| THE HANDSTAND | 2ndWINTER2011 November-December |
occupy
wall street
reports
UPDATE:9.11.2011
video, Keith Olbermann
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoG9PmdGaT8&feature=player_embedded
Mayor Bloomberg we need you to keep on
making mistakes!!
Hello friends.
The rhetoric of this video lauds freedom of dissent:
But what is the emerging nationwide reality here in America as Occupy Wall Street explodes nationwide!?
If you have not yet scene footage of
the brutal attack by Oakland police on the Occupy
Oakland branch or your and my worldwide movement for
peace, justice and economic fairness here is a disturbing
video clip: Video
of Oakland police attack . Now watch again from
another angle. What do you feel as this Heroic
Navy Sailor Stands Tall In the Middle of Oakland Tear Gas
Firestorm Holding Up the Constitution and a Flag:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/unbelievable-must-see-video-heroic-navy-sailor-stands-tall-in-the-middle-of-oakland-tear-gas-firestorm-%E2%80%A6-holding-up-the-constitution-and-a-flag.html
?
Here is more on the implications of this attack: http://socialistworker.org/2011/11/01/we-are-all-scott-olsen .
Are your “Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!” yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_qgVn-Op7Q ? Then read below to find several opportunities to stand in solidarity with those under attack in Oakland and elsewhere.
Peace and Blessings,
Christopher
Christopher Gruener MA, LMHC
617-965-6552
www.crossroads-counseling-services.com
PS Don't worry. Something wonderful is about to happen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PziOfL29rOo ! In fact it is happening already!!
Action Step Opportunity for Solidarity
THE LIE
The Lie is everywhere
And it is Silent.
The Lie may not be spoken of.
The Lie may not be spoken.
Or thought.
The Lie is everywhere.
And it is Silent.
Until we hold hands with billions
And shout the Simple Hidden Truth,
The Lie is a Lie!
Yes, a Lie!
Am I dead as I write this?
You too as you read it?
If not, Why not?
Sisters, brothers of all Humankind--
Let us join hands as One!
Wall Street's
Wars
Fallujah Veteran: 'I Served The 1%'
Thoughts
on the role of veterans in the Occupy movement
By Ross Caputi
November 08, 2011 "Information Clearing
House"
- I did not serve my country in Iraq; I served the 1%. It
was on their behalf that I helped lay siege to Fallujah,
helped kill thousands of civilians, helped displace
hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and helped
destroy an entire city. My "service" served
Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and other
multinational corporations in Iraq.
My family in Massachusetts is not safer because of my service, and Iraqis are not freer. I helped oppress Iraqis in a manner far more brutal than what has been experienced by the Occupy movement at the hands of the New York and Oakland police departments.
I was an occupier and am now an #occupier. I once served the 1%, but now try to serve the 99%. That is why I must speak up when I see the Occupy movement being led astray by the same nationalism and “Ameri-centrism,” the same thoughtless praises for U.S. troops and veterans, and the same hypocrisy that led us into the so-called “War On Terror” and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many of us have joined the Occupy movement, because we identify as members of the 99%, but the media only began to highlight our participation after Cpl. Scott Olsen was shot in the head by the Oakland police with a projectile on Oct. 25. Olsen was immediately rushed to the emergency room, and his name soon became a rallying cry. A nationwide call was put out for vigils in solidarity with Olsen.
Going to war is not "serving our country"
The Occupy movement was quick to highlight Olsen's "service" and his two deployments to Iraq. The New York Times noted that "his injury—and the oddity of a Marine who faced enemy fire only to be attacked at home—has prompted an outpouring of sympathy, as well as calls for solidarity."
Although Olsen appears to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—he is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace,—the Occupy movement's response to his attack has revealed ambivalence on these issues.
The Occupy movement has glossed over the irony that Olsen was put in the hospital by some of the same tactics that his Marine Corps has used against Iraqis. It has not drawn a connection between what happened to Olsen and what happened to Iraqis who peacefully protested against the U.S. occupation of their country—like in Fallujah on April 28, 2003, when the U.S. fired into a crowd of protesters and killed 13 civilians. Countless other identical incidents have taken place, even today as Iraqis also protest unemployment, corruption and lack of services.
