Reporters For Right-Wing Publication Daily Caller Beaten By NYPD, Helped By Protesters By Zaid Jilani on November 17, 2011 at 1:20 pm "Reporters For Right-Wing Publication Daily Caller Beaten By NYPD, Helped By Protesters" The Daily Caller's Michelle Fields faced abuse from the NYPD and help from protesters. The right-wing Daily Caller website has been anything but kind to Occupy Wall Street, even going so far as to condemn the protest movement as generating riots, murder, and arson. But when a couple of Daily Caller employees were at Occupy Wall Street this morning, it was the very protesters they had been demonizing who ended up helping them out. “Direna had a camera in her hand and I had a microphone, and we were being hit,” she said. Fields says that protesters right now are effectively “barricaded” in Zuccotti Park, which was the spot from which they were ousted from on Tuesday. Update The Daily Caller has now added video of Fields being assaulted by police.
Occupy Oklahoma City Now Facing Eviction Posted 2 years ago on Nov. 28, 2011, 11:17 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt Call Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett (405-297-2424 - email mayor@okc.gov) and voice your opposition to the eviction of this peaceful expression of free speech! The coordinated crackdown on free speech continues. While Occupations in Los Angeles and Philadelphia are still holding strong (as of 11pm EST) and Washingtonians are occupying their State Capitol, the encampment at Occupy Oklahoma City is now under threat of eviction. City officials declined to renew a permit application and announced that overnight encampment will no longer be "tolerated" at Kerr Park, where the Occupation is currently centered. During the Black Friday national day of action against consumerism, several Occupy OKC members were arrested inside a Walmart. 12:32am EST: Police are beginning to surround the park.12:20am EST: Twenty minutes past the 11pm CST eviction deadline, at least fifty people reported in the park.
Occupy Atlanta encamps on lawn of house under foreclosure threat An Atlanta police officer sent an email to Occupy Atlanta protesters asking for help with his house, which is under threat of foreclosure (when the family tried to refinance their mortgage, the bank responded with a foreclosure notice). Dozens of Atlanta occupiers shifted their camp to the house's lawn, erecting "This home is occupied" signs and promising to put their bodies between the house and the sheriff's deputies when the eviction comes. The neighbors are highly supportive. Last week, Tawanna Rorey’s husband, a police officer based in Gwinnett County, e-mailed Occupy Atlanta to explain that his home was going to be foreclosed on and his family was in danger of being evicted on Monday. Occupy Atlanta Encamps In Neighborhood To Save Police Officer’s Home From Foreclosure (via Digg)
CUNY Protests Happening Now Inside of a barricaded meeting at Baruch College (24th and Lexington Ave), the City University of New York Board of Trustees is voting to raise tuition at the school. Outside, hundreds of Occupy CUNY students and their supporters are chanting, "Education is a right, Fight! Fight! Students are asking all supporters to join them at Baruch College until 8PM this evening. Following the lead of student protesters opposing tuition hikes and austerity measures, today has been called as a student strike and day of action in solidarity with the protesters at the University of California-Davis who faced severe police repression while expressing their right to free speech. The proposal to call for a strike was passed by a massive general assembly at UC-Davis in an effort to shut down campuses where the UC Regents' were scheduled to vote today on austerity measures there:
Their Own Worst Enemies by Dominic Holden - Seattle News N o sooner had six panelists finished opening remarks last Saturday evening than a woman scampered onstage and yelled, "Mic check!" It was an orchestrated effort by several dozen Occupy Seattle activists to use the "People's Mic" to interrupt a forum at Town Hall—a forum in favor of Occupy Wall Street, featuring three wonks and three activists from Occupy Seattle. Their stunt replaced what was supposed to be an informed discussion with an uninformative shoutathon about process that consumed most of the evening. They booed opinions they disagreed with and drove supporters out of the building. "I walked in supportive and left unsupportive," said 69-year-old Mary Ann, who declined to provide her last name. She added: "And I believe in every one of their damn principles." Across the country, police and mayors have been sweeping occupiers out of their camps; conversely, here in Seattle, protesters have become their own greatest public-relations liability.
Around the World, Medical Workers Join Protests on the Side of the 99% | Occupy Wall Street November 28, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The following article first appeared at Working In These Times, the labor blog of In These Times magazine. Warning: Defending your rights may be hazardous to your health. The recent uprisings around the world illustrate the physical risks involved in intense street protests. Amid the brutal clashes with security forces at Tahrir Square, barebones field hospitals have held the line, thanks to a grassroots network of Tahrir doctors. But hospitals are by no means safe havens. The Jerusalem Post reported on a brutal assault on a field hospital: A force of military police swept in like a fury, striking and beating doctors and patients alike. Physicians for Human Rights reports that in Bahrain, Syria and other countries swept up in mass uprisings, authoritarian rulers have directly targeted doctors for doing their jobs.
