Occupy Wall Street

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

From video's description: Now of course this sucker punch was nothing major and I am not crying over it. What is more disturbing to me is the blatant unprofessional thuggish behavior of this NYPD officer.

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

Kinda sums it up, don't it.

[aGENT]

It's extreme but it gets the message out...and then fires that message out of a cannon over a shark.

I don't like the implication that if you're not on the front lines you're brain washed.

I do however really like the saluting protesters. IMO that's is the most important part of the cartoon.

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

Those aren't protestors chief.

[Sharpshooter]

I thought I would tidy that up a bit for you.. I know you have been programmed toward the class envy garbage.. Next thing you will be looking for those with eyeglasses and an extra mule.... Get the kulaks !!

[Sharpshooter]

Perhaps you can explain it to me...pal.

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

I think he might be right...guy.

[Sharpshooter]

I'm sure he is...sport.

That's why I'm asking for the explanation to cure my ignorance...uhhh...I got nothing.

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

What can I say? You coulda gone with champ.....princess.

[unbridled_id]

Don't edit my posts.

[Shift-4]

You need the help, so you should view it as compassion on my part.

[Sharpshooter]

You need the help, so you should view it as compassion on my part.

[Satan's Evil Twin]

YASHA LEVINE RELEASED FROM JAIL, EXPOSES LAPD’S APPALLING TREATMENT OF DETAINED OCCUPY LA PROTESTERS…

By Yasha Levine

I finally got home Thursday afternoon after spending two nights in jail, and have had a hard time getting my bearings. On top of severe dehydration and sleep deprivation, I’ve got one hell of pounding migraine. So I’ll have to keep this brief for now. But I wanted to write down a few things that I witnessed and heard while locked up by LA’s finest…

First off, don’t believe the PR bull. There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD’s attack on Occupy LA–not unless you think that people peacefully protesting against the power of the financial oligarchy deserve to be treated the way I saw Russian cops treating the protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were demonstrating against the oligarchy under Putin and Yeltsin, before we at The eXiled all got tossed out in 2008. Back then, everyone in the West protested and criticized the way the Russian cops brutally snuffed out dissent, myself included. Now I’m in America, at a demonstration, watching exactly the same brutal crackdown…

While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media. And the disgraceful truth is that a lot of the abuse was police sadism, pure and simple:

* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.

* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.

* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.

* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven’t recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.

* One seriously injured protester, who had been shot with a shotgun beanbag round and had an oozing bloody welt the size of a grapefruit just above his elbow, was denied medical attention for five hours. Another young guy, who complained that he thought his arm had been broken, was not given medical attention for at least as long. Instead, he spent the entire pre-booking procedure handcuffed to a wall, completely spaced out and staring blankly into space like he was in shock.

* An Occupy LA demonstrator in his 50s who was in my cell block in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center told us all about when a police officer forced him to take a crap with his hands handcuffed behind his back, which made pulling down his pants and sitting down on the toilet extremely difficult and awkward. And he had to do this in sight of female police officers, all of which made him feel extremely ashamed, to say the least.

* There were two vegetarians and one vegan in my cell. When I left jail around 1:30 pm, they still had not been given food, despite the fact that they were constantly being promised that it would come.

* There were 292 people arrested at Occupy LA. About 75 of them have been released or have gotten out on bail, according the National Lawyers Guild. Most are still inside, slapped with $5,000 to $10,000 bail. According to a bail bondsman I know, this is unprecedented. Misdemeanors are almost always released on their own recognizance, which means that they don’t pay any bail at all. Or at most it’s a $100.

* That means the harsh, long detentions are meant to be are a purely punitive measure against Occupy LA protesters–an order that had to come from the very top.

http://exiledonline.com/yasha-levine-released-from-jail-exposes-lapds-appalling-treatment-of-detained-occupy-la-protesters/

Disgusting. And after donating turkeys to the protesters.

[Sharpshooter]

U.N. Envoy: Occupy Crackdowns Violating Americans' Human Rights

WASHINGTON -- The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities.Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. "special rapporteur" for the protection of free expression, said in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

"I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order," he said Thursday. "But on the other hand I also believe that the state -- in this case the federal state -- has an obligation to protect and promote human rights."

"If I were going to pit a city ordinance against human rights, I would always take human rights," he continued.