When the Occupy
movement mentions Olsen's "service" without
clarifying who he served, they hide the lies of the 1%
and ignore the more than 1 million dead Iraqis, the
millions of refugees and orphans, and the dramatic rise
in cancers and birth defects in Iraq.
We must stand for the most affected victims
of Wall Street
I watched a Youtube video the other day of U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Shamar Thomas shouting at the NYPD: "If you want to go kill or hurt people, go to Iraq. Why are you hurting U.S. citizens?" as a crowd of Occupy Wall Street protesters cheered him on.
Over 2.5 million people have watched this video, and Thomas appeared on Rosie O'Donnell's television show and made several appearances on Keith Olbermann. Everyone championed his "service" and decried police brutality against U.S. citizens. Nobody questioned the dismissal of the value of Iraqi lives.
We should all decry police brutality wherever it rears its ugly head. Yet police brutality and the murder of innocent civilians in foreign countries in service of the 1% are both moral issues, and to decry one without decrying the other suggests a serious disconnect.
These attitudes in our movement are deeply troubling to me. We decry economic injustice at home, but stay silent about the unjust occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. We decry police brutality at home, while the U.S. war machine brutalizes innocent people abroad. We need to understand that Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Libyans and everyone else who has fallen victim to the 1% and its war machine are part of the 99%, too.
We can love our country, but we should not value American lives more than any other. We can set up a Scott Olsen Support Fund, but we should not ignore the rise in cancers and birth defects that U.S. weapons have caused in Iraq.
Veterans have an important role to play in this movement, but we are not heroes because of our participation in the wars, and it is shameful for anyone to use us to appeal to patriotism; that only serves the 1%. What we have to offer this movement is a first-hand account of what the 1% has done all over the world at the expense of the 99%. We as veterans are in a better position than anyone else to fight against the dangerous beliefs that put veterans on a pedestal. It is our responsibility to speak out against injustice, no matter where it occurs in this world.
The author is a Marine Corps veteran of the second siege of Fallujah and a member of March Forward!. He is the founder of the 'Justice for Fallujah Project' which will host various events during the second annual 'Remember Fallujah Week,' Nov. 16-19. Click here for more information.
The
most common and effective mode of news repression is
omission.
By
Michael Parenti
November 09, 2011 "Information Clearing
House"
Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011,
a protest movement spread across the United States to 70
major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar
actions emerged in scores of other nations.
For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream
media along with NPR did what they usually do with
progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the
same media that had given the Tea Party supporters
saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them
“a major political force.”
The most common and effective mode of news repression is
omission. By saying nothing or next to nothing about
dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents,
the media consign them to oblivion. When the Occupy
movement spread across the country and could no longer be
ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative
method: trivialization and marginalization.
So we heard that the protestors were unclear about what
they were protesting and they were “far removed from
the mainstream.” Media cameras focused on the clown
who danced on Wall Street in full-blown circus costume,
and the youths who pounded bongo drums: “a carnival
atmosphere” “youngsters out on a spree,”
with “no connection to the millions of middle
Americans” who supposedly watched with puzzlement
and alarm.
Such coverage, again, was in sharp contrast to the
respectful reportage accorded the Tea Party. House
Majority Leader, the reactionary Republican Eric Cantor,
described the Occupy movement as “growing mobs.”
This is the same Cantor who hailed the Tea Party as an
unexcelled affirmation of democracy.
The big November 2 demonstration in Oakland that
succeeded in closing the port was reported by many media
outlets, almost all of whom focused on the violence
against property committed by a few small groups. Many of
those perpetrators were appearing for the first time at
the Oakland site. Some were suspected of being undercover
police provocateurs. Their actions seemed timed to
overshadow the successful shutdown of the nation’s
fourth largest port.
Time and again, the media made the protestors the issue
rather than the things they were protesting. The
occupiers were falsely described as hippie holdovers and
mindless youthful activists. In fact, there was a wide
range of ages, socio-ethnic backgrounds, and lifestyles,
from homeless to well-paid professionals, along with
substantial numbers of labor union members. Far from
being a jumble of confused loudmouths prone to violence,
they held general assemblies, organized themselves into
committees, and systematically took care of encampment
questions, food, security, and sanitation.
