This Is What Revolution Looks Like:Chris Hedges

By Chris Hedges (about the author)


Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future. 

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool's paradise. They think they can clean up "the mess" -- always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security -- by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke. 

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits.  Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street. 

The rogues' gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it's over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are "cathartic" and "entertaining," as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book, "Anatomy of a Revolution," laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton's next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.


I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor's legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. "Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators," Siegel tweeted after his resignation. 
There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backwards from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor.

No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall. 

Cross-posted from Truthdig

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio

Latest developments in the Occupy protests: AP

Latest developments in the Occupy protests

By The Associated Press – 17 hours ago 

Some of the latest developments in the Occupy protests:

CALIFORNIA

A day of demonstrations by students and anti-Wall Street activists was disrupted Tuesday when a campus police officer shot a man with a gun about a half-mile from the main protest site at the University of California, Berkeley.
The shooting occurred inside the Haas School of Business as hundreds of demonstrators left an outdoor plaza at the school for a march to demonstrate outside a bank. Officials didn't yet know whether the suspect was part of the Occupy Cal movement, said Ute Frey, a spokeswoman for the university.
ReFund California, a coalition of student groups and university employee unions, called for a campus strike, and protesters marched and rallied to protest banks and budget cuts to higher education.
Earlier in the day, more than 1,000 students, campus employees, faculty and other demonstrators filled an outdoor plaza after many took part in teach-ins. The plaza was covered with banners that read "stop the cuts" and "educate the state."
In Los Angeles, police and Occupy protesters are working on a plan that would close down an encampment that encircles City Hall.
Cmdr. Andrew Smith said Tuesday police don't have a sense of when demonstrators will pack up and go home but discussions are ongoing and both sides hope for a peaceful resolution.
Tensions rose briefly earlier Tuesday when about 100 protesters marched downtown in solidarity with New York counterparts being ousted from their encampment. No arrests were made.

GEORGIA

About 50 protesters gathered on the steps of City Hall in downtown Atlanta on a rainy Tuesday evening, holding banners reading, "Take Back Wall Street" and "Oakland, Wall Street, Atlanta, Chapel Hill: Our Passion for Freedom is Stronger Than Their Prison."
Spokeswoman La'Die Mansfield said the Occupy Atlanta demonstrators joined protests across the country in solidarity with New York protesters who were told to vacate Zuccotti Park.
The Occupy Atlanta protesters were forcibly removed by police from the park they had camped in for weeks after Mayor Kasim Reed decided conditions had become unsafe. The experience has given the Atlanta protesters a kinship with movements in New York and Oakland, where police also clashed with protesters, Mansfield said.

ILLINOIS

Protesters staged a sit-in Tuesday in front of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office to try to stop health care cuts.
The protesters had the backing of a variety of activist groups, including Occupy Chicago, as they marched to City Hall from a nearby church. About a dozen protesters eventually took up seats on the floor outside Emanuel's office under the watchful eyes of police and journalists. Dozens more protesters assembled in a cordoned-off area in a hallway outside Emanuel's office. The mayor wasn't there.
The protesters oppose his proposed budget, which would close six of the city's 12 mental health clinics and partner the city's neighborhood health clinics with a federal program.
They chanted and offered testimonials about how they had been helped by the clinics.

MAINE

Occupy protesters worked Tuesday to insulate their tents, set up portable heaters and buy extra thermal socks as they vowed to stick it out in a city park for the winter months ahead in Maine.
Close to 60 tents are now set up in Lincoln Park, with many people placing hay bales around their tents and tarps over the top for insulation to ward off the cold to come. Some have brought in portable kerosene and propane heaters to prepare for the weather in Portland, which averages 62 inches of snow a year.

MASSACHUSETTS

Hip-hop mogul and political activist Russell Simmons told protesters at the Occupy Boston encampment Tuesday that it will take dramatic action to rid the American political system of corporate influence.
Simmons arrived in Boston after police dismantled the birthplace of the Occupy movement in New York earlier Tuesday.
"The Occupy movement is under attack," Simmons said, adding that there is no contradiction in a multimillionaire such as himself supporting a movement demanding economic equity. "I benefit off the tax code, but I'm ready to pay more taxes and ... I don't like having my secretary paying more in taxes than me."
Also Tuesday, Occupy Boston demonstrators filed a lawsuit as a pre-emptive strike against any attempt to remove them from their protest site.
The lawsuit said the demonstrators are concerned about attempts in New York and other cities to shut down the protests. The group is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the city or police from removing them from Dewey Square in Boston's financial district, where they have had an encampment since Sept. 30.
A hearing on the request is scheduled in Suffolk Superior Court Wednesday.

