NYPD Footage of Zuccotti Park Raid Leaked

NYPD beats Occupy protester with fist in Zuccotti Park, 11/15/11. (photo: AP/SA)

By Natasha Lennard, Salon

26 September 12

he presence of NYPD TARU (Technical Assistance Response Unit) officers at Occupy protests has long been a source of contention among occupiers and legal observers. The precise role and remit of the camera-wielding officers is ill-defined; the end product of their constant filming usually goes unseen by those featured in it.

However, on Sunday a group claiming Anonymous affiliation released 60 hours of TARU footage from the night of the Zuccotti Park eviction on Nov. 15. The footage is considered particularly relevant in fleshing out the NYPD versus Occupy narrative, since both mainstream and citizen journalists and videographers were forcibly kept away from the park as officers dismantled the encampment and rounded up protesters that night.

A release introducing the footage dump notes, “The NYPD denied freedom of the press the night of the Zuccotti raid by kicking out media and keeping them two blocks away … Much of the video being released is edited by the NYPD, and at times edits are quite blatant, probably trying to cover up their brutality.”

The release urges that readers share the TARU footage and take note of any glitches or time stamp changes, which might suggest selective editing. “We ask for an unedited version of the tapes,” it notes.

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Occupy Will Be Back

Posted on Jun 18, 2012

 By Chris Hedges

In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a “surprise.” The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City’s Zuccotti Park was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political system, will be considered beneficial. 

Those who have the largest megaphones in our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities, trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the “left” or the “right” while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the Republicans. Don’t waste time watching or listening. They exist to confuse and demoralize you.  READ MORE

Why is the FBI Manufacturing Reasons to Arrest Occupy Protesters While Ignoring White Supremacist Violence?

A sign in Foley Square at the Community/Labor
march in suport of Occupy Wall Street

A recent Rolling Stone article raises troubling questions about FBI entrapment schemes and their targets

May 18, 2012

This story originally appeared in Salon.

Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates “terrorists” out of anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white supremacist groups.

Using some recent examples, Perlstein paints a startling picture. He notes the arrest this month of a small group of self-identified anarchists, participating in Occupy Cleveland, who — strung along in an FBI sting — planned to blow up a large Ohio bridge. The target was suggested and (fake) C-4 explosives were provided by an FBI infiltrator. As Perlstein put it, the episode was one among numerous law enforcement schemes since 2001 in which “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.  READ MORE

Occupy Isn't About Electing Democrats--It's About Exposing a Broken System

Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party didn't succeed by electing candidates--it succeeded showing the limitations of the electoral system. Occupy should do the same.

May 13, 2012

As long as there has been a thing called Occupy Wall Street, there have been people who've suggested it should become the left's version of the Tea Party. Josh Harkinson's piece is a notable contribution to the conversation because it comes after eight months of in-depth reporting on the movement. Harkinson, like Jennifer Granholm, suggests that Occupy should recruit and run candidates, so the left has champions in Congress and can credibly threaten less ideologically aligned Democrats. According to this logic, it doesn't matter if Occupy does this itself or essentially outsources the job to our progressive allies -- the point is to find ways to elect more good Democrats.

The idea of a progressive Tea Party was totally my jam before Occupy started. Like Harkinson, I didn't see how the left could create real change in America without taking control of the Democratic Party. Now I think it's important to recognize that the problems we face as a country can't be solved by electing more Democrats, or even by electing more good Democrats. A progressive Tea Party would be a welcome addition, but it wouldn't be nearly enough to create the kind of change we need.

If Occupy tried to start a left Tea Party, we would be following in the footsteps of several progressive movement efforts that came up short. Howard Dean's presidential campaign turned into Democracy for America to reclaim the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the Progressive Change Campaign Committee explicitly references the DCCC, and Rebuild the Dream originally billed itself as the progressive Tea Party. I have worked for each of these organizations and have lots of respect for their work. But unfortunately, none of these projects, despite their many successes, have managed to mount a serious national effort to take out bad Democrats and replace them with good ones. They are constrained by the lack of a grassroots base in many congressional districts and big donors reluctance to fund challenges to Democrats. Even big, collaborative efforts to take out bad Democrats have a relatively poor record (See Sheyman, Ilya; Halter, Bill; or Lamont, Ned).

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Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide

We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility.

May 4, 2012

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US.  His new book, Occupy, published in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.

From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact.   READ MORE

Chomsky: Do We Have the Makings of a Real Revolution?

