Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Just saw this from a review of Taleb's recent presentation at The Royal Society...
http://curiouslypersistent.wordpress...antifragility/

"Uncertainty makes mistakes costly, and thus both businesses and governments should remain small. Taleb suggested that if Tesco suddenly ran into difficulties then the government would have to bail out a supermarket. He feels the government should only intervene in things that can’t organise organically, and is thus advising the government on how to make its institutions smaller (such as splitting the NHS into localised, autonomous units)."

So, if this review is accurate, Taleb is promoting:
(1) small (smaller institutions)
(2) organic (self-organized) institutions

Looks to me like Taleb is an advocate for society organized in alignment with Complexity Theory. Obviously, I'll have to dig further, but just found this initial find/read of interest and telling.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Just saw this from a review of Taleb's recent presentation at The Royal Society...
http://curiouslypersistent.wordpress...antifragility/

You do understand that Taleb's primary claim to fame is that he understood the (deliberate or otherwise) underpricing of risk for long tail events?

That this isn't in any way related to complexity, but rather to the normal institutional bias?

As for 'small' - interesting that he would advocate localized autonomous NHS service units when the purpose of NHS is, well, national.

How exactly do localized autonomous national health care service units form a coherent national health policy? How does having localized autonomous units prevent the normal turf battles that accompany such situations over budgets, over personnel, over charter, etc etc?

Size isn't everything, but neither is it nothing.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

You do understand that Taleb's primary claim to fame is that he understood the (deliberate or otherwise) underpricing of risk for long tail events?

That this isn't in any way related to complexity, but rather to the normal institutional bias?

As for 'small' - interesting that he would advocate localized autonomous NHS service units when the purpose of NHS is, well, national.

How exactly do localized autonomous national health care service units form a coherent national health policy? How does having localized autonomous units prevent the normal turf battles that accompany such situations over budgets, over personnel, over charter, etc etc?

Size isn't everything, but neither is it nothing.

Taleb is a salesman, selling out with the old and in with the new.

Building a dialectic of cost versus uncertainty, then selling a model (based upon CAS) that is "more" predictable. Reducing size of institutions reduces friction againt swarming events, making system pertibation and swarming flows more likely and consistent.

But then, you know this already.

PS. Just wait 10 years for the impact of Obama's Defense-sized Healthcare budget to take effect.... then we'll clearly see the impact of Complexity in the US.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Reducing size of institutions reduces friction againt swarming events, making system pertibation and swarming flows more likely and consistent.

But what if the system doesn't want smaller institutions?

What if smaller institutions only lead to different large institutions, later on?

All these complexity theories are interesting, but assume that there are some immutable laws of nature which govern outcome when history shows fads, prophets, manias, and so forth as being much more a factor.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

But what if the system doesn't want smaller institutions? What if smaller institutions only lead to different large institutions, later on? All these complexity theories are interesting, but assume that there are some immutable laws of nature which govern outcome when history shows fads, prophets, manias, and so forth as being much more a factor.

I will answer you this way, I sure as hell hope that there are immutable laws of nature which will curtaiil man-made society's current trajectory. I hope that science & mathematics, with all of its deception, fails, and people turn back to faith, which I believe is what Kurt Godel ultimately showed us in his life's work and proofs on the limit of man's formal systems.

But I cannot turn away from what I see, and that is an army of agents selling future chaos, marginalization/destruction of our existing institutions, and complexity modelling techniques built to predict futures in such a chaotic society. Jean Baudrillard calls this "precession of simulacra", where the future is being invisiaged in the minds of "thought leaders" before that future is deployed. In fact, via this technique, it is ultimately "us" who deploy it. It's kind of a grand OODA loop, where the 'observations" and "orientations" of the masses is modified such that the decision-action tree is self-evident.


This brings us back to OWS, which was a "seeded"-swarm being deployed to changed the "observations" and "orientations" of the masses, such that these same masses will apply pressure on existing institutions in a pre-determined direction, now viewing the world in a dialectic of the 1-percenters against the rest of us. Two things: (1) this kind of swarming technique simply won't work unless society exhibits specific properties inherent in a complexity model; (2) the swam was gamed, or seeded, in that many of the core participants were paid to participate, and therefore it was not organic as we were led to beleive.