MICHIGAN

The Detroit City Council has given Occupy Detroit protesters a one-week extension on their right to hold out at a city park.
Organizers of Occupy Detroit told council members Monday that they wanted extra time to clean up the park and move their belongings to new, winter locations.
Council members approved the extension Tuesday. It allows group members to remain at Grand Circus Park until 10 p.m. next Monday.
About 150 people have moved into the park since Oct. 14.
The city last month denied a request for a 45-day permit.

MINNESOTA

Authorities in Minneapolis aren't saying when or if they will begin enforcing a new rule against sleeping overnight on a government plaza after they declined to remove Wall Street protesters the night the rule took effect.
Several dozen protesters spent Monday night on the plaza between the Hennepin County Government Center and Minneapolis City Hall. Since Oct. 7, the roughly half-block area has been the site of protests rooted in a movement that began in New York City.
Carolyn Marinan, a Hennepin County spokeswoman, and Sheriff Rich Stanek have said they're balancing free speech with concerns about the safety of protesters, who have been forbidden to set up tents.
"It's not going to be OK for people to stay overnight when temperatures are dangerous and cold," Marinan said Tuesday. "We don't want someone freezing on our plaza."

MISSOURI

A federal judge refused Tuesday to order Kiener Plaza re-opened for round-the-clock protests by the group Occupy St. Louis, whose tent city was ousted over the weekend after police began enforcing a 10 p.m. curfew in city parks.
U.S. District Judge Carol Jackson said Occupy St. Louis failed to show that the curfew was being selectively enforced in Kiener Plaza or that the enforcement was a reaction to the political nature of the protest, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Occupy St. Louis maintained its tent city in Kiener Plaza from early October until police arrested 27 members without incident early Saturday.

NEW YORK

Hundreds of police officers in riot gear raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City in the pre-dawn darkness Tuesday, evicted hundreds of protesters and then demolished the tent city, leaving the future of the demonstration in limbo.
Later in the day, a New York judge upheld the city's crackdown. Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman said in his ruling that the protesters "have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators and other installations to the exclusion of the owner's reasonable rights ... or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely."
Protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti Park two by two Tuesday evening. They each could take only a small bag. No sleeping bags or tents were allowed.
City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez was released without bail Tuesday night after being charged with resisting arrest as police cleared the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park.
Rodriguez emerged from a courtroom Tuesday night with visible scrapes on his left temple and right forehead. He says an officer assaulted him two blocks from the park as he went to observe the police action. Police had no immediate comment.
Several journalists were arrested, handcuffed and hauled onto police buses along with hundreds of protesters Tuesday.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the NYPD's policy of keeping the media back, saying it was intended to keep them out of harm's way.
City officials said the behavior was troubling, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the council would look into "reports of excessive force by the NYPD and reports of infringement of the rights of the press."
According to a poll released Tuesday, most New York voters don't believe the Occupy Wall Street movement has a clear message or represents 99 percent of Americans, but they support the demonstrators' right to stay in public parks around the clock.
The Siena College poll showed 45 percent of voters statewide have a favorable view of the movement. Forty-four percent have an unfavorable view, up six percentage points from a month earlier.
However, 57 percent of those polled said the demonstrators should be able to stay in the parks all day and all night, while 40 percent say they should not.
In upstate New York, a Republican Party official clashed verbally with Occupy Albany protesters Tuesday and urged Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor to handle curfew violations by the demonstrators in a public park next to the state Capitol.
Albany County Republican Chairman Don Clarey went to the encampment Tuesday to tell reporters that Cuomo should appoint the special prosecutor.
"The rule of law is at stake here," Clarey said. "We need to enforce the law."
Demonstrators surrounded him Tuesday with signs with slogans like "Got Lies" and "Robin Hood was right" and countered that they have a constitutional right to be there. "The Constitution is the law of the land," some chanted, making him hard to hear.