One unnoticed community protest was Occupy Walnut Creek. For those who don’t know, Walnut Creek is a comfortable conservative suburb in northern California (with no known record of revolutionary insurrections). Only one local TV station gave Occupy Walnut Creek brief attention, noting that about 400 people were participating, average age between 40 and 50, no clowns, no bongos. Participants admitted that they lived fairly prosperous lives but still felt a kinship with the millions of Americans who were enduring an economic battering. Here was a contingent of affluent but rebellious “middle Americans” yet Walnut Creek never got mentioned in the national media, as far as I know.
The Occupy movement has promulgated a variety of messages. With a daring plunge into class realities, the occupiers talk of the 1% who are exploiting the 99%, a brilliant propaganda formula, simple to use, yet saying so much, now widely embraced even by some media commentators. The protestors carried signs condemning the republic’s terrible underemployment and the empire’s endless wars, the environmental abuses perpetrated by giant corporations, the tax loopholes enjoyed by oil companies, the growing inequality of incomes, and the banksters and other gangsters who feed so lavishly from the public trough.
Some occupiers even denounced capitalism as a system and hailed socialism as a humane alternative. In all, the Occupy movement revealed an awareness of systemic politico-economic injustices not usually seen in U.S. protests. Remember, the initial and prime target was Wall Street, finance capital’s home base.
The mainstream news outlets not only control opinions but even more so opinion visibility, which in turn allows them to limit the parameters of public discourse. This makes it all the more imperative for ordinary people to join together in demonstrations, hoping thereby to maximize the visibility and impact of their opinions. The goal is to break through the near monopoly of conservative orthodoxy maintained by the “liberal” media.
So demonstrations are important. They have an energizing effect on would-be protestors, bringing together many who previously had thought themselves alone and voiceless. Demonstrations bring democracy into the streets. They highlight issues that have too long been buried. They mobilize numbers, giving a show of strength, reminding the plutocracy perched at the apex that the pyramid is rumbling.
But demonstrations should evolve into other forms of action. This has already been happening with the Occupy movement. It is more than a demonstration because its protestors did not go home at the end of the day. In substantial numbers they remained downtown, putting their bodies on the line, imposing a discomfort on officialdom just by their numbers and presence.
At a number of Occupy sites there have been civil disobedience actions, followed by arrests. In various cities the police have been unleashed with violent results that sometimes have backfired. In Oakland ex-Marine Scott Olsen was hit by a police teargas canister that busted his skull and left him hospitalized and unable to speak for a week. At best, he faces a long slow recovery. The day after Olsen was hit, hundreds of indignant new protestors joined the Occupy Oakland site. Police brutality incites a public reaction, often bringing more people out, just the opposite of what officials want.
Where does this movement go? What is to be done? The answers are already arising from the actions of the 99%:
- Discourage
military recruitment and support conscientious
objectors. Starve the empire of its legions.
Organize massive tax resistance in protest of
corrupt, wasteful, unlawful, and destructive
Pentagon spending
- Transfer
funds from corporate banks to credit unions and
community banks. Support programs that assist the
unemployed and the dispossessed. It was Giulio
Tremonti, Italy’s embattled finance minister
who declared: “Salvate il popolo, non le
banche” (“Save the people, not the
banks”). It would be nice to hear such
sentiments emanating from the U.S. Treasury
Department or the White House.
- Coordinate
actions with organized labor. Unions still are
the 99%’s largest and best financed groups.
Consider what was done in Oakland: occupiers
joined with longshoremen, truckers, and other
workers to close the port. Already there are
plans for a general strike in various communities.
Such actions improve greatly if organized labor
is playing a role.
- We need new
electoral strategies, a viable third party,
proportional representation, and even a new
Constitution, one that establishes firm rules for
an egalitarian democracy and is not a rigmarole
designed to protect the moneyed class. The call
for a constitutional convention (a perfectly
legitimate procedure under the present U.S.
Constitution) seems long overdo.
- Perhaps most of all, we need ideological education regarding the relationship between wealth and power, the nature of capitalism, and the crimes of an unbridled profit-driven financial system. And again the occupiers seem to be moving in that direction: in early November 2011, people nationwide began gathering to join teach-ins on “How the 1% Crashed the Economy.”