La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it's clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces "as long as that doesn't severely affect the rights of others."

In moments of crisis, governments often default to a forceful response instead of a dialogue, he said -- but that's a mistake.

"Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension," he said

"One of the principals is proportionality," La Rue said. "The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order -- but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger."

And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don't work anyway, he said. In Occupy's case, he said, "disbanding them by force won't change that attitude of indignation."

Occupy encampments across the country have been forcibly removed by police in full riot gear, and some protesters have been badly injured as a result of aggressive police tactics.

New York police staged a night raid on the original Occupy Wall Street encampment in mid-November, evicting sleeping demonstrators and confiscating vast amounts of property.

The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas, smoke grenades and bean-bag rounds at demonstrators there in late October, seriously injuring one Iraq War veteran at the Occupy site.

Earlier this week, Philadelphia and Los Angeles police stormed the encampments in their cities in the middle of the night, evicting and arresting hundreds of protesters.

Protesters at University of California, Davis were pepper sprayed by a campus police officer in November while participating in a sit-in, and in September an officer in New York pepper sprayed protesters who were legally marking on the sidewalk.

"We're seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation.

"The demonstrations are treated as if they're presumptively criminal," she said. "Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene."

What they should do, Verheyden-Hilliard said, is make it their mission to allow the activity to continue.

Using the same lens placed on the Occupy movement to look at, say, the protest in Egypt, Verheyden-Hilliard said, observers would have focused on such issues as "Did the people in Tahrir Square have a permit?"

La Rue said the protesters are raising and addressing a fundamental issue. "There is legitimate reason to be indignant and angry about a crisis that was originated by greed and the personal interests of certain sectors," he said. That's especially the case when the bankers "still earn very hefty salaries and common folks are losing their homes."

"In this case, the demonstrations are going to the center of the issue," he said. "These demonstrations are exactly challenging the basis of the debate."

Indeed, commentators such as Robert Scheer have argued that the Occupy movement's citizen action has a particular justification, based on the government's abject failure to hold banks accountable.

La Rue said he sees parallels between Occupy and the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests. In both cases, for instance, "you have high level of education for young people, but no opportunities."

La Rue said he is in the process of writing what he called "an official communication" to the U.S. government "to ask what exactly is the position of the federal government in regards to understanding the human rights and constitutional rights vis-a-vis the use of local police and local authorities to disband peaceful demonstrations."

Although the letter will not carry any legal authority, it reflects how the violent suppression of dissent threatens to damage the U.S.'s international reputation.

"I think it's a dangerous spot in the sense of a precedent," La Rue said, expressing concern that the United States risks losing its credibility as a model democracy, particularly if the excessive use of force against peaceful protests continue.

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman welcomed the international scrutiny.

"We live in a much smaller, connected world than we ever did before, and just as Americans watch what goes on in Tahrir Square and in Syria, the whole world is watching us, too -- and that's a good thing," Lieberman said.

"We're kind of confident that we're living in the greatest democracy in the world, but when the international human rights world criticizes an American police officer for pepper spraying students who are sitting down, it rightly give us pause."

[Sapper]

Well I don't agree with the approach taken by the occupiers I do agree with the passion that started it.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2011/12/05/oecd-rich-poor-gap.html

With the loss of union jobs we are reaping what we sow - Just look at debates on these forums .. All it takes is for someone to suggest unions are good or comment about a group of workers going on strike and the righteous right comes out in droves to defend the rights of business and to heck with workers .... Workers should just be happy to have jobs and how dare they want enough to live on ... or concession workers shouldn't make enough to eat - they are unskilled ... or my personal favorite - that teachers should not expect to be paid on par with university graduates with master degrees in the private sector!!!! - they should be happy we pay them and destroy their union for suggesting they be paid more. Corporations are barley scrapping by with their billions and even a single penny more in taxes might mean that instead of using $1000 bills for toilet paper they may have to use $100's. Oh the horror

Thank god under Harper we will achieve further parity with the USA and soon move from our 10-1 to match their 14-1. I will sleep better at night knowing that our business elite will not have to resort to the nasty new plastic 100 dollar bills to wipe their privileged tush lol.

[kyledude]

[Sharpshooter]

^^ Looks about right actually.