OHIO

Police in Ohio say they have arrested seven Occupy protesters for refusing to leave a bank.
Columbus police Sgt. Rich Weiner says the group on Tuesday took their protest and chanting into a Fifth Third branch and a U.S. Bank branch, where they were arrested.
He said they were asked to leave by security, and those who refused were arrested on misdemeanor criminal trespassing charges.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson plans to join an Occupy group in Ohio at a rally protesting the recent clearing out of Occupy camps in New York and other cities.
Spokesmen for Occupy Cincinnati and Jackson say he will join the group Tuesday night at a downtown park where the group's members have been meeting and last month camped out. The group says about 20 University of Cincinnati students joined them Tuesday in a meeting on the UC campus where Occupy Cincinnati had urged students to walk out of classes in support of the movement.

OKLAHOMA

A member of the Occupy Tulsa group said Tuesday that demonstrations will continue there around the clock despite recent arrests of protesters in the city and elsewhere.
Occupy Tulsa members have been gathering at a downtown park for several weeks to protest what they say is corporate greed and economic inequality.
Tulsa police officer Jason Willingham estimated 40 to 50 arrests had been made at H.A. Chapman Centennial Green since Nov. 2, the most recent on Sunday.
Occupy Tulsa member Brian Horton said those arrested in Tulsa weren't acting as part of the group when they violated the city's 11 p.m. park curfew.

OREGON

A group of key Occupy Portland demonstrators say they're breaking off ties with the city and police amid allegations by demonstrators that police used excessive force when they broke up a downtown camp that protesters had held for five weeks.
Protester Justin Bridges was hospitalized Sunday after police dragged him away from the camp, and he now claims officers beat and brutalized him. Police said Bridges was simply pulled away from a dangerous situation when he fell to the ground between protesters and riot police.
Six demonstrators who had served as liaisons between Occupy Portland, the city and police published an open letter Tuesday saying they were giving up their positions "in direct response to the deplorable police actions" and what they see as a lack of communication.
Officials told protesters in a state park on the Capitol grounds in Salem their tents and other structures have to be out by the end of the month.
Parks and Recreation Department officials say the camp's food and medical structures at Willson Park are open all night and are attracting unruly people.
The department told the protesters Monday their permit to demonstrate would end at the end of the month. The park is open to pedestrians 24 hours a day, and state officials say the protesters can be there if they don't camp or have structures.

PENNSYLVANIA

Police say a homeless man was arrested early Tuesday for assaulting a homeless woman at the Occupy Philadelphia encampment.
Officer Jillian Russell says the 47-year-old man was arrested after slapping and punching the woman. He is charged with simple assault.
Both the man and the woman told police they were affiliated with the protest. A member of Occupy Philadelphia said he couldn't immediately verify whether that was the case.

TENNESSEE

A flood of support for Wall Street protesters poured in after Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam imposed a curfew that led to the arrests of 55 people in Nashville, according to public records obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Of nearly 400 emails sent to the Republican governor's office, only 11 supported his actions.
The documents also include cost estimates for cleaning the plaza following the protest. One company on Oct. 31 said it would cost more than $46,000 to clean and refinish the surface, while another estimated it to be about $18,000 to pressure wash and treat the areas.

TEXAS

Police say seven people have been arrested at an Occupy El Paso campsite in a peaceful removal of the protesters.
El Paso police spokesman Darrel Petry says no one was injured during the arrests early Tuesday at San Jacinto Plaza. The seven El Paso residents are accused of misdemeanor unlawful camping in a city park and also being in a public park after hours, he said.
A federal judge has refused to grant an order sought by Occupy Dallas demonstrators to prevent the city from closing their campsite.
Protesters failed to get a temporary restraining order Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle earlier expressed concern that federal courts did not have jurisdiction.
The city last week said protesters had violated an agreement to allow the campsite near Dallas City Hall. The city noted reports of a sexual assault of a child at the site, the removal of a baby over possible endangerment and trespassing arrests.
A Nov. 12 deadline to comply has been extended.
Occupy Dallas officials said protesters are abiding by the deal.

VIRGINIA

Members of Occupy Richmond say they'll take up a newspaper publisher's offer to encamp on his property next door to the mayor's residence.
The protesters said they'll accept the offer from Raymond Boone, editor and founder the Richmond Free Press. They said they'll begin their encampment on Tuesday.
Boone offered his property last week in an editorial.