[BK]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Here is the updated link to one of the seeders (?) - that includes all the news outlets interviews he participated in - the gentleman has lived in the US for 3-4 years tops - a key organizer for OWS whose life hasn't really been impacted by Wall Street - he is a paid rabble rouser for the Center for World Religions.
http://crdcgmu.wordpress.com/staff/kobi-skolnick/

The idea that OWS was an organic movement from the masses seems without foundation.

Sadly - investigative journalism for newspapers and televisions is dead.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

The idea that OWS was an organic movement from the masses seems without foundation.

Where it came from and where it's going are two different stories. Huge debt at graduation and high unemployment are new. Sooner or later something is going to pop.

I keep asking myself what I would do if I owed 60,000 dollars and had no employment prospects except marginal jobs covering interest payments. I think I would bolt.

The media loves to scratch its head and wonder why more people underwater on their mortgages haven't bailed out. I think the MSM are about to get clocked.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Where it came from and where it's going are two different stories.

If the techniques being employed are not sufficient evidence to support OWS' underlying goals, perhaps an analysis of who is financially funding the "seeds" will help reveal it's destination. Wasn't ACORN accused of paying people $100 bucks per day... I never followed this particular story thread, so can't personally confirm validity.

Further, gaining control over anti-system narratives, BEFORE those who are really anti-system can, is a pretty standard psywar technique.

I keep asking myself what I would do if I owed 60,000 dollars and had no employment prospects except marginal jobs covering interest payments. I think I would bolt.

Yup, don't pay it back..... I simply can't understand why people are still paying their mortgages? Time to default in mass.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

I will answer you this way, I sure as hell hope that there are immutable laws of nature which will curtaiil man-made society's current trajectory.

This is an extremely general statement which is completely irrelevant with regards to events in our lifetimes.

Sure, the sun will die some 9 digit number of years from now, but that really affect the subject at hand.

But I cannot turn away from what I see, and that is an army of agents selling future chaos, marginalization/destruction of our existing institutions, and complexity modelling techniques built to predict futures in such a chaotic society.

Simply because these agents exist doesn't mean they actually accomplish anything. Nations have been sending/supporting dissidents to other nations ever since the Romans started bribing specific Germanic tribes to beat up other Germanic tribes. Lenin as a revolutionary was a nobody for 2 decades; it took the military defeat of Russia in World War I to bring forth the conditions by which Lenin eventually prospered.

OWS, while it certainly has seeds in it planted by various interest groups, is still a far cry from being the emasculated parody which the Tea Party has become.

Equally so it is unclear that the aforementioned seeds will be able to influence the OWS agenda; ultimately most of these seeds are seeking to protect an agenda which is opposite to the anger at the system which lies at the core of OWS.

You may deride the 99%/1% paradigm, but it is a powerful one - one which has driven peasant revolutions for centuries.

The only question in my mind is whether the police forces and/or military in the US will be willing to gun down large numbers of active protesters - because to my knowledge that's the only way to really keep the masses down.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

it goes with the territory . . . at least they're not being shot (so far) in their beds . . .

Infiltration is the Norm, not the Exception, of U.S. Political Movements

When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy.

Virtually every movement has been the target of police surveillance and disruption activities. The most famous surveillance program was the FBI’s COINTELPRO which according to COINTELPRO Documents targeted the women’s rights, Civil Rights, anti-war and peace movements, the New Left, socialists, communists and independence movement for Puerto Rico, among others. Among the groups infiltrated were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, Congress for Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. Significant leaders from Albert Einstein to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who are both memorialized in Washington, were monitored. The rule in the United States is to be infiltrated; the exception is not to be.
The Church Committee documented a history of use of the FBI for purposes of political repression. They described infiltration efforts going back to World War I, including the 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up “anarchists and revolutionaries” for deportation. The Church Committee found infiltration efforts growing from 1936 through 1976, with COINTELPRO as the major program. While these domestic political spying and disruption programs were supposed to stop in 1976, in fact they have continued. As reported in “The Price of Dissent,” Federal Magistrate Joan Lefkow found in 1991, the record “shows that despite regulations, orders and consent decrees prohibiting such activities, the FBI had continued to collect information concerning only the exercise of free speech.”

