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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"
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."
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.
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,
Now that's no way to talk about Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.....
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right, because when stamping out freedom, you want to do it in the most professional and organized way possible.
I suppose this is "a lot better" from the perspective of the fascists who want the protestors to disappear, but from the perspective of someone who's tired of the robber barons running the show, this is definitely worse.
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.
Actually, it is only civil disobedience if you ignore the order to vacate. However, even those who did vacate were arrested outside the park as they were leaving. So, yes, once lawfully ordered to leave, some did refuse the order and were arrested. Many more were arrested, however, that had already left.
As for DHS and FBI involvement, it matters, because it is limited federal resources being applied to local problems. Again, the only law being broken was for the failure to leave when told to do so. The FBI and DHS involvement occurred prior to this. Is it really the role of government police authority to be used on citizens when no federal laws are being violated?
The irony is that people camping out in the park may be an embarrassment to city officials, but doesn't cost them much. Arresting and processing them through the legal system is a whole different story.
> 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.
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.
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.
If you do civil disobedience, you expect to get hauled off to jail.
Exactly. To add, the only way civil disobedience "works" is if people can get enough like minded people together so that when the arrests happen, there is not enough space to hold everyone in the jails and the cost of prosecuting all of the arrested people outweighs the benefits of prosecution.
What the OWS folks really need to do is organize a huge, jurisprudence education campaign to inform people of their rights to judge the law itself. That way if the state decides to prosecute, they will find themselves saddled with juries who will not convict. THAT will deliver the message that the people stand with OWS and their goals. Once the state loses control of the judiciary and their ability to enforce unpopular laws, then we will have real change.
This isn't civil disobedience. This is a constitutionally protected peaceable assembly. The ones breaking the law here are the city governments and police.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm really getting tired of all these "ZOMG, Poop!" comments. The protesters tried to bring in porta-potties but were denied. If you want to bitch at anybody about the terrible health conditions, bitch at the city for not allowing the protesters to provide the sensible sanitation arrangements that they tried to.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
OWS on the other hand is a genuine grass roots movement without any leadership, without media savvy, without spin doctors, without even self-policing to root out the hooligans and vandals who are attracted to any protest movement. Time will tell, which one is real and which one is astro-turf.
The 1% had even stronger media control, and even stronger stranglehold on the government machinery in the past. They were broken. If the 1% are smart they will voluntarily and peacefully allow the taxes to go up and bring deficit under control in a more equitable manner. If not, it is going to be a lot more ugly than a bunch of hippies camping out in some public park.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact