporting OWS. I see a lot of (civil) disagreements at the protests, and surprising amounts of consensus among people from different backgrounds. Most people are there representing THEIR OWN OPINIONS on what is wrong, and there is very little active discouragement of different opinions. Also, calling yourself a member of the "Adult World" is pretty damned childish. Who talks like that? We're trying to steer the national conversation in this country towards VERY adult topics, but find ourselves fighting against outright lies on the one hand (false attacks on the protesters) and the usual bread and circuses on the other (reality TV, celebrity news, FUD about foreign threats, anything that comes out of Herman Cain's mouth, etc). So you disagree about the camps. Fine. I suppose you would have told Rosa Parks that she was being an arrogant **tch who ought to just sit in the back too, right? You do understand what civil disobedience is?
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
How can an communist complain when someone steals 'their' stuff? Hey, there is no such thing as private property, man.
There is a difference between private property - that which is abstractly recognized as yours by the society to do as you see fit; and personal property - that which physically belongs to you / is used by you. Communism purports to do away with the former, but keeps the latter - the idea is that you shouldn't be able to own, say, a factory single-handedly (because you can't use it alone), but a car is perfectly fine.
Most of the printed flyers passed out as OWS NY were from gorups that self-identified as communist. What do you expect people to think?
Now how do you know *most* of the flyers were from self-identified communist groups? Did you do a study, collecting all the flyers you could then doing a statistical analysis? Or did you just hear some guy say it and figure it sounded pretty truthy?
Now I strolled past Occupy Boston and the signs ran from obscure but substantive ("Re-enact Glass-Steagall!"), to the plain obscure ("We are the 99%"). I'm sure there were plenty of socialists down there, but the only references I saw could possibly be ironic ("Support Socialist Programs like Education.").
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What a load of crap.
The Tea Party (which is nothing you say it is, and I'm calling you out as a liar) has had nothing but crap from the mainstream left-tilted media that stands up and lies through its teeth about being objective.
The Occupy movement - which seems to have no agenda other than "People shouldn't be allowed to be rich, no matter how hard-working, smart, and successful they are" - and is definitely the 1% of extreme leftists and totally out of step with the 99% of normal people - has had mostly favorable coverage from that same media.
The Tea Party is about maximum liberty and minimum government. The Occupy fringe is the exact opposite - they are about maximum government and minimum liberty.
I find it interesting how you say the occupy movement has no goals and then you say they want a people's republic. Picking out a sub-group's goals and expanding them to occlude the rest of the group is greatly oversimplifying.
You are certainly right that from the beginning the tea party was better organized and comprised mostly of older people. But i will argue that comparing occupy to tea party is going off on a tangent. Because group B is better organized than Group A doesn't mean that A doesn't have a point or reason to exist.
I was simply pointing out that you can't lump all of occupy under a hippie, college student, or unemployed banner. They are a very diverse group. Their reasons for being there are also diverse. Occupy appears to be on the opposite end of the spectrum from the tea party. Where tea party people need to be home before 9:30, the occupy people never leave. It is easy to see how a tea party person would call occupy hippies and how occupy calls tea party aged yuppies.
btw, i consider both movements to be a great thing. I just wish there was better mainstream coverage. Youtube seems to be the best place to find video's for them.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Wallstreet's exchange services have failover connections, in the event that primary ones go down.
Yes, saturating dedicated fiber is expensive.
A rented backhoe is not.
Prof. Domhoff say win Democratic primaries with egalitarian ideas:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Want an even funnier one? They have an OWS event ongoing at Harvard... only Harvard students involved. What are the odds of finding ONE student there who isn't a member in good standing of the 1%? To be admitted to Harvard is to automatically be admitted to the ranks of the 1%.
I'm a member of the 1% and I damn well support the OWS movement because this country needs fixing for all 100% of us and they are the only people even trying to talk about it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
and where is this money coming from that we are just giving to everyone every month.. do we expect them do do anything for that money or simply being an american grants them the money? but what about the illegals?? does just being in america grant them the money? how do we decide how much every american needs??
sure it would be nice if we could all just give everyone everything they want...the world dont work that way
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You go to a restaurant. Your food taste terrible. Do you not complain even though you have no plan to replace the chef and his recipe?
The first step in fixing something is recognizing that it is broken.
Are you kidding? More than 70% of attendees received financial aid in 2010. Are you suggesting that a Harvard english major is a member of the one percent?
The corner of a round room
Analogous to what you said:
I'm fairly certain the constitution says "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."
It doesn't say anything about publishing a book. A book is writing. Speech is out loud. Why can't you just read your book out loud? Then it would be "speech." Convenient, no, but that's the price of admission.
Really, what you said doesn't make any sense. An occupation is an assembly, just as a book is a form of speech. The constitution does not say "may only assemble for 8 hours" or "may only assemble during the day" or "may only assemble so long as nobody is annoyed," what it says is: "Congress shall make no law...abridging...the right of the people peaceably to assemble."
The Bill of Rights has no price of admission.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.