[JonnyDraft]

[Sharpshooter]

Corporate America Is Sitting On The Solution To The Jobs Crisis: Report

WASHINGTON -- Corporate America is sitting right on top of the solution to the nation's employment crisis, according to a new report from a group of University of Massachusetts economists. If America's largest banks and non-financial companies would just loosen their death-grip on a chunk of the $3.6 trillion in cash they're hoarding and move it into productive investments instead, the report estimates that about 19 million jobs would be created in the next three years, lowering the unemployment rate to under 5 percent.

"There is no reason that the U.S. needs to remain stuck in a long-term unemployment crisis," Robert Pollin, lead author of the report and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, said in a statement accompanying the report's release Tuesday.

"Getting the banks and corporations to move their hoards into productive investments and job creation requires carrots and sticks -- policies such as a new round of government spending stimulus as well as taxes on the banks' excess reserves -- that can both strengthen overall market demand and unlock credit markets for small businesses," Pollin said.

(See, for background, slide 5 of our Nov. 8 story, 6 Things Obama Could Do To Goose The Economy -- Without Congress, and, from 2010: Job Creation Idea No. 9: Encourage Banks To Lend -- Or Else.)

Even as the nation continues to confront massive unemployment, the nation's biggest companies have been hoarding cash. Banks have been able to borrow the money essentially for free from the Federal Reserve, so why not? In fact, according to the Federal Reserve (Table L.109, line 28), banks are sitting on $1.6 trillion in reserves -- about 8,000 times the $20 billion they held in 2007.

Meanwhile, non-financial companies are keeping their profits liquid, rather than plowing them back into investments, to the tune of about $2 trillion.

Together, that amounts to almost a quarter of the U.S. gross domestic product.

Pollin and his colleagues figured that even accounting for a massive safety cushion, at least $1.4 trillion of those reserves should be considered excess.

Meanwhile, the report notes, small business are having a hard time getting anyone to lend them money.

The report concludes that investing the $1.4 trillion in private businesses would generate an enormous surge in employment. It recommends that the money in particular be channeled toward "small businesses that face larger than normal credit constraints; more labor intensive businesses; and businesses that generate large social as well as private benefits."

[ronthecivil]

Corporate America Is Sitting On The Solution To The Jobs Crisis: Report

WASHINGTON -- Corporate America is sitting right on top of the solution to the nation's employment crisis, according to a new report from a group of University of Massachusetts economists. If America's largest banks and non-financial companies would just loosen their death-grip on a chunk of the $3.6 trillion in cash they're hoarding and move it into productive investments instead, the report estimates that about 19 million jobs would be created in the next three years, lowering the unemployment rate to under 5 percent.

"There is no reason that the U.S. needs to remain stuck in a long-term unemployment crisis," Robert Pollin, lead author of the report and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, said in a statement accompanying the report's release Tuesday.

"Getting the banks and corporations to move their hoards into productive investments and job creation requires carrots and sticks -- policies such as a new round of government spending stimulus as well as taxes on the banks' excess reserves -- that can both strengthen overall market demand and unlock credit markets for small businesses," Pollin said.

(See, for background, slide 5 of our Nov. 8 story, 6 Things Obama Could Do To Goose The Economy -- Without Congress, and, from 2010: Job Creation Idea No. 9: Encourage Banks To Lend -- Or Else.)

Even as the nation continues to confront massive unemployment, the nation's biggest companies have been hoarding cash. Banks have been able to borrow the money essentially for free from the Federal Reserve, so why not? In fact, according to the Federal Reserve (Table L.109, line 28), banks are sitting on $1.6 trillion in reserves -- about 8,000 times the $20 billion they held in 2007.

Meanwhile, non-financial companies are keeping their profits liquid, rather than plowing them back into investments, to the tune of about $2 trillion.

Together, that amounts to almost a quarter of the U.S. gross domestic product.

Pollin and his colleagues figured that even accounting for a massive safety cushion, at least $1.4 trillion of those reserves should be considered excess.

Meanwhile, the report notes, small business are having a hard time getting anyone to lend them money.

The report concludes that investing the $1.4 trillion in private businesses would generate an enormous surge in employment. It recommends that the money in particular be channeled toward "small businesses that face larger than normal credit constraints; more labor intensive businesses; and businesses that generate large social as well as private benefits."