WASHINGTON

The Occupy movement has reached one of Washington state's most remote towns — the fictional home of the characters in the vampire teen series "Twilight."
The Peninsula Daily News reports that 17 people held an Occupy Forks protest on Saturday, rallying outside a Bank of America branch, the only corporate presence the protesters could find in the town.
It's about a four-hour trip from Seattle, on the western side of the Olympic Peninsula.

AUSTRALIA

Police in Australia have swooped down on the Occupy Melbourne camp, arresting three protesters as they enforced city orders requiring demonstrators to take down tents and tarpaulins.
A Melbourne spokeswoman says campers weren't evicted Wednesday morning but were issued notices giving them an hour to remove the shelters. She said some protesters have lawfully remained at the camp.

SWITZERLAND

Police in the Swiss city of Zurich have cleared a makeshift camp linked to the global Occupy protest movement.
Zurich city police say 31 protesters peacefully resisted the clearance and were briefly detained when officers enforced an evacuation order for the historic Lindenhof square early Tuesday.
Police spokesman Marco Cortesi says some 20 protesters had earlier left the camp voluntarily.
The protesters had pitched their tents in the old town square Oct. 16 as part of an international anti-capitalist movement sparked by efforts to "occupy Wall Street."

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

Signs Point to a Coordinated National Program to Try and Unoccupy Wall Street and Other Cities

Police State Tactics: Signs Point to a Coordinated National Program to Try and Unoccupy Wall Street and Other Cities

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/900

Tue, 11/15/2011 - 18:27 — Anonymous

by: 

Dave Lindorff

The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.
Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, Dallas, TX, Atlanta, GA, and most recently New York, NY, where the Occupation Movement began on September 17. The two most recent eviction efforts, in Oakland and New York, have been the worst.
The police attacks have had a lot in common. They have been “justified” based upon trumped up pre-textural claims that the occupiers are creating a health hazard, or a fire hazard, or a crime problem, generally on little or no evidence, or there has been a digging up of obscure and constitutionally questionable statutes, for example laws outlawing the homeless. Then the police come in, usually in dead of night, dressed in riot gear and heavily armed with mace weapons, batons, plastic cuffs and tear gas, or even assault rifles in some cases and so-called flash-bang stun grenades--all weapons to be used against peaceful demonstrators.
So violent has been the response that some returned veterans have condemned the police for using weapons and tactics that are not even permitted by occupying troops in war-torn countries.
“We definitely feel, especially in a movement like this that has arisen so quickly in a number of cities, that there will be a coordinated national effort to try and shut it down,” says Heidi Bogosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, which has been playing a key role providing legal services to the new movement.
“We see the scapegoating of these movements, the attacks at night, and in general tactics designed to terrorize and to scare protesters away. I can’t see this as anything other than centrally coordinated.”
One indication of that coordination may have been a conference call among 18 city mayors which was confirmed by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan in a radio interview on San Francisco station KALW. Dan Siegel, an Oakland attorney who worked as an advisor to Quan, but who resigned in disgust after Oakland police and law enforcement personnel from a number of surrounding jurisdictions brutally drove occupiers there out of their park using tear gas, supposedly non-lethal ammunition (bean bags and rubber bullets) and flash-bang grenades in a night-time raid in the early hours of November 14, says that phone conference call took place, significantly, while Quan was in Washington, DC.
Remember this image: it's the national police state on the march
Shortly afterwards, on Oct. 25, Quan authorized the first brutal police assault on Occupy Oakland. It led, among other things, to the critical wounding of Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran who was among the protesters, and was hit in the forehead by a police tear gas cannister fired at close range.
Who organized that critical conference call? Was it Quan or one of the other mayors, or was it someone in the federal government? Siegel says he doesn’t know, and Quan isn’t saying.
But both Siegel and Boghosian say they strongly suspect federal involvement in the planning of the recent spate of police violence against occupiers. Says Siegel, “It’s only logical to assume that the ‘Fusion Centers’ are involved, especially after the Oakland occupiers shut down the port in Oakland.”
Some 72 Fusion Centers, located around the US and funded by the US at a cost of half a billion dollars, are a post 9-11creation of the new Homeland Security Department. Bringing the FBI together with local law enforcement departments, they both collect and share domestic intelligence, and can serve as command centers to direct local law enforcement in helping implement national law enforcement goals. There are also many Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which directly link the FBI with urban police departments.
Says Boghosian, “What we are seeing here is the Miami model, with various levels of law enforcement, local, state and federal, all at work. It would be shocking if federal law enforcement were not seeing this occupy movement now as a national security threat.”
Mara Veheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild’s National Mass Defense Committee, based in Washington, agrees. “These crackdowns on the occupation movement certainly appear to be part of a national strategy to crush them,” she says. “We haven’t yet found overt evidence of federal involvement, but the fact that in rapid succession local authorities have taken action raises the specter of coordination.”
She adds, “There is absolutely no legal justification for the involvement of the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in this movement. These demonstrations are not terrorist activities, and police should not be treating them as such, yet all over the country the police are treating the protesters as if they are criminals. The similarity of the response everywhere to the movement makes it appear that there is a coordinated strategy.”
Meanwhile, Siegel, now back in private practice, says that since the riots that followed the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART transit cop, who shot Grant fatally in the head after he had been arrested, subdued and handcuffed for a turnstile jumping violation, federal law enforcement officials have been observed actively involved in police activities in the Oakland area.
Some Oakland residents have reported seeing federal vehicles and possibly also National Guard equipment during the police actions against occupation demonstrators, too, though National Guardsmen can only be legally activated by a governor, and California Gov. Jerry Brown, a former mayor of Oakland, has not publicly issued any such order.
Rick Ellis, a journalist with the Minneapolis office of the news outlet Examiner.com, is reporting that an unidentified US Justice Department official has confirmed what Boghosian, Siegel and Veheyden-Hilliard say they suspect is the case: that each of the recent brutal police evictions and attacks on occupation groups “was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.”
Ellis writes, “According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.”
According to an AP story published early Wednesday, mayors and city leaders in as many as 40 cities were communicating about coordinating an attack on the occupy movement. Again, this hardly seems like it was on their own initiative.
Given how things have played out, it certainly looks like the suspicions were correct, and that Ellis’s source is telling the truth.
President Obama has a lot to answer for. So do the mayors who have been overseeing the repressive operations locally.

