Neither law enforcement nor the public can afford to be lulled into thinking that the Occupy movement, its encampments mostly gone, is no longer a concern -- especially with some Occupiers taking cues from terroristic Weather Underground predecessors.Did you see it?
Rusty Weiss details for America's Survival Inc. (usasurvival.org) a March 3 event in upstate New York. Promoted and attended by Occupy Albany and hosted by a co-founder of the radical group, it celebrated an imprisoned Weatherman terrorist's new book.
The preliminary injunction hearing will begin at 9:00 am on Tuesday, January 10th in room 800 of the City-County Building in Downtown Pittsburgh. At 3:30 pm, Occupy Pittsburgh will begin demonstrating outside of the City-County Building. When Court lets out, there will be a brief Press Conference including an opportunity for Q & A with a member of the Occupy Pittsburgh legal team. Occupiers will then march from the City County Building to BNY Mellon for a demonstration followed by a rally at People’s Park and a musical performance by Jasiri X.In addition to asking the public to attend the rally and march, Occupy Pittsburgh is asking the public to do the following to show their support:
• Hold non-violent demonstrations against BNY Mellon around the world (the bank’s corporate headquarters is One Wall Street, New York City). As a multinational banking institution BNY Mellon has offices around the globe including offices in; Boston, London, Moscow, Sydney, Cairo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and many other population centers around the worldAccording to Occupy Pittsburgh, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Cleveland, Occupy Philadelphia and other Occupy groups across the U.S. will take action in support of Occupy Pittsburgh today. This includes a demonstration by Occupy Wall Street in front of One Wall Street, the New York headquarters of BNY Mellon.
• Wear bandannas, Guy Fawkes masks, or similar coverings to express solidarity with the anonymous and amorphous “99%” in general and the 50 Jane Does and 50 John Does named in the lawsuit in particular. This, of course, is merely a suggestion subject to the comfort level of those involved;
• Engage in autonomous direct actions ***;
• Send mail supporting Occupy Pittsburgh to BNY Mellon’s Pittsburgh office (500 Grant Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15258) with the return address of #1 People’s Park, Pittsburgh PA 15219; and
• Temporarily change your addresses on Facebook and other web sites to #1 People’s Park, Pittsburgh PA 15219
***Occupy Pittsburgh and our allies will not endorse, plan, or coordinate any unlawful or violent actions.
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Several dozen Occupy DC protesters rolled out the human red carpet for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s holiday party at their Washington, DC headquarters this evening. The Chamber is the nation’s largest corporate lobby group. As guests entered, protesters shouted, “You walk on our rights, now walk on us!” encouraging attendees to trample on the activists laying underneath the red carpet painted with “99%.” No one did, sadly, at least while ThinkProgress was in attendance.By the way, Thinkprogress is also reporting that:
[T]he Republican National Committee will hold its annual holiday party at the supposedly non-partisan U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Though the Chamber of Commerce has tried to assert its independence, events like this reinforce the notion that, as Politico’s Ken Vogel notes, the corporate trade association might “be thought of as a GOP arm.” In 2010, the Chamber was the top outside spending group, buying over $32 million worth of advertising, almost exclusively backing Republicans.As an aside, I have to point out what one of the commenters at thinkprogress noted before I did:
Wait a minute, wait a minute! This is a "Holiday Party", not a "Christmas Party"? What will the "War on Christmas" crowd think of THAT?I wonder now if the good Christians at the American Family Association will include either the RNC or the Chamber of Commerce on their "Naughty or Nice" list.
My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.By the way, Occupy LA is where the LAPD went undercover:
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”
As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.
Los Angeles police used nearly a dozen undercover detectives to infiltrate the Occupy LA encampment before this week's raid to gather information on the anti-Wall Street protesters' intentions, according to media reports Friday.So their HUMINT was wrong, I guess.
None of the officers slept at the camp, but they tried to blend in during the weeks leading up to the raid to learn about plans to resist or use weapons against police, a police source told the Los Angeles Times. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
The undercover work yielded information that some protesters were preparing bamboo spears and other potentially dangerous weapons in advance of an expected eviction, none of which were used, according to the City News Service, which first reported the story.
Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.And then:
Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.
This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.
Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.
For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdingsIn case you're keeping score:
When the late Gil Scott-Heron said that "the revolution would not be televised," he spoke too soon. There was no way that the performance poet could conceive of the era of the viral video or know that it was just around the corner.In the event you haven't heard it, here's what Tony was writing about:
Last Friday, a cop at the University of California, Davis forgot the cardinal rule every officer should have internalized since the Rodney King debacle -- if there's a camera around, then police brutality will be televised. There are too many witnesses and too many cameras in the environment to ever give another officer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to violence on civilians. We know from painful experience that there are too many liars wearing badges to pretend otherwise.This is what he was writing about:
Much has been said about the militarization of the police in this country and how the "war on drugs" mentality has trickled down into society and college policing.I'd always wondered whether the phrase "The revolution will not be televised" had any deeper meaning. With the lyrics that open with:
It also doesn't help that the Bush administration considered torture and sadism legitimate tools of coercion and social control. The cops at the bottom always take their cues from the cops at the top. When administration and military officials are amoral, then it is too much to expect men and women many levels below their pay grade to respect the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.
The police claim that they're not choosing sides in the dispute but are simply enforcing the law. Former Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a great response to such moral evasiveness: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
You will not be able to stay home, brother.It points to a revolution that will not be a media event. But Scott-Heron points to something deeper:
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.