Ignorance is bliss when it comes to challenging social issues Nov. 21, 2011 — The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . "These studies were designed to help understand the so-called 'ignorance is bliss' approach to social issues," said author Steven Shepherd, a graduate student with the University of Waterloo in Ontario. "The findings can assist educators in addressing significant barriers to getting people involved and engaged in social issues." In one study, participants who felt most affected by the economic recession avoided information challenging the government's ability to manage the economy.
Violent Police Crack-Downs on the Occupy Movement Represent a Real Threat | Occupy Wall Street November 28, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Around California and all over the country, we have been told that Occupy encampments must come down because of "health and safety concerns." But all around the country, we have seen the police take down these encampments with an overzealous use of pepper spray, tear gas and flash-bang grenades. UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi cited "health and safety concerns" on Friday when she called for tents at the fledging Occupy UC Davis encampment to "be peacefully removed" by 3 p.m. Unfortunately, the UC Davis Police Department is not the only law enforcement agency that fails to appreciate those two self-evident principles. UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau initially claimed that the Occupy Cal protesters - by merely linking arms - were "not nonviolent," apparently ignoring the venerable history of what has now become an iconic gesture of the civil rights movement.
Tweet Forensics: Occupy vs. Tea Party Occupy Wall Street Twitter network as of November 15 2011. [Click the image for a larger version] Credit: Marc Smith/Social Media Research FoundationHere's an interesting analysis by Marc Smith at the Social Media Research Foundation in Belmont, California, of the difference between Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party tweeters. The above image shows the OWS network. These are the connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word occupywallstreet when queried on November 15, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded).
How Zuccotti Park Became Zuccotti Prison: Creeping American Police State | Occupy Wall Street November 28, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. When I arrived at Zuccotti Prison one afternoon last week, the “park” was in its now-usual lockdown mode. The park itself was bare of anything whatsoever and, that day, parts of it had been cordoned off, theoretically for yet more cleaning, with the kind of yellow police tape that would normally surround a crime scene, which was exactly how it seemed. Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg’s police assault on the park, OWS has largely decamped for spaces unknown and for the future. And keep in mind, when it comes to that pepper-spraying incident, we’re talking about sleepy Davis, California, and a campus once renowned for its agronomy school. Still, terror is what now makes our American world work, the trains run more or less on time, and the money flow in.
92% Of Americans Are Socialists They Just Don't Know It Wealth inequality is as extreme today as it was during the Great Depression years. In real terms, the wealthy hold the majority of this nation’s wealth and income. The problem in this country is mass disillusionment. In a recent study by Duke and Harvard University they found many Americans believe that the top 20% of our nation’s wealthiest own 60% of the wealth. The real figure is the top 20% own 84% of our nation’s wealth and it is increasing every year. When the respondents were asked to pick an unlabeled pie chart “How much should the top 20% own?” Here is the actual study. Americans Prefer Sweden For the first task, we created three unlabeled pie charts of wealth distributions, one of which depicted a perfectly equal distribution of wealth. 92% of the respondents believe in the socialistic economic wealth distribution of Sweden. This current Republican Great Recession has started to open the eyes of many Americans.
Breaking Through When New York City’s mayor ordered an assault this week on Liberty Square, the story played like a script only the 1% could write: Michael Bloomberg, a Wall Street media baron worth $18 billion, who spent $50 million of his own money and rewrote the law to win a third term in office, sent in a thousand cops to trash a library, close a kitchen, shut down an occupation and arrest hundreds in the name of “unsanitary” conditions in the park. But the tactics behind the scenes are more complicated. Preceding the NYPD’s raid on Occupy Wall Street, 18 mayors held a conference call to “discuss” the national movement. Nine weeks into the occupation, we know this: every time the forces of order have confused themselves with the rule of law, the movement has expanded. At first the march looked like many of those that came before; surrounded by flashing lights, with police escorts violently pushing people from the streets back up on the sidewalks, the crowd circled City Hall Park. it.’”
Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism with Asian values - Talk to Al Jazeera From the Middle East to the streets of London and cities across the US there is a discontent with the status quo. Whether it is with the iron grip of entrenched governments or the widening economic divide between the rich and those struggling to get by. But where are those so hungry for change heading? Slovenian-born philosopher Slavoj Zizek, whose critical examination of both capitalism and socialism has made him an internationally recognised intellectual, speaks to Al Jazeera's Tom Ackerman about the momentous changes taking place in the global financial and political system. In his distinct and colourful manner, he analyses the Arab Spring, the eurozone crisis, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and the rise of China. Slavoj Zizek's latest book is Living in the End Times (Verso).