How many agents or infiltrators can we expect to see inside a movement? One of the most notorious “police riots” was the 1968 Democratic Party Convention. Independent journalist Yasha Levine writes: “During the 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which drew about 10,000 protesters and was brutally crushed by the police, 1 out of 6 protesters was a federal undercover agent. That’s right, 1/6th of the total protesting population was made up of spooks drawn from various federal agencies. That’s roughly 1,600 people! The stat came from an Army document obtained by CBS News in 1978, a full decade after the protest took place. According to CBS, the infiltrators were not passive observers, monitoring and relaying information to central command, but were involved in violent confrontations with the police.” [Emphasis in original.]

Peter Camejo, who ran for Governor of California in 2003 as a Green and as Ralph Nader’s vice president in 2004, often told the story about his 1976 presidential campaign. Camejo able to get the FBI in court after finding their offices broken into and suing them over COINTELPRO activities. The judge asked the Special Agent in Charge how many FBI agents worked in Camejo’s presidential campaign; the answer was 66 agents. Camejo estimated he had a campaign staff of about 400 across the country. Once again that would be an infiltration rate of 1 out of 6 people. Camejo discovered that among the agents was his campaign co-chair. He also discovered eavesdropping equipment in his campaign office and documents showing the FBI had followed him since he was a student activist at 18 years old.

The federal infiltration is buttressed by local and state police. Local police infiltrators have a long tradition dating back to the Haymarket riots of 1886 and the 1904 “Italian Squad in New York City. In addition to political activity they were also involved in infiltrations of unions especially around strikes. Common throughout the United States were the so-called “Red Squads” a 1963 report estimated 300,000 officers were involved in surveillance of political activities. These were local police focused on the same types of people as the FBI. Some of their activities included assassinations of political activists.

In fact, a predecessor to the modern Occupy, the Bonus March of 1932 was infiltrated by federal agents. Their focus was on radicals, anarchists and Communists who might be in the movement. The infiltration resulted in greatly exaggerated reports about radicals inside the Bonus encampments, which were primarily made up of veterans and their families that were used to help justify their removal by President Herbert Hoover with military troops acting against veterans under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, assisted by then-colonels Eisenhower and Patton.

Another predecessor to the Occupy, Resurrection City of 1968, a “community of love and brotherhood,” that occupied the Washington, DC mall for four months was organized by the Poor People’s Campaign fulfilling a plan made prior to the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Resurrection City was heavily infiltrated by layers of police including the FBI, military, Park Police, Secret Service and Metropolitan DC police. FBI director Hoover had agents go to press conferences with false media identification, stationed FBI agents around the perimeter of the encampment and authorized an expensive informant program. After the FBI, the most expensive infiltration of Resurrection City was military intelligence which conducted an unlawful surveillance program, intercepting radio transmissions, monitoring radio traffic and intercepting all communications which were then passed on to the FBI, Secret Service, DC police and Park Police. The military also sent fictitious media to press conferences. The Metropolitan DC police “red squad” sent undercover officers into the camp and took mug shots of its members.

Infiltration tactics continue, perhaps have even escalated today. In a recent report the ACLU writes: “Today the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined. The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, themilitary, state and local police, private companies, and evenfiremen and emergency medical techniciansare gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants.” There have also multiple reports of the CIA working with New York City police for years, an activity that is almost certainly illegal.

Not only have budgets increased in the post-911 world, but restrictions on spying have been weakened and court review has become rarer. The government, often with corporate interests, are gathering huge amounts of data on Americans and targeting a wide range of groups and individuals for intelligence gathering and infiltration. The extent of spying is so widespread that it is more than this brief article can examine, but the ACLU provides a state-by-state review.

We will not know the extent of current infiltration and the activities of government agents for quite some time, but in the post-911 world, with record intelligence budgets and a massive new homeland security bureaucracy, spying is very likely more extensive than ever. Add to that the private security of corporations and political organizations tied to the two political parties and the extent of Occupy infiltration is very likely quite extensive.

What Have Been the Goals, Strategies and Tactics of Past Infiltration?

The most common purpose of infiltration is the intelligence function of gathering information, but the goals are commonly more aggressive. Herbert Hoover ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders according to COINTELPRO Documents.

According to, Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond, the goal of COINTELPRO was also to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” groups. FBI field operatives were directed to:

1.Create a negative public image for target groups by surveiling activists and then releasing negative personal information to the public.

2.Break down internal organization by creating conflicts by having agents exacerbate racial tensions, or send anonymous letters to try to create conflicts.

3.Create dissension between groups by spreading rumors that other groups were stealing money.

4.Restrict access to public resources by pressuring non-profit organizations to cut off funding or material support.

5.Restrict the ability to organize protests through agents promoting violence against police during planning and at protests.

6.Restrict the ability of individuals to participate in group activities by character assassinations, false arrests, surveillance.
The COINTELPRO documents disclose numerous cases of the FBI's intentions to stop the mass protest against the Vietnam War. Many techniques were used to accomplish the assignment. The documents state: “These included promoting splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists, and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful demonstrations.”

Infiltration to gather intelligence and intentionally disrupt and break up social movements is common in the United States. At this point in history when the degree of wealth inequality has reached such staggering proportions that the richest 400 people have the same wealth as the bottom 154,000,000 people, when unemployment and foreclosures rates are high, when tens of millions can’t afford health care and students can’t afford to go to college, those in power are fearful that the people will rise up. Events of the past year, particularly the Occupy, reveal that this uprising has begun. It is likely that the powerful will use the tools available to stop Occupy, including infiltration to disrupt, divide and misdirect.
In Part III, we will describe common behaviors of infiltrators and how other social movements have tried to minimize the impact of infiltration. We will then examine the basic structure of the Occupy and analyze its strengths and weaknesses in the context of infiltration. Our hope is that this series will lead to a broader discussion within the movement so that efforts can be made to balance the strengths of Occupy with actions necessary to protect the movement from disruption and division.

If you have experience with your Occupy responding to infiltration please send them to research@october2011.org. Experiences that have worked and failed are of interest.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are original organizers of OccupyWashington, DC/October2011 and are currently among the organizers of the National Occupation of Washington, DC.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Bank of America is a “raging hurricane of theft and fraud”

Matt Taibbi speaking at an Occupy Wall Street day of action, February 29th, 2012. He wrote this article for OWS, and passed it out to the crowd. It’s an informative and urgent call to action for Americans from all walks of life. We are happy to be the first to publish it.

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it’s corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it’s a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn’t gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the “Too Big To Fail” concept. Because it is considered a “systemically important institution” whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

This is why the question of whether or not Bank of America should remain on public life support is so critical to all Americans, and not just those millions who have the misfortune to be customers of the bank, or own shares in the firm, or hold mortgages serviced by the company. This gigantic financial institution is the ultimate symbol of a new kind of corruption at the highest levels of American society: a tendency to marry the near-limitless power of the federal government with increasingly concentrated, increasingly unaccountable private financial interests.

The inevitable result of that new form of corruption is this bank, whose continued, state-supported existence should naturally outrage all Americans, be they conservative or progressive.

Conservatives should be outraged by Bank of America because it is perhaps the biggest welfare dependent in American history, with the $45 billion in bailout money and the $118 billion in state guarantees it’s received since 2008 representing just the crest of a veritable mountain of federal bailout support, most of it doled out by the Obama administration.

For instance, with its own credit rating hovering just above junk status, Bank of America has been allowed to borrow tens of billions of dollars against the government’s credit rating using little-known bailout programs with names like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. Since the crash of 2008, it’s also borrowed billions if not trillions in emergency, near-zero interest rate loans from the Federal Reserve – it took out $91 million in rolling low-interest financing from the Fed on just one day in January, 2009.

Conservatives believe that a commitment to free market principles and limited government will lead us out of our economic troubles, but Bank of America represents the opposite dynamic: a company that is kept protected from the judgments of the free market, and forces the state to expand to take on its debts.

Last summer, for instance, the Bank – in order to satisfy creditors who were nervous about the enormous quantity of risky assets on its balance sheet – decided to move some $73 trillion (that’s trillion, with a T) in exotic derivative bets from one end of the company into the federally-insured, depository side of the bank.

This move, encouraged by the Obama administration, put the American taxpayer on the hook for an entire generation of irresponsible gambles made by another failed investment firm that should have gone out of business, but was instead acquired by Bank of America with $25 billion in taxpayer help – Merrill Lynch.

When did we make it the job of the taxpayer to buy failed companies, and rescue companies from their own bad decisions? How is that conservative?

Meanwhile, if you’re a progressive, Bank of America is the ultimate symbol of modern predatory capitalism. This company has knowingly sold hundreds of billions of worthless securities to unions and pension funds (New York state filed two different lawsuits against Bank of America and its subsidiaries on behalf of its pension fund, one of which was settled for $624 million) brazenly overcharged its depositors (it was forced to pay customers $410 million in restitution for bogus overdraft charges), and repeatedly lied to its shareholders (most notoriously, it lied about billions in losses on Merrill Lynch’s books before asking shareholders to approve its merger with the firm).

Moreover, Bank of America has ruthlessly preyed upon millions of homeowners, throwing them out on the street on the strength of doctored, “robosigned” paperwork created through brazenly illegal practices they helped pioneer — the firm sped struggling families to foreclosure court using perjured affidavits produced in factory-like fashion by the hundreds or thousands every day, with full knowledge of management. Through the firm’s improper use of an unaccountable private electronic mortgage registry system called MERS, it also systematically evaded millions of dollars in local fees, forcing some communities to cut services and raise property taxes.

Even when caught and punished for its crimes by the authorities, Bank of America has repeatedly ignored court orders. It was one of five companies identified in two separate investigations earlier this year that were caught continuing the practice of robosigning, even after promising to stop in a legally binding consent decree. Last summer, the state of Nevada sought to terminate a settlement over mortgage abuses it had entered into with Bank of America after it found the company was brazenly violating the agreement, among other things raising payments and interest rates on mortgage customers, despite the fact that the settlement only allowed them to modify loans downward.

Over and over again, we see that leveling fines and punishments at this bank is not enough: it simply ignores them. It is the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain.

Companies like Bank of America are a direct threat to national security, for many reasons. For one thing, they drive smaller, more honest banks out of business: since the market knows the federal government will never let Bank of America fail, it charges less to lend the bank money. That gives Bank of America, despite its near-junk credit rating, a competitive advantage over a smaller, regional bank that might have a better credit rating, but doesn’t have the implicit support of the federal government.

Worse still, stock market investor dollars that normally would go to more customer-friendly, more creative, and more commercially dependable firms will instead continue to flow to Too-Big-To-Fail behemoths like Bank of America, as buying stock in a company with implicit state support will be considered almost a safe-haven investment, like buying gold or Treasury bills.

This robs more deserving and ingenious entrepreneurs of scarce capital, and also encourages existing companies to pour resources not into better performance and increased productivity, but into lobbying and government influence. The result will be fewer Googles and Apples, more bad banks, and more campaign contributions for politicians.

Moreover, we’ve seen throughout our history that when criminal organizations are not punished, they tend to be encouraged to commit more crimes. Five years from now, our government’s decision to avoid jailing Bank of America executives for their roles in the vast robosigning program may result in a situation where no court document of any kind can be trusted, as companies will realize that it is cheaper and easier to simply invent legal affidavits than to draw them up properly and accurately.

What will your defense be against a future lawsuit for a credit card debt or a foreclosure, when your bank walks into court with a pile of invented documents? Will you wish then that you’d fought harder for Bank of America to be punished now?

And the state’s decision to allow Bank of America to pay a middling, $137 million fine for the rigging of bids for five years of municipal bond issues – a very serious crime that robbed taxpayers of millions in revenue, and incidentally is exactly the sort of thing we used to put mobsters in jail for, when the rigged contracts were for cement instead of bonds – may mean that down the road, all municipal bond issues will be rigged.

In recent years, Too-Big-To-Fail banks like Bank of America and Chase and Wells Fargo have been caught rigging the bids for financial services in dozens of municipalities nationwide. Worse, these same banks have repeatedly been let off the hook by regulators, who rarely seek jail sentences for the offenders, and more often simply apply fractional fines to the companies caught. This behavior, if left unchecked, will ultimately mean that we will all have to pay more for our roads, our traffic lights, our sewers, in fact all public services, as the banker’s secret bonus will soon become an institutionalized part of the invoice. And it’ll be our fault, because we didn’t do anything about it now.

The only way to prevent this kind of slide to total lawlessness is to break this unhealthy relationship between bank and government. It would be a great sign of America’s return to healthier capitalism if we could allow one of the worst of public-private monsters, Bank of America, to sink or swim on its own, in the free market.