We need to explicitly invite the African-American, Latino, and Asian communities into the fight, reminding everyone that the Great Recession victimizes everyone but comes down especially hard on the ethnic poor.
We need to educate ourselves regarding the beneficial realities of publicly owned nonprofit utilities, publicly directed environmental protections, public nonprofit medical services and hospitals, public libraries, schools, colleges, housing, and transportation--all those things that work so well in better known in some quarters as socialism.
There is much to do. Still it is rather impressive how the battle is already being waged on so many fronts. Meanwhile the corporate media ignore the content of our protest while continuing to fulminate about the occupiers’ violent ways and lack of a precise agenda.
Do not for one moment think that the top policymakers and plutocrats don’t care what you think. That is the only thing about you that wins their concern. They don’t care about the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink, or how happy or unhappy or stressed and unhealthy or poor you might be. But they do want to know your thoughts about public affairs, if only to get a handle on your mind. Every day they launch waves of disinformation to bloat your brains, from the Pentagon to Fox News without stint.
When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen. It is already happening. It may eventually fade away or it may create a new chapter in our history. Even if it does not achieve its major goals, the Occupy movement has already registered upon our rulers the anger and unhappiness of a populace betrayed.
Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts. www.michaelparenti.org/
Why
Are So Many In The Media Threatened by Occupy Wall Street
By Danny Schechter
October 26, 2011 "Information Clearing
House"
-- The other night, I ran into a veteran journalist, a
writer who I always considered was among the
“plugged in.” Yet when I told him I was
reporting on Occupied Wall Street, he plugged out, and
stared at me cluelessly. “What do they want,”
he asked, echoing the questioned raised endlessly by TV
pundits and editorial commentators.He didn’t seem to
know or care who “they” are, or why they have
taken to living in parks to make their point.He and his
colleagues seem to be saying that to understand
what’s going on, it all be first compressed into a
press release with bullet points they can simplify
further.
“I don’t get it,” he sighed.
“Its about Occupying Wall Street,” I replied,
“Occupying Wall Street, challenging the power of its
economic power.
Another blank look…
Its as if we need our politics to follow a predictable
format characterized by legislators playing to the
cameras, message points, and pithy slogans. The idea of a
deeper challenge to a totally compromised system driven
by big money and special interests is considered by some
as anomaly that belongs in another century, Extra
parliamentary political movements don’t compute for
some who want the political debate limited to rituals
like elections, traditional “debates” and up
and down votes on selective laws. In this world, politics
is best left to politicians with citizens there to look
but not to act.
There seems to be three factors at work.
1. Financial issues are treated as exotic, beyond our
comprehension and best left in back of the paper in the
business pages where obscurantist language makes it so
dense that most readers turn away.
2. The upper classes, now referred to as the 1%, and the
people who identify with them or uncritically, rely on
them for financial guidance cannot comprehend any
critique that challenges their prerogatives and power.
They use terms like “unsophisticated” to
deligitimize protesters who challenge their pretensions
and priorities.
3. Some don’t and won’t “get it”
because it is not in their interest to do so. They
shamelessly use their power to impose their will on the
legislative process with an eye on loosening or
abandoning any financial reforms that force higher
standards of transparency.
Example: even as Occupy Wall Street wins public support
for its campaign against inequality and challenge big
banks and corporations, The Obama Administration is about
to strip mine laws to insure corporate accountability.
Mike Taibbi explains the latest way Washington is aligned
with Wall Street in Rolling Stone: (Amazing isn’t it
that a music magazine does a better job of covering these
issues than our financial media?)
He writes, “Barack Obama is apparently expressing
willingness to junk big chunks of Sarbanes-Oxley in
exchange for support for his jobs program. Business
leaders are balking at creating new jobs unless Obama
makes compliance with S-O voluntary for all firms valued
at under $1 billion
Here’s how to translate this move: companies are
saying they can’t attract investment unless they can
hide their financials from investors. So the CEOs and
gazillionaires on Obama’s Jobs Council want the
politically-vulnerable president to give them license to
cook the books in exchange for support for his jobs
program. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “All
you’re going to do is have more fraud. The ultimate
losers are going to be investors,” said Jeff Klink,
a former federal prosecutor whose Gateway Center firm
helps clients prevent and detect fraud.”
