Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...?currentPage=1

A piece from the New Yorker, making it clear that it's silly to pigeon hole anyone.

from the New Yorker piece (wasn't one of these guys an iTulip contributor )

Two middle-aged men had stopped in front of Moss and begun to argue with her in heavy Russian accents. “Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela is ultimate destination of what you’re doing,” the first Russian said.


“My wife is midwife—she has job,” the second man said.


“Congratulations, that’s great,” Moss said.



“You can get job, too.”


“I’d love one. Can’t find one.”


“This is waste of your time. Go look for job—put your time into that.”

“Bottom line: go to North Korea,” the first Russian said. “This is your final destination.”

[FRED]

Scott Olson speaks

Video here.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Olson speaks

Spitzer's list for OWS demands...

http://www.alternet.org/economy/1532...e/?page=entire

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Olson speaks

double post

[BK]

Re: Scott Olson speaks

Mr Spitzer is a savvy politician - who hopes is he spouts off about the rotten banks and the corruption the sheeple will forget about the Mayflower Hotel. Mr Spitzer and his family derive the family fortune from Bernard Spitzer Real Estate business. I heard Elliot on a NYC Public Radio discussion and the populist rhetoric flowed from his lips with great ease.
Elliot took advantage of the Financial crisis to buy some good Real Estate for the family business:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123630701016248327.html

[reggie]

]

Occupy Wall Street? Hell No! Unoccupy Walmart

http://theintelhub.com/2011/11/28/oc...ccupy-walmart/

"...Consequently, we don’t need to occupy Wall Street, or Oakland, or none of the places the occupiers have occupied by ignorance or evil intent. On the contrary, we need to unoccupy Walmart, Costco, Keymart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Best Buy, Ikea, and all the big corporate stores who mostly sell cheap products made abroad by quasi-slave workers, and only buy in locally owned stores that don’t ship their money to banks abroad, but leave it in the community.

We have been brainwashed to admire these huge corporate stores as symbols of America’s entrepreneurship and freedom, as chain departments stores like Woolworth, Sears, Macy’s, and Montgomery Ward were sixty years ago. Currently, however, the mega stores have changed to become efficient tools of economic slavery at the service of our hidden masters. Instead of loving them, we need to get angry with these large corporate stores for their direct contribution to the destruction of America’s economy."

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Clue is right. The E in FIRE should stand for "education."

"As for her economic status, Katehi was hired in 2009 at $400,000 per year plus substantial benefits. That's the same base pay as the American President, and well more than double the pay of California's governor, who makes less than $175,000. Katehi holds numerous patents and her husband also teaches at UC Davis - more than enough to place her solidly in the 1%. Her salary represented a massive 27 per cent increase over the pay for the previous chancellor - the very same year that student fees were being hiked by 32 per cent, while classes were being cut. The reasoning was... well, it's not reasoning, really. It's just how things are done within the 1% - a procedure based on comparing pay for the heads of various different colleges, public and private, including Johns Hopkins, Yale and the University of Chicago.

This makes perfect sense, considering the governing body behind her, the UC Board of Regents. It's a veritable Who's Who of the 1% in California. The Chair is Russell Gould, a former Senior VP of Wachovia Bank; Vice Chair is Sherry Lansing, former Chair and CEO of Paramount Pictures. Others include Richard C. Blum, president of his own investment firm and husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein; Eddie Island, former VP for McDonnell-Douglas; Norman Pattiz, founder and chair emeritus of Westwood One, America's largest radio network company.

Now UC Davis is a very good school, but even UC Berkeley isn't Yale. It's not so much a question of educational quality - it's a question of founding mission and purpose... which are not very well served by the sorts of people sitting on the Board of Regents, none of whom has a distinctive educational background. The UC system is part of a three-tiered college system - universities, state colleges and community colleges - that according to California's 1960 Education Master Plan is supposed to provide affordable higher education to every high school graduate in the state who wants a public college education. Indeed, technically, it's supposed to be tuition-free. But student "fees" now make a mockery of that. The 32 per cent fee increase mentioned above was just a tiny fraction of the enormous fee increases since 1992 - roughly 1/16 of the 534 per cent total increase in dollars through 2009 - or 1/10 of the total when adjusted for inflation. It's now even higher, and current plans would jack that increase up to more than 1,200 per cent over 1992 levels in just the next few years.

Fee hikes haven't been smooth. They've skyrocketed in stages as public funding from California's state budget has plunged in a series of successive budget crises. But the dynamics are more complicated than first meets the eye, as UC Santa Cruz politics professor Bob Meister explained back in 2009. There are actually incentives for university officials to welcome state budget cuts, explained Meister, President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations. State budget money comes with strings attached, prioritising education. But money from student, ironically, has no such restrictions, and hence is perfect for empire-building, he explained.