Protesters at "Occupy Wall Street"
camp, Liberty Square
Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe

Unless the spirit of the last year continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

May 8, 2012

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of.  If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won’t come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.  READ MORE

"Festive, Righteous Anger": Occupy Makes a May Day Comeback With Massive Demonstrations

Yesterday, Occupy recaptured the public's attention with rallies, marches, parties, and yes, arrests all over the country.

May 1, 2012

All over the world, May 1st is celebrated as International Workers Day. Yesterday, May Day also marked the reemergence of the Occupy movement, with events in cities all over America. AlterNet's reporters were in the field -- here are their dispatches from New York and the Bay Area.

Midtown NYC, morning 

-- Sarah Jaffe

Midtown is a great place for chanting; your voice echoes off the tall buildings and you can hear it blocks away. Even better for marching bands, bells and whistles.  There may not actually be 99 pickets, but midtown Manhattan is clogged with them in the morning, and they're inside the heads of the people on the street--I walk past a couple discussing our "cruel," unequal society as I hurry from picket to picket. 

 I made it to Bryant Park a few minutes after eight in a haze of rain, and found a crowd of around a hundred huddled under their umbrellas or the ones at tables in the park. The Rude Mechanical Orchestra were clustered around their instruments but not playing, and Occupiers chatted with one another.

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Romney Celebrates with Trump as Working New Yorkers Rally Against Rich Tax Dodgers

Mitt Romney's wife held a tax day fundraiser in New York--and found a day of protest from working people angry at the Romneys and their 1% friends' low tax rates.

April 17, 2012

On the street outside the shimmering gold logo of Trump Towers, a baseball team has gathered. This isn't the Yankees or the Mets, though. It's the long-lost Dodgers. The Tax Dodgers, that is.

Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe

Inside Trump Towers, Ann Romney is celebrating her birthday with a fundraiser expected to bring in close to $600,000. Outside on the street, New Yorkers from the Working Families Party, New York Communities for Change, VOCAL-NY, United NY, and many other community groups have joined forces to remind the Romneys—and anyone passing by—that they pay a higher tax rate than the richest Americans.

The Tax Dodgers pose in their uniforms, hula-hooping cheerleaders hold up their “Tax Loopholes,” and the “team manager” thanks “hardworking, taxpaying Americans” for “paying taxes so we don't have to.”

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Wall Street Isn't Winning - It's Cheating

Activists demonstrate outside of the New York
Stock Exchange against Wall Street bonuses,
12/15/10. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

26 October 11

I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.

"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO" he said. "I think that's funny."

"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"

"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what bank to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."

Oh, Christ, I thought. He's saying the protesters are hypocrites because they're using banks. I sighed.

"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"

"Well," he said, "it's just, they're protests are all about ... You know ..."

"Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street."

"Whatever," he said, shrugging.

These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I'd taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing.

Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.

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4 Polls That Show Occupy Wall Street is Just Getting Started

Is the increasingly popular movement poised to turn the tide of American history?

October 24, 2011

After over a month of demonstrations, numerous dismissals, and thousands of arrests, Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum. Over the last two weeks, polls have poured in revealing that Americans familiar with the protests largely support them. And since that familiarity will continue to increase, we can only conclude that the country's support for the movement will keep on growing. When you've got NYT pundit Charles Blow unfurling his hipster flag comparing OWS to legendary 90s band Nirvana, you know a tipping point has been reached!

Recent polls prove that when Americans hear this band, they dig it. 

Here’s a round-up:

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Livestreaming Journalists Want to Occupy the Skies With Cheap Drones

Livestreaming journalist Tim Pool shows off his modified drone, dubbed the Occucopter, intended to make aerial coverage available to citizen reporters. (photo: Sean Captain/Wired)

Sean Captain, Wired Magazine

Intro: "It may not sound like much: A video blogger bought a toy helicopter. But the blogger is 25-year-old Tim Pool - an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. He and his partners hope that the toy chopper - the $300 Parrot AR Drone - will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news."
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The Belittle Big Bodies Banzai: A Year-End OWS Salute and Immune Key to 2012

Friday 30 December 2011

by: W. David Kubiak, Truthout | Op-Ed 

 

Yes, Virginia, there really are silver bullets and here's a sterling one for you.

After a lifetime clashing with monstrous corporate bodies in the US, India and Japan, I hobble into the Occupation arena with a grateful hallelujah and some wild reconnaissance.

The hallelujah is a chorus, by the way.

It also arises from countless other US expatriates who have long lived abroad and prayed for signs of a Yankee spring, i.e. any American uprising against the rampant, corporate coup that's beggared the nation at home and scarred its honor overseas.