Unfortunately, the Occupy Wall Street activists have,
like the rest of the country not been widely exposed to
the considerable documentation around massive fraud by
the financial industry. When former bank regulator and
the country’s leading critic of corporate fraud,
William Black, now of the University of Missouri Law
School, visited Occupy Wall Street on October 25th, he
was not recognized by most of those in the encampment or
by many in the press who are also unfamiliar with the
depth of the crimes of Wall Street. Those crimes just
don’t impact investors but have hit ordinary
Americans hard. They include the subprime mortgages as
well as usurious credit cards. Black takes a systematic
look at the problem. He spoke at a teach-in at Occupy
Wall Street Tuesday evening to an attentive crowd. It was
one of the first lectures about aspects of the Financial
crisis that many don’t really know about. Its
important to have more talks like this with critics
taking the protesters to task about being
“unsophisticated.
More experts like Black will be speaking in the Park in
the near future.
Perhaps that’s why Elisabeth Warren, the Harvard
Professor who proposed a consumer protection agency is
claiming she put for the intellectual ideas that led to
the Occupy Movement, The Daily Beast’s Samuel P.
Jacobs reports she created “much of the intellectual
foundation” for the Occupy Wall Street movement. She
also talks about her past life as a Republican and the
challenges of being a woman on the campaign
trail—and say she’s no “guileless Marxist.”
Ironically that’s also true of many in Zuccotti Park
who seem to favor Anarchism, but at least they have a
deeper critique of the posturing of both parties and seem
to want far deeper reforms than those proposed by Warren.
Perhaps that’s why self-styled “liberals”
like The Washington Posts Richard Cohen can’t find
an ounce of sympathy for protester who are being skewered
by the Israel Lobby AIPAC as Anti-Semitic based on an
incident involving two people. AIPAC has no comment on
the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been
protesting economic abuses in Israel Itself. To his
credit, Cohen dismisses the hysterical anti-Semitism
smears against Occupy Wall Street that have been
amplifies on Fox and other right-wing outlets.
But, as FAIR notes, Cohen goes on piss on the protests.
Here’s the headline:
OWS isn’t Anti-Semitic–Just
Clueless, Repugnant
“This right-wing attempt to discredit both the
Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic
Party’s hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible.
It’s made possible, however, because no one this
side of the Moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall
Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it
marches off to some location to highlight what we all
know–that Wall Street guys are rich–and their
slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to
me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage
bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.”
I have hung out with Richard at the World Economic Forum
in Davos in years past. It’s the intellectual
corporate playground of the 1% and I don’t remember
anything he wrote with this nasty tone about greedy CEOs
who were getting rich off the poor and the Middle Class.
It would be easy to denounce this hypocrisy, but it is
worse because clearly the poobahs of the media lack the
capacity to critique their own complicity in the
media’s failure to expose that “felonious
capitalism” when it might have done some good. They
are threatened by a movement that is winning public
support because it is also a repudiation their own elite
journalism in the service of the status quo.
News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs at newsdissector.com.
His film Plunder and book The Crime Of Our Time
investigate financial crime on Wall Street. www.Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com
Oakland police and mayor face fresh protest over wounding of veteran. UPDATED:
Occupy movement returns to streets demanding answers after teargas canister hit Iraq serviceman Scott Olsen in the head
Protesters in front of Oakland
City Hall on Wednesday night in the wake of an Iraq
veteran's critical wounding by a police teargas canister.
Photograph: Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty
Protesters have returned to downtown Oakland, California, to demand the resignation of the city's mayor and an investigation to explain how an Iraq war veteran, Scott Olsen, was hit in the head by a teargas canister at close range, leaving him critically injured.
About 2,000 people – half as many as Tuesday night – massed in front of City Hall on Wednesday, tearing down a steel barricade intended to keep them off the grass in Frank Ogawa Plaza.