"How does UC sell $1.3bn in construction bonds immediately after declaring an 'extreme financial emergency,' slashing funds for teaching and research and cutting staff and faculty pay? By using your tuition as collateral," Meister wrote online at KeepCaliforniasPromise.org. "Higher tuition lets UC borrow more for construction even while it cuts instruction and research." And this is only the beginning, he explained.

"UC's most recent (post-"emergency") construction bonds are just the beginning of a long-term (10-15 year) plan to borrow very much more against very much higher tuition in order to fund individual projects that no longer have to be approved by the state or paid for out of each project's own revenue."

In short, rather than the university existing to serve the students, it's the other way round. From the Board of Regents' point of view, the students are - above all else - a revenue stream to secure Wall Street funding. Hardly a surprise, really, when you consider the makeup of the Board.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opi...714508499.html

[Starving Steve]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Solidarity with the Occupy Movements around the world, including the Arab Spring?

I noticed to-day, Dec 3rd, that the Arab Spring has brought about the apparent election of Islamists in Egypt. In other words, the liberal, Mubarek, is going to be replaced with Islamists in Egypt, including many from the Moslem Brotherhood. The clock is going to be set back to the 7th Century: Women are going to be in burkas and kept hidden in the backgound, whilst all men will be on their knees praying all day. No-one will be asking any questions nor dissenting in Egypt ever again.

This is what happens when there are Occupy Movements in the world, but without specific and manifest objectives: There will be those in the background who would steer the vague mass-discontent (of the 99%) to their own secret and tyrannical agenda.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

My Occupy LA Arrest

Patrick Meighan

December 7, 2011

From Patrick Meighan’s blog, My Occupy LA Arrest.

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.

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.

When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.

At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.

With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.

I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.

Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.

As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Contrast Patrick Meaghan's blog with the editorial the L.A. Times ran on December 3rd after the police action. Now, that's chilling.

"The Los Angeles Police Department and city leadership have received well-deserved praise for their successful eviction of the Occupy L.A. protesters from the grounds outside City Hall last week. Smooth communication, a smart policing approach and a disciplined, restrained force combined to defuse a situation that had confounded police from New York to UC Davis.

"Now that the occupation is gone, this is a moment to reflect on a lesson from the encounter that should guide city leaders going forward. It comes from the same philosophy that undergirds much of modern policing: the landmark work of James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, authors of the "broken windows" theory. Their article of that title, first published in 1982 by the Atlantic magazine, gave rise to community policing, which has come to mean everything from smart community relations to tough enforcement of low-level crimes. It is that latter meaning that was lost in the early moments of the Occupy L.A. protest and that is worth reconsidering now.

"As Wilson and Kelling explained, small offenses give rise to larger ones. The neighborhood that is allowed to decay breeds crime; the police who allow minor miscreants to get away with littering or urinating on sidewalks or failing to appear for court dates eventually encounter those same men — they are almost always men — as burglars, robbers or murderers. One of the lessons of "broken windows," then, is to confront small crimes assertively, and respectfully, to safeguard society from the consequences of decay and increased criminality.

"In Los Angeles, city officials bent over backward to accommodate a group of protesters they in some ways admired — and who, in some ways, deserved that admiration. This page even applauded the city's restraint. But what we didn't anticipate is that once demonstrators were allowed to spend one night on the City Hall lawn, it became harder to deny them a second. And then harder still to deny them a third. Given the ambiguity of their demands, it became unclear what would ever cause them to leave, short of force.

"All this seems academic now that it's over, but the next group of squatters may be skinheads or anti-immigration zealots — protesters City Hall may enjoy less as neighbors. Going forward, a word of advice to the city leadership: No one should be allowed to sleep in the park. It closes at 10:30 every night for everyone. Enforcing that rule forcefully but thoughtfully — without regard to the message of those attempting to violate it — will save this city plenty of grief."

[LazyBoy]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Wow. What avenues for change are left when peaceable assemblies are crushed with violence?

[Prazak]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Wow. What avenues for change are left when peaceable assemblies are crushed with violence?

It looks uncomfortably like the way Russia is dealing with their latest protesters. I don't see how the U.S. can say a word about what's happening in Moscow right now without being a complete hypocrite -- although that won't stop any politician or diplomat worth their salt.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165072...cked-princeton

[jk]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

It looks uncomfortably like the way Russia is dealing with their latest protesters. I don't see how the U.S. can say a word about what's happening in Moscow right now without being a complete hypocrite -- although that won't stop any politician or diplomat worth their salt.

i had a similar reaction when i heard secty of state hilary clinton lecturing some nation about free and fair elections. "free"? it's about $1billion a pop these days. and "fair" at those prices?

[Prazak]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

i had a similar reaction when i heard secty of state hilary clinton lecturing some nation about free and fair elections. "free"? it's about $1billion a pop these days. and "fair" at those prices?

Yes, not to mention the unintended ironies the past few years in the U.S. State Dept's Country Reports on Human Rights. It would all be funny if it weren't so sad.