We don’t want Bank of America to fail. Our position is, it already is insolvent, and already has failed – and only our tax dollars, and our government’s continued protection, is keeping that failure from becoming more common knowledge. There are many opinions about the nature of modern American capitalism. Some think the system is no longer able to meet the needs of ordinary people and needs to be radically overhauled, while others like it just the way it is.

But one thing that everyone on this spectrum of beliefs can agree upon is that our system doesn’t work when corrupt companies, companies that should fail in the free market, are kept alive by the government. When we allow that, what we get is a system that is neither capitalism nor socialist, but somewhere more miserably in between – a bureaucratic state in which profit is not tied to performance, but political power.

We have to break that cycle, and we can. Even with the enormous levels of state support, Bank of America has been teetering on the edge of collapse for years now. In December of 2011, its share price briefly dipped below $5, a near-fatal event in the firm’s history. The market has reacted violently to bad news about the bank on multiple occasions in the last year – after news of layoffs, after hints that the government might not bail the bank out completely in the event of a collapse, and after significant new lawsuits were filed. Each of these corrections nearly sent the company into a tailspin, but it was always rescued in the end by the widespread belief that Uncle Sam would bail it out in the event of a collapse.

We need to put a dent in that belief. We need to convince politicians and investors alike to allow failure to fail.

– Matt Taibbi, February 29th, 2012, Occupy Wall Street

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

This is an extremely general statement which is completely irrelevant with regards to events in our lifetimes.

Sure, the sun will die some 9 digit number of years from now, but that really affect the subject at hand.



Simply because these agents exist doesn't mean they actually accomplish anything. Nations have been sending/supporting dissidents to other nations ever since the Romans started bribing specific Germanic tribes to beat up other Germanic tribes. Lenin as a revolutionary was a nobody for 2 decades; it took the military defeat of Russia in World War I to bring forth the conditions by which Lenin eventually prospered.

OWS, while it certainly has seeds in it planted by various interest groups, is still a far cry from being the emasculated parody which the Tea Party has become.

Equally so it is unclear that the aforementioned seeds will be able to influence the OWS agenda; ultimately most of these seeds are seeking to protect an agenda which is opposite to the anger at the system which lies at the core of OWS.

You may deride the 99%/1% paradigm, but it is a powerful one - one which has driven peasant revolutions for centuries.

The only question in my mind is whether the police forces and/or military in the US will be willing to gun down large numbers of active protesters - because to my knowledge that's the only way to really keep the masses down.

Oh brother...

First, the immutable laws of nature that you refer to are actually the architecture for the system that man's complexity theory is attempting to emulate.

Second, the system to date has experienced incredible accomplishments. The fact that almost all can't see them is a testimony to its success.

Third, who was Lenin fronting for?

Fourth, who do you think created the OWS and its "agenda"?

Fifth, why do you think the 99% v 1% was created? How are those goals in alignment with the goals of Complexity Theory?

Sixth, who needs military force when the mechanization of the public mind works so wonderfully? Although, a few good images of "agent forces" attacking "anti-system agents" would go a long way in shaping the public mind, I'm sure.

It's about Brain "Wiring", and until we're willing to "re-wire", ain't nothing going to change.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

it goes with the territory . . . at least they're not being shot (so far) in their beds . . .

Infiltration is the Norm, not the Exception, of U.S. Political Movements

When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy.

Virtually every movement has been the target of police surveillance and disruption activities. The most famous surveillance program was the FBI’s COINTELPRO which according to COINTELPRO Documents targeted the women’s rights, Civil Rights, anti-war and peace movements, the New Left, socialists, communists and independence movement for Puerto Rico, among others. Among the groups infiltrated were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, Congress for Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. Significant leaders from Albert Einstein to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who are both memorialized in Washington, were monitored. The rule in the United States is to be infiltrated; the exception is not to be.
The Church Committee documented a history of use of the FBI for purposes of political repression. They described infiltration efforts going back to World War I, including the 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up “anarchists and revolutionaries” for deportation. The Church Committee found infiltration efforts growing from 1936 through 1976, with COINTELPRO as the major program. While these domestic political spying and disruption programs were supposed to stop in 1976, in fact they have continued. As reported in “The Price of Dissent,” Federal Magistrate Joan Lefkow found in 1991, the record “shows that despite regulations, orders and consent decrees prohibiting such activities, the FBI had continued to collect information concerning only the exercise of free speech.”