As for the recon, life in Asia teaches you to see the world as an interplay of living systems - ancient, healthy ones like tribes, wetlands and mammal bodies, and newly emerging malignant ones like megacorporations. It also suggests we're not simply facing a random series of fiscal, social or environmental crises, but a human/megacorps endgame battle for future of the earth.

Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we have conjured up an army of intended servant beings that have grown colossal, escaped our control and now overrun the planet. Indigenous leaders have begun calling big multinationals bodies an "alien invasive species" that menace their cultures and homelands more than any threat they've faced before.

In this view, Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agrobiz, Big "Defense" et gargantuan cetera are all variations of an emergent new life form - sensually/spiritually/morally blind superorganisms that are alive, in charge and out of control. These Big Bodies' sickening effects on our lands and lives are everywhere apparent, but the good news is that they are a monocultured mutation and remedies that incapacitate some may help to cure them all.  READ MORE

 

Thomas Frank: How the Right Wing Hijacked Rage Over the Economic Collapse and Swindled America

Frank discusses one of the most important political developments of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right.

 
December 28, 2011

In his new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” Tom Frank turns his mordant eye on the unlikeliest political development of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right. The deregulation of Wall Street, championed for 30 years by right-wing leaders, had led to an economic catastrophe so frightening that the country elected a liberal Democrat to the presidency. Yet two years later, the most conservative faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, had taken effective control of the House of Representatives, the regulation of Wall Street had stalled, and the champions of economic deregulation in Washington had emerged stronger than ever.

Frank, author of the bestselling book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” provides a pithy and nuanced explanation of what he calls the “hard-times swindle.” He spoke with Salon from his father’s home in Kansas City, Mo.

Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, “We’re all socialists now.” What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?

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Occupying the Conventions? How Protests Will Change Politics-as-Usual in 2012

Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe

Four years after the moment of "hope and change," the 99% is set to alter the dynamics of presidential elections. 

 

December 26, 2011

Every era has an iconic image, like a protester standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square, a military officer shooting a handcuffed Vietnamese prisoner in the head at point-blank range, or the famous zeppelin Hindenburg crashing in flames. These images can end wars, destroy industries or memorialize a moment for a nation forever. The image speaks to us through its raw potency and ability to freeze an instant into a frame. It becomes iconic because it captures a particular cultural zeitgeist. These two elements – authenticity and timeliness – grant such images power.

In the autumn of 2011, a video of the casual pepper-spraying of peaceful student protesters at UC Davis by a police officer dressed in full paramilitary gear gave America a new iconic domestic political image. The video, posted on YouTube, immediately became a cultural sensation, showcasing the willingness of American security forces to use chemical weapons on peaceful Americans posing no physical threat. This iconic video didn’t appear from thin air, but was preceded by months of organizing work and a network of tent cities set up around the country. It now stands as a visual accompaniment to linguistic innovation, the creation of a new language of 21st century depression: the 99% versus the 1%.

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Occupy Wall Street, Mass Media and Progressive Change in the Tea Party Era: Our Window of Opportunity

(Photo: Sasha Kimel / Flickr)

Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street, Truthout:

"Regular reporting of public anger at business elites has
led some to compare OWS to the Tea Party with regard
to both forces' 'insurgent,' 'revolutionary' themes and their
support for 'rebellion' against the status quo. Beneath and
beyond these easily noticeable similarities, however, deep
and fundamental differences significantly undermine the
core equivalence and parallels that are commonly posited
between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement."
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The 1%'s Own Terror Gives the Game Away

I had a weird revelation the other day: the ultimate success or failure of the Occupy Wall Street Movement will not be determined by the protesters themselves, but by the 1% and all of their political and media enablers. But believe it or not, the 1% do feel . . . well, probably not guilt . . . but at least a vague and deeply disturbing apprehension that they may have to pay for what they’ve done in their sociopathy. And it is this that will help ensure the Occupy Movement’s continuing success. One of the strengths of the Occupy Movement is that there are no formal demands, no formal leaders, just a large and growing mob of people agitating against the status quo for very many different reasons. Of course, this isn’t just “rebellion for rebellion’s sake” – despite the diversity of interests represented in the movement, there are a number of broad issues about which pretty much everybody protesting is justifiably upset. One of these is outrage over the huge inequalities in wealth and income in the United States. For all the critics who have decried the Occupy Movement’s lack of formal demands and concrete ideas for reform (and I admit to being one of those), nobody doubts that this is the movement’s fundamental grievance. Occupy Wall Street’s burgeoning popularity is the onlyreason Eric Cantor felt it necessary to schedule a speech ostensibly about “income inequality” – although it really wasn’t... READ MORE