When the city closed down a nearby underground station, preventing dispersing protesters going home, they organised a spontaneous march through the centre of the city, chanting: "Whose streets? Our streets!" Police had been under orders to let them have the run of the plaza until 10pm. Officers stood guard at junctions in patrol cars and motorbikes to deter people from jumping up on to an overhead freeway. The police were more lowkey than on Tuesday, when they manned barricades around the plaza and fired volley after volley of teargas that filled the surrounding streets and smoked out businesses. As the protest continued late into the night both sides appeared afraid of engaging the other. Many marchers wore scarves over their noses and mouths in anticipation of teargas. Some had gas masks. When officers wanted the crowd to move out of a traffic intersection they sent an ambulance in with its siren blaring, not a police vehicle.
One sign taped to a lamppost delivered this message to the police: "You've fuelled our fire."
Speaker after speaker demanded the resignation or recall of the city's mayor, Jean Quan, who had initially voiced her support of the protesters. "Mayor Quan you did more damage to Oakland in one evening than Occupy Oakland did in two weeks," said one slogan scrawled near the entrance to her offices. In an afternoon news conference Quan had struggled to explain the decision to clear the square in the early hours of Tuesday morning and again when protesters returned that evening. She gave the impression she had been as blindsided as anyone by the decision to close down Occupy Oakland. She had been in Washington at the time and said that although she knew there were hygiene and public safety issues that needed to be addressed, she did not expect that to happen while she was on the other side of the country. "I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators," she said, pinning responsibility for the decision on her police chief and the top city administrator. When pressed for more details, Quan said: "I don't know everything."
Scott Olsen, 24 – a former US marine who friends said served two tours of duty in Iraq – has become a figurehead among Occupy Wall Street supporters in Oakland and elsewhere. Organisers took to Twitter and other social media urging protesters back into the streets.Acting Oakland police chief Howard Jordan told a news conference his department was investigating the injury to Olsen as a "level one" incident, the highest for an internal police inquiry.
In Portland, Oregon, a crowd estimated to number at least 1,000 joined in a march organised by the AFL-CIO labour federation in support of the anti-Wall Street movement.
Hundreds of protesters also gathered in New York to march in solidarity, leaving the Occupy Wall Street base in Zuccotti Park and marching around the financial district and city hall. Protesters in New York voted to send $20,000 and 100 tents to their peers in Oakland, according to a Twitter message from a protester identified as JA Myerson and retweeted by the Occupy Wall Street group.
The Oakland crowd was a mixture of eco-activists, families with young children, nurses and teachers, as well as a handful of young men with bandanas or Palestinian keffiyehs covering part of their faces. Many said they were shocked by what happened on Tuesday and were bracing themselves for further confrontations with the police.
"Quan let the [county] sheriffs in to do her dirty work and then said she didn't know who was responsible for the decision. She's got to go," said Robijn Vangiesen, a local activist and organiser.Vangiesen was in the plaza when Olsen was knocked down by a teargas canister. "He was out, man. Totally non-responsive. He had blood pouring out of his nose," Vangiesen said. The initial teargas volley was followed by another projectile from the police straight into the small crowd trying to help Olsen. His friends said it was a flash-bang grenade, pointing to a video distributed on the internet as evidence, but police have denied this.
Many of Wednesday night's protesters expressed anger. "When the rich steal from the poor it's called business. When the poor fight back it's called violence," a 25-year-old solar energy company executive, Cory Rae Shaw, wrote on a banner.
"Who's really the bandits here?" said Demarion English, a 23-year-old security guard. "I called them bitches. I call the police bitches to their face. We're all fighting for a real cause... and we got teargassed."
Iraq war vet injured in Oakland protests
Thu Oct 27, 2011
Scott Olsen, a former US Marine and Iraq war veteran,
lies on the street after being injured during a
demonstration in Oakland, California, October 25, 2011. A
former US Marine and Iraq war veteran has been critically
injured by projectile that struck him in the head during
the brutal crackdown of 'Occupy Oakland' protesters by
the police.
Scott Olsen, 24, who was struck in the head with a tear-gas
canister fired by police during protests in Oakland on
Tuesday evening, is in a “critical condition”, the
Guardian quoted a hospital spokesperson as saying.
Jay Finneburgh, a photographer who was covering the
protest, published pictures of Olsen lying on the ground.
"This poor guy was right behind me when he was hit
in the head with a police projectile. He went down hard
and did not get up," Finneburgh said.