How many agents or infiltrators can we expect to see inside a movement? One of the most notorious “police riots” was the 1968 Democratic Party Convention. Independent journalist Yasha Levine writes: “During the 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which drew about 10,000 protesters and was brutally crushed by the police, 1 out of 6 protesters was a federal undercover agent. That’s right, 1/6th of the total protesting population was made up of spooks drawn from various federal agencies. That’s roughly 1,600 people! The stat came from an Army document obtained by CBS News in 1978, a full decade after the protest took place. According to CBS, the infiltrators were not passive observers, monitoring and relaying information to central command, but were involved in violent confrontations with the police.” [Emphasis in original.]

Peter Camejo, who ran for Governor of California in 2003 as a Green and as Ralph Nader’s vice president in 2004, often told the story about his 1976 presidential campaign. Camejo able to get the FBI in court after finding their offices broken into and suing them over COINTELPRO activities. The judge asked the Special Agent in Charge how many FBI agents worked in Camejo’s presidential campaign; the answer was 66 agents. Camejo estimated he had a campaign staff of about 400 across the country. Once again that would be an infiltration rate of 1 out of 6 people. Camejo discovered that among the agents was his campaign co-chair. He also discovered eavesdropping equipment in his campaign office and documents showing the FBI had followed him since he was a student activist at 18 years old.

The federal infiltration is buttressed by local and state police. Local police infiltrators have a long tradition dating back to the Haymarket riots of 1886 and the 1904 “Italian Squad in New York City. In addition to political activity they were also involved in infiltrations of unions especially around strikes. Common throughout the United States were the so-called “Red Squads” a 1963 report estimated 300,000 officers were involved in surveillance of political activities. These were local police focused on the same types of people as the FBI. Some of their activities included assassinations of political activists.

In fact, a predecessor to the modern Occupy, the Bonus March of 1932 was infiltrated by federal agents. Their focus was on radicals, anarchists and Communists who might be in the movement. The infiltration resulted in greatly exaggerated reports about radicals inside the Bonus encampments, which were primarily made up of veterans and their families that were used to help justify their removal by President Herbert Hoover with military troops acting against veterans under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, assisted by then-colonels Eisenhower and Patton.

Another predecessor to the Occupy, Resurrection City of 1968, a “community of love and brotherhood,” that occupied the Washington, DC mall for four months was organized by the Poor People’s Campaign fulfilling a plan made prior to the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Resurrection City was heavily infiltrated by layers of police including the FBI, military, Park Police, Secret Service and Metropolitan DC police. FBI director Hoover had agents go to press conferences with false media identification, stationed FBI agents around the perimeter of the encampment and authorized an expensive informant program. After the FBI, the most expensive infiltration of Resurrection City was military intelligence which conducted an unlawful surveillance program, intercepting radio transmissions, monitoring radio traffic and intercepting all communications which were then passed on to the FBI, Secret Service, DC police and Park Police. The military also sent fictitious media to press conferences. The Metropolitan DC police “red squad” sent undercover officers into the camp and took mug shots of its members.

Infiltration tactics continue, perhaps have even escalated today. In a recent report the ACLU writes: “Today the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined. The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, themilitary, state and local police, private companies, and evenfiremen and emergency medical techniciansare gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants.” There have also multiple reports of the CIA working with New York City police for years, an activity that is almost certainly illegal.

Not only have budgets increased in the post-911 world, but restrictions on spying have been weakened and court review has become rarer. The government, often with corporate interests, are gathering huge amounts of data on Americans and targeting a wide range of groups and individuals for intelligence gathering and infiltration. The extent of spying is so widespread that it is more than this brief article can examine, but the ACLU provides a state-by-state review.

We will not know the extent of current infiltration and the activities of government agents for quite some time, but in the post-911 world, with record intelligence budgets and a massive new homeland security bureaucracy, spying is very likely more extensive than ever. Add to that the private security of corporations and political organizations tied to the two political parties and the extent of Occupy infiltration is very likely quite extensive.

What Have Been the Goals, Strategies and Tactics of Past Infiltration?

The most common purpose of infiltration is the intelligence function of gathering information, but the goals are commonly more aggressive. Herbert Hoover ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders according to COINTELPRO Documents.