The Washington Influence Industry Trailer

Occupy Wall Street: New York police evict demonstrators

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-ny-police-evict-demonstrators.html

 

8

3

New York City police moved in on Zuccotti Park early Tuesday, ordering Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who have been encamped in Lower Manhattan since Sept. 17 to leave or risk arrest.
About 1 a.m., police handed out notices from the park's owner, Brookfield Office Properties, and the city saying the park had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous, the Associated Press reported.
Paul Browne, a police spokesman, said most people began leaving when they received the notices; one person was arrested for disorderly conduct.
Rabbi Chaim Gruber, an Occupy Wall Street member, said police officers were clearing the streets near the park.
“The police are forming a human shield and are pushing everyone away,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
The New York Daily News said hundreds of police were at the scene.
"I don't want to leave," protester Ben Swenson, 25, said, according to the Daily News. "It's about social justice, equality, even rights."
Protesters were told they could return but without sleeping bags, tarps or tents.
The protesters' website streamed live video as the raid unfolded. The website also urged people to “get to the park immediately for eviction defense.” Demonstrators shouted “We love our country” and “You don’t have to do this.”
The eviction came as Occupy Wall Street unveiled a call to “shut down Wall Street” on Thursday morning, and to occupy the city’s subways that afternoon.
Brookfield Office Properties and the city came close to removing the demonstrators on Oct. 14, but backed off.
Occupy Wall Street has sparked similar encampments in cities across the nation, including a tent city on the grounds of Los Angeles City Hall. Residents of the Los Angeles encampment were heard banging drums as midnight approached.
The leaderless movement has complained about a range of issues, including Wall Street practices and student loan indebtedness.
Some cities have taken a more aggressive posture to stem the protests in recent days. Riot police evicted demonstrators Sunday in Portland, Ore., while demonstrators have been arrested in Oakland; Albany, N.Y.; Salt Lake City; and Denver.
RELATED:
Oakland site cleared, but protest lives
At Occupy L.A., no lock step or group think
Occupy Wall Street protesters driven by varying goals
-- Steve Clow
Photo: New York City police gather early Tuesday to order Occupy Wall Street protesters to leave Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, their longtime encampment. Credit: Karly Domb Sadof / Associated Press

NYC police radio channel

http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/?action=wp&feedId=8905

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DO IT NOW: URGENT: Defend Occupy Wall Street

EMERGENCY: Occupy Wall Street tweets, "Raid happening NOW at #libertysq MOBILIZE!" Please sign the emergency petition against this outrage -- then call every phone number listed in the email you get afterward. Mayor, Governor, NYPD, everyone... Mayor Bloomberg: Respect First Amendment rights. Don't evict Occupy Wall Street. http://act.boldprogressives.org/sign/petition_defend_ows/?source=tw-2

"NYPD Counter Terrorism" unit sent in. Unfuckingbel... on Twitpic

"NYPD Counter Terrorism" unit sent in. Unfuckingbel... on Twitpic

@MMFlint

Michael Moore November 15, 2011
"NYPD Counter Terrorism" unit sent in. Unfuckingbelievable when the terrorists are @ Goldman Sachs.

Economic Collapse a Mathematical Certainty - Top 5 Places Where Not To Be

by NewAmericaNow

The dollar collapse will be the single largest event in human history. This will be the first event that will touch every single living person in the world. All human activity is controlled by money. Our wealth,our work,our food,our government,even our relationships are affected by money.


No money in human history has had as much reach in both breadth and depth as the dollar. It is the de facto world currency. All other currency collapses will pale in comparison to this big one. All other currency crises have been regional and there were other currencies for people to grasp on to.

This collapse will be global and it will bring down not only the dollar but all other fiat currencies,as they are fundamentally no different. The collapse of currencies will lead to the collapse of ALL paper assets. The repercussions to this will have incredible results world wide.

"We Are the 99%" day of action on November 17

Dear MoveOn member,

They just don't get it. Ordinary people are rising up and demanding that our country work for the 99%, but Congress is still acting like nothing has changed.

In less than two weeks, the Super Committee will unveil their deficit reduction plan. And instead of focusing on creating jobs and making the rich pay their fair share, all indications are that Congress will once again protect the 1% at the expense of the 99%—unleashing up to $1.2 trillion in vicious, job-killing cuts that could hit Medicare, Social Security, and other programs the middle class relies on.

We've got just 12 days left to stop them—and our only chance is massive, coordinated action to let them know we will not stand for more of the same disastrous policies.

So we're joining with Occupy Wall Street, and progressive allies like SEIU, AFL-CIO, and many more for a "We Are the 99%" day of action on November 17. Together, we'll demand that Congress and the Super Committee tax Wall Street to create millions of jobs and rebuild our economy for the 99%. But if we're going to stop this terrible deal, these events need to be big—really big. Can you join us?

I'll stand up for the 99% on November 17 in Minneapolis.

I can't make this event, but keep me up-to-date on the campaign.

Democrats on the Super Committee have already offered $500 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, even though Republicans still refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy.¹ And any deal that the Super Committee reaches will be incredibly dangerous. Part of the debt ceiling deal this summer was that the Super Committee's report would get a straight up-or-down vote in both houses of Congress immediately—making it very hard to stop once the train has left the station.

Our plan for November 17 is to hold events at the very places where Congress could be creating jobs to get Americans back to work: crumbling bridges, understaffed schools, and other examples of critical infrastructure in disrepair. We need to remind Congress—and our fellow community members—that there's plenty of work that needs doing in America, if only Washington would focus on the right things. And we need to show Congress how huge the backlash will be if they push through yet another disastrous deal.

Can you join us in Minneapolis to stand up for the 99%?

I'll stand up for the 99% on November 17 in Minneapolis.

I can't make this event, but keep me up-to-date on the campaign.

Thanks for all you do.

–Lenore, Joan, Ryan, Wes, and the rest of the team

Source:

1. "Dems, GOP Play Super Committee Hot Potato As Talks Stall Over Taxes," Talking Points Memo, November 10, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=267546&id=32795-18984773-M0J1Flx&t=6

Class Warfare and Revolution (Circa 1850)

Class Warfare and Revolution (Circa 1850)

In a recent post I discuss six policies that spurred the Industrial Revolution in England – opening up immigration, weakening the guilds, investing in infrastructure, privatizing agricultural land, forcing a move to new energy sources, and policies for bringing capital to the new, capital-intensive technologies – and suggest that these policies have their analogues today as we face what history may view as another industrial revolution.

But that is only one part of the story of the Industrial Revolution. Another part is not always very pretty, but might also be instructive.  

Class Division in the New Economy

The rise of the capitalist class during the Industrial Revolution is well known, with a select few, the barons of industry, be it steel, rail, or textiles, catapulting to a level of wealth rarely known before. But less considered is the other tail of the distribution, the downward spiral of what today might be termed the middle class.

The story of the steel-driver John Henry’s race with the steam hammer is a type for the plight of English laborers overrun by the Industrial Revolution. Labor was caught in the sea-change of new technologies and economic organization. 

Hand work could not compete with the machines, no matter how great the workers' skill and determination. A whole generation of hand laborers kept up a desperate struggle, but with an inevitable end. The same occurred for the small farmers, who were squeezed out by the consolidation of farms that had been initiated by the policy of privatizing enclosures. Some gave up their land and drifted away to the towns to keep up the struggle a little longer as hand-loom weavers, but then became part of the factory labor class, just as others gave up their looms and devoted themselves entirely to farming for a while, but eventually sold their land and dropped into the class of agricultural laborers. 

The result was the same in either case: Household manufacture gave way to that of the factory and the small farms were consolidated. For the many who did both farming and hand work, their work, subsistence farms and homes were all lost.The farmers who lost access to the commons due to the policy of enclosures frequently failed to find alternative employment near home and became paupers and vagabonds.

Just as the factory system disenfranchised and commoditized the industrial workers, the farm workers became separated from the land. Three classes emerged in agriculture: the landlords, the tenant farmers, and the farm laborers. The landlord class was a comparatively small group, a few thousand, of nobility and gentry who owned by far the majority of agricultural land. Another class, the yeomen who owned and cultivated their own small farms, disappeared entirely, descending into the class of laborers.

Obviously, the Industrial Revolution ultimately increased prosperity, but for a time it made a wide swath of the populace worse off. The period of transition from the domestic to the factory system of industry and from the older to the new agriculture was one of almost unrelieved misery for those who could not integrate into the new economy, whether due to lack of capital or lack of physical or mental adaptability.

New Routes to Job Creation

While the hand-loom weavers kept up a hopeless struggle in the attics and cellars of the factory towns, their wages sinking lower and lower until the whole generation finally died out, and while the small farmers bowed to the competition with the larger producers, the plight of the farmers and hand laborers descended with a vengeance on their children. Many landed in parish poorhouses, and it didn’t take long before the factories discovered this fresh new source of labor. They began taking the poorhouse children as “apprentices”, signing indentures with their stewards, agreeing to give their wards room and board – and the promise of training – and then put them to work.

Children as young as seven years old worked in the cotton spinning factories. The children began work while extremely young and worked the same hours as the grown men and women. They could do many jobs in the factories just as well, and in some cases, such as when working with spindles and fine thread, even better than adults. They were remotely situated in apprentice houses built near the factories, the burdens of unrelieved labor and the harshness of their masters unnoticed by the community. The actual working hours in the factories in the earlier part of the 19th century were a technology-assisted twelve to fourteen hours a day; gas lights illuminated the factories and steam power worked without tiring. When the factory was running at full capacity the children were employed in two shifts, one in the day and another in the night. It was said that "their beds never got cold," one shift climbing into bed as the other got out. There was no effort to provide them with any training, nor education, nor time for recreation.

While the conditions were harsh in the factories, things could be worse. Here is an account of child labor in the mines. It is so heart-wrenching that it might be dismissed as sensationalism were it not based on the findings of an 1842 report of a Royal Commission charged with investigating the conditions of child labor in the mines:

Children began their life in the coal mines at five, six, or seven years of age. Girls and women worked like boys and men, they were less than half clothed, and worked alongside of men who were stark naked. There were from twelve to fourteen working hours in the twenty-four, and these were often at night. Little girls of six or eight years of age made ten to twelve trips a day up steep ladders to the surface, carrying half a hundred weight of coal in wooden buckets on their backs at each journey. Young women appeared before the commissioners, when summoned from their work, dressed merely in a pair of trousers, dripping wet from the water of the mine, and already weary with the labor of a day scarcely more than begun. A common form of labor consisted of drawing on hands and knees over the inequalities of a passageway not more than two feet or twenty-eight inches high a car or tub filled with three or four hundred weight of coal, attached by a chain and hook to a leather band around the waist.

(Also see Lord Shaftesbury’s speech to parliament).

The job creators, with the prosperity of England no doubt foremost in their minds, lobbied against the hand of regulation and labor reform. Their points were three-fold:

First, that abolishing child labor would harm those who promoted job creation and productivity. Manufacturers opposed the child labor laws as an unjust interference with their business, an unnecessary and burdensome obstacle to their success, and a threat of ruin to the class who provided employment to so many laborers and created the productive engine that was the source of commerce for the country.

Second, that if child labor were restricted England would be placed at a competitive disadvantage. This would not only affect the capitalist class, but affect the size of the pie to be distributed, and thus ultimately trickle down to affect the working class itself.

Third, that at a more fundamental level government regulation should be broadly cast aside because it was detrimental to competition and essential freedoms: freedom of labor, freedom of capital, and freedom of contract. If the employer and the employee were both satisfied with the conditions of their labor, why should the government interfere? How this related to children who had been indentured by their stewards is unclear.

There was, however, opposition slowly grinding out successes in one industry after another over the course of the decades, though the most oppressive industry, that of mining, being literally underground and hence less visible, was only addressed toward the tail end of the reform.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Cry of the Children, published in 1842, is an influential example of the outpouring of sympathy for the plight of child labor, but the most persuasive argument for reducing the hours of children did not come from sympathy as much as from economic practicality worthy of laissez faire. Work in such a stifling and harsh environment stunted the children’s growth and led to disease and degenerative conditions. Therefore, some in the capitalist class were won over, or at least muted in their opposition because they deemed it advisable to reduce the harsh labor conditions for the “physical preservation of the race”.

The Revolutions of 1848

There are different possibilities available at any historical moment; the socioeconomic sphere can adjust to change in any number of ways. In the face of the social tumult brought on by the industrial revolution, the course taken in Europe differed from that of England. In England awareness and change came about gradually through the force of government reforms. In Europe the epiphany occurred with the revolutions of 1848. As did the events in the England, these revolutions reflect some of the stresses and some of the glimmers of political and social activity we are seeing today.

The 1848 revolutions were the culmination of a number of stresses, some similar to those felt in England, which had been building over the course of decades. There were social costs incurred as the small farms and guilds of the artisans were replaced with larger, impersonal agricultural and industrial plants. There had been a decline in the standard of living compared to that of the previous generation.  The problems reached a crescendo in the years immediately preceding the 1848 revolutions because of the interrelated crises of years of poor harvests, a credit crunch brought on in part by the need to borrow in the face of the resulting high food prices, and an economic downturn precipitated by, among other things, a banking crisis. These all combined to lead to lower income and high unemployment. 

The revolutions of 1848 spread by force of ideology, spurred on by new modes of communication that, ironically, were facilitated by the concentration of the masses due to the factory system. The  revolutionary events began in January 1848 in Palermo, the provincial capital of Sicily. Uprisings were a regular occurrence there and in southern Italy in general, but this time they found more success and quickly spread from there to the Italian mainland. From there they moved on to Paris, where there were street demonstrations and clashes between demonstrators and police, with the demonstrators erecting barricades throughout the city. By March demonstrations and clashes between the demonstrators and police spread to Munich, Vienna and Budapest, and then to Milan and Berlin.

In most all cases the confrontations led to constitutional changes, dissolution of monarchies, and boarder political representation for the masses. But these changes ended up being short-lived; within a few years a counterrevolutionary wave washed many of these gains away. However, the 1848 revolutions represented the first time that there was such a broad outpouring of popular support, with the masses, mostly participating in non-violent protests, spanning many countries, religious groups and classes. 

Government! Do the Right Thing!

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 17

 

 2 - 3:00 p.m. - Join with fellow Minnesotans at the State Capital Rotunda to demand that our

GOVERNMENT

DO THE RIGHT THING.

4:00 p.m. – Reconvene with us at the 10^th Avenue Bridge to rally in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street as we Bridge The Gap On Jobs And Racial Equality. Organized by Minnesotans For A Fair Economy.        

Hundreds of homeless men women and children in our state with more people put out every day. Thousands living on the brink in Minnesota have no right to education, housing, food, or medical care.  And our representatives are doing nothing to help because they are too busy trying to figure out how to give

$300,000,000.00 to the RICHEST 1%

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=139636669475114&view=wall

  

If you are one paycheck away from disaster, come stand in solidarity with your neighbors and friends because any day,

IT COULD BE YOU!