Olsen who served two tours of Iraq in 2006 and 2007 had
only moved to Oakland and he was a member of Veterans for
Peace and Iraq Veterans against the War.
Amateur video footage taken by protesters shows Olsen
lying flat in front of a line of police, as around 10
people gather around him in an apparent attempt to
provide aid, before a police officer throws an explosive
device at them, scattering the group.
The new wave of police raids on protest rallies against
“corporate greed, arrogance and power” has
prompted speculation that American authorities are losing
patience with expanding demonstrations around the country.
The 'Occupy' movement, emerged after a group of people on
September 17 rallied in New York's financial district
under the motto of 'Occupy Wall Street,' protesting
corruption, poverty as well as social inequality in the
US.
The movement has now spread to major US cities and other
countries, including Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Ireland, and Portugal.
PG/JR
Police arrest 140 protesters in
Oakland Wed Oct 26, 2011
An 'Occupy Oakland'
demonstrator is arrested during a protest rally in
response to an early morning police raid which displaced
tents set up by protesters in Oakland, California October
25, 2011. Police officers in Oakland, California have
arrested more than 140 peaceful protesters who were
rallying against recent arrests at an "Occupy Wall
Street" camp.
Police confronted protesters with tear gas and sound
grenades as they marched to City Hall to reclaim the camp
on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
Police had earlier arrested at least 90 demonstrators in
the early hours of Tuesday and removed tents set up by
Occupy Oakland protesters outside the city hall and in a
local park.
Nearly 150 tents had been set up on the location over the
past two weeks as rallies, inspired by anti-Wall Street
protests, spread through the US.
Meanwhile, in Atlanta 'Occupy' protesters stayed put in
peaceful defiance of t police orders to clear out a park
they have been camping out for two week.
The 'Occupy' movement, emerged after a group of people on
September 17 rallied in New York's financial district
under the name Occupy Wall Street, to protest against top-level
corruption, poverty as well as social inequality in the
US.
The movement has now spread to major US cities and other
countries, including Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Ireland, and Portugal.
PG/HGH
Noam
Chomsky Addresses Occupy Boston Protesters:
http://youtu.be/pbxLA2uTWuw
comment: Are you listening?? Chomsky's lecture contains a concrete strategy of the Occupy Movement: he weaves a thread from the 1930's sit-down strikes, which most textbooks ignore,? to the 70's steel workers, ... to now. C'mon, workers! Let's take this sh*t over!! 1960's to NOW. The man? doesn't stop fighting.HanzSygnal
1.Eliminate Fractional? Reserve Banking - If a bank
does not have the money they will not be allowed to loan
it.
2.Re-install Glass- Steagall - separating the function of
Savings Banks from Investment Banking.
3.Major Wall Street investment reform that outlaws
Derivitives, Short Selling, Hedge Fund, and Algorithmic
Trading.
4.Redefine Federal limits back to the Constitution,
giving most of it's present powers back to the States,
back to pre- Feb.
17, 1871. Will224000
occupy wall street incoming mail
INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER
STATEMENT ON LIBYA
Lynching in Libya – Made in U$A
- Murder of Gadhafi is next step to wider U.S. wars in
Africa
Gadhafi died resisting to the very end U.S.-NATO war, as he said he would. He refused to negotiate with NATO an ignominious departure for himself or to surrender. He chose a martyr's death for Libya’s independence and sovereignty. Despite ridicule in the West, in Africa Gadhafi will be remembered as an anti-imperialist fighter. The gross and disrespectful behavior of the National Transitional Council (TNC) in the display of Moammar Gadhafi's body confirms to the world in the most graphic way that these elements, who the imperialist powers have given official recognition, are in fact crude, low-life gangsters. Instead of burying Gadhafi within a day as required under Islamic law, they chose to display Gadhafi’s battered, half naked body -- bloody, unwashed and uncovered -- on a soiled mattress in a meat locker at a shopping center. This affront to religious and national custom will further deepen outrage and resistance.