According to, Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond, the goal of COINTELPRO was also to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” groups. FBI field operatives were directed to:

1.Create a negative public image for target groups by surveiling activists and then releasing negative personal information to the public.

2.Break down internal organization by creating conflicts by having agents exacerbate racial tensions, or send anonymous letters to try to create conflicts.

3.Create dissension between groups by spreading rumors that other groups were stealing money.

4.Restrict access to public resources by pressuring non-profit organizations to cut off funding or material support.

5.Restrict the ability to organize protests through agents promoting violence against police during planning and at protests.

6.Restrict the ability of individuals to participate in group activities by character assassinations, false arrests, surveillance.
The COINTELPRO documents disclose numerous cases of the FBI's intentions to stop the mass protest against the Vietnam War. Many techniques were used to accomplish the assignment. The documents state: “These included promoting splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists, and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful demonstrations.”

Infiltration to gather intelligence and intentionally disrupt and break up social movements is common in the United States. At this point in history when the degree of wealth inequality has reached such staggering proportions that the richest 400 people have the same wealth as the bottom 154,000,000 people, when unemployment and foreclosures rates are high, when tens of millions can’t afford health care and students can’t afford to go to college, those in power are fearful that the people will rise up. Events of the past year, particularly the Occupy, reveal that this uprising has begun. It is likely that the powerful will use the tools available to stop Occupy, including infiltration to disrupt, divide and misdirect.
In Part III, we will describe common behaviors of infiltrators and how other social movements have tried to minimize the impact of infiltration. We will then examine the basic structure of the Occupy and analyze its strengths and weaknesses in the context of infiltration. Our hope is that this series will lead to a broader discussion within the movement so that efforts can be made to balance the strengths of Occupy with actions necessary to protect the movement from disruption and division.

If you have experience with your Occupy responding to infiltration please send them to research@october2011.org. Experiences that have worked and failed are of interest.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are original organizers of OccupyWashington, DC/October2011 and are currently among the organizers of the National Occupation of Washington, DC.

Don, I think the critical part of this that you are missing is that BOTH sides are controlled, the anti-system messengers and the infiltrators who "infiltrate" the anti-system messengers. This is based on long standing military doctrine. ALL narratives are always controlled.

But yes, if a narratives does in fact get out that is not controlled, it is indeed infiltrated and muted.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

I again recommend this book...

http://www.amazon.com/Word-Short-His.../dp/184467679X

It's makes it clear that narratives are controlled and then are not able to be controlled.

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

First, the immutable laws of nature that you refer to are actually the architecture for the system that man's complexity theory is attempting to emulate.

Nature has no architecture. Therefore any system modeled on nature equally has no architecture.

Note that you were the one to talk about immutable laws of nature, not I.

As for complexity theory and emulation - I'd like to see you show linkage between literally millions and billions of random trials in a gigantic variety of environments vs. a set of human guesstimates feeding into computers or theory or whatever.

We can't even understand everything in a fruit fly's genetic sequence, nor do we understand genetic expression or what is/is not junk DNA, and yet you seem to be saying that this set of unknowns can be modeled.

Second, the system to date has experienced incredible accomplishments. The fact that almost all can't see them is a testimony to its success.

Perhaps you can list a few of these accomplishments. In particular, show how they are 'different than before'.

Third, who was Lenin fronting for?

You tell me. From my view, Lenin was the spokesmodel for the radical egalitarians/Bolsheviks. Sure, he was sent by Germany to Russia, but it is quite fair to say that the Germans didn't profit long term from this endeavor.

Fourth, who do you think created the OWS and its "agenda"?

Given that OWS doesn't have a clear public agenda outside of staging protests, I'd say you'd have to be a lot more clear in your veiled innuendo.

Fifth, why do you think the 99% v 1% was created? How are those goals in alignment with the goals of Complexity Theory?

Now you're just getting ridiculous. 99% is just a way of creating us vs them, no different than egalite/liberte/fraternite or give me liberty or give me death, or even The South shall Rise Again.

Sixth, who needs military force when the mechanization of the public mind works so wonderfully? Although, a few good images of "agent forces" attacking "anti-system agents" would go a long way in shaping the public mind, I'm sure.

Again, you tell me. If the "mechanization of the public mind" works so well, then why exactly are we seeing such blatant rollback of civil liberties?