TNC militias did no real fighting. These divided, competing military bands operate as scavengers or vultures, calling in air strikes and lying in wait to pick over the death that NATO bombers have blasted in front of them. In seven months of NATO bombing they have shown themselves capable of firing endless weapons in front of cameras and brutalizing Black Libyans, yet incapable of conducting any independent military action. U.S. and NATO forces bear responsibility for this latest crime and the way it was carried out. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded like a gunslinger in a Hollywood western in Tripoli the day before Gadhafi’s murder, demanding his capture – dead or alive.
Loyalist forces in the city of Sirte, Bani Walid and several other cities have held out heroically two months after NATO seizure of Tripoli. NATO bombers targeted Sirte and Bani Walid's electrical grid, communications, food storage, the city water supply, the water towers on apartment buildings and even the water tower on the roof of the hospital. Again and again the TNC has announced that all resistance in these small cities have has been destroyed, only to be driven out each time. The imperialist war in Libya is reminiscent of past colonial wars in Africa and Asia. Targeting of any civilian necessities, such as water, food, medicine, and communication is specifically prohibited under international law and considered a war crime under the Nuremburg and Geneva Conventions. Yet during seven months of war those are exactly the civilian targets that NATO planners focused on again and again. The bombing of lines of cars fleeing the NATO besieged city of Sirte that led to Gadhafi’s capture is an example of systematic targeting of civilians. U.S. British, French and Italian imperialist forces claimed to be protecting civilians and implementing a United Nations Security Council No-fly zone. But the Libyan government used no aircraft at all. U.S. and other NATO jets ruled the skies and civilians were their targets. This is an expanding war. Today U.S. drones strike with impunity at defenseless peoples around the world. In the same week that Secretary of State Clinton traveled to Tripoli and that Gadhafi was murdered, President Barack Obama ordered U.S. Special Forces and military advisors to Uganda, South Sudan, Central Africa Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. These are countries that hold a vast reservoir of strategic minerals, including cobalt, coltan, industrial diamonds, copper in Congo and newly discovered oil in Uganda and South Sudan.
Gadhafi's greatest threat to the imperialist countries was promoting a development plan for an African Federation and a stable African currency backed by Libya's $90 billion reserves to help Africans free themselves from the IMF and World Bank's onerous dictates. Forty-two years ago Libya was one of the poorest, least developed countries of Africa. Gadhafi and other young military officers overthrew the Western-supported Libyan monarchy of King Idris in 1969, then held the imperialist's off as the Libyans built with nationalized oil revenues a series of modern cities and infrastructure. Before the NATO bombing this year, the Libyan people had achieved the highest educational and health standards in Africa, according to UN development statistics. Anyone who expects that U.S./NATO forces or their corrupt collaborators will rebuild the schools, hospitals, modern housing, sports complexes, vast underground water system, electricity, advanced communications, reorganize free health care or reconstruct essential infrastructure that they have laid waste to in months of bombing need only look at their ignominious record in Iraq after eight years or in Afghanistan after ten years. The promised peace, national reconciliation, democracy and development were empty words. Today, the vast majority of Iraqi people, even in the capital city of Baghdad, still struggle with a few hours of electricity a day. Potable water is a memory of a past, pre-occupation epoch, so is free education and health care. NATO is a war machine for corporate profit, not a social service agency. It has shown itself as incapable of reorganizing a decent life. In Afghanistan after a decade of occupation, the rubble of U.S. bombs and rusting tanks still litter the roads. None of the promised social progress has reached beyond Pentagon press releases and politicians visits. In Iraq the indignities and humiliations were so numerous and such an affront that even the government of compliant collaborators established by the U.S. has been forced by mass sentiment to refuse immunity to U.S. troops scheduled to remain in Iraq as relabeled trainers and advisors.
As in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen the resistance in Libya to U.S. NATO domination will continue and take on new forms. The imperialists never expected mass mobilized resistance to their plans. They predicted a war that would be over within a week. Instead a small population of six million, spread across a largely desert country, managed through mass mobilizations of millions of people, military resistance and emergency measures to withstand more than 200 days of non-stop bombardment, more than 9,000 air strikes. U.S., British and French corporate looters are planning a new assault on Africa, but they are finding that this is not the world of 100 years ago.
The tens of thousands of youth occupying sites in cities across the U.S. and Europe need to stand in solidarity with resistance to corporate domination at home and to imperialist wars abroad.
Occupy Wall Street!