This Can't Be Happening!

London — For a dozen years they had marched peacefully to the street containing the residence of Britain’s prime minister, asking the current occupant of #10 Downing Street to investigate the scourge ripping at the soul of this nation.

That scourge is the thousands of suspicious deaths occurring while in the custody of British police, in British prisons and in British mental health facilities.

Eight persons died in police custody just during the first nine months of 2011, according to official British government statistics. That’s more than double the custody deaths last year.

One of those deaths involved a 49-year-old reggae music singer who police claimed had committed suicide by plunging a butcher knife into his heart while making tea in his kitchen, allegedly for officers who were in his house conducting a drug investigation.

That knife contained no fingerprints of the dead singer.

This year, on their thirteenth march to Downing Street the demonstrators endured, for the first time — the very thing they were protesting against: abuse by police.

This year police responded to this annual march by the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) by roughing up some demonstrators, and by denying them their desire to simply pin their demands to the gate blocking entrance to Downing Street as they’ve done without incident in past years.

March participants Rigg and Bennett whose brothers died in police custody, at protest march (photo by Washington)

You say you feel my pain
But
You don’t even know what pain is.

– Untitled final poem by Street Poet
 

Oklahoma City — After spending the last three weeks in Oklahoma City covering the Occupy OKC encampment, I was shocked to learn of Street Poet’s passing yesterday. It just didn’t seem possible that this talented, loving young man whom I had known for just ten days could be taken away so suddenly.

The man we all called “Street Poet” was about 18 years old and homeless. He said he had spent a lot of time in foster care growing up. In his final days, he had complained about asthma attacks in the morning. He showed no other signs of physical or mental health problems, drug addiction, or suicidal tendencies. He was a joyous presence in Occupy OKC.

Gone but not forgotten, Street Poet died, apparently in his sleep, at the Oklahoma City occupation (photos courtesy Occupy OKC official Facebook page)

Street Poet was discovered unresponsive in his tent by another camper around 2:45 on the afternoon of Halloween. There was no blood, or signs of trauma. No alcohol, street drugs or drug paraphernalia by his bedside. It is generally believed that Street Poet passed sometime during the night, as rigor mortis had already set in by the time his body was found.

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UPDATE:
Street Poet’s family has been identified and located, so we can finally release his name: Louis Cameron Rodriguez, age 18.

His mother and sister live in Clarksville, TN and want to fly to OKC to claim his body. Occupy OKC is trying to raise donations for Louis’ family, who cannot afford airfare. Please spread the word.

Anyone out there who wants to donate either frequent flier miles or cash can contact Occupy OKC. Beth Isbell is coordinating this effort. Her email is roxybeast@hotmail.com. Local readers can just drop by the camp in Kerr Park to donate in person.
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The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power.
 
-Mikhail Bakunin

 
It was 10:30 pm on Dilworth Plaza, the concrete apron around Philadelphia City Hall that’s home for over 300 tents in the Occupy Philadelphia movement. The air was clear and the temperature was pleasant.

Occupiers collected in clusters, talking, some smoking and drinking out of cups. A tall, good-natured African American man performed a spoken-word dance routine before an audience of 15 people. People were still tabling the Information Tent and some were inside the Media Tent doing official Occupation work. There was not a cop in sight.

“We need to march in solidarity with the people of Oakland!” a young woman announced using a microphone. She referred to the war-zone-style police assault on the Occupy Oakland encampment the night before, where an Iraq veteran member of Veterans For Peace had been shot in the head by a police projectile; he was still unconscious and in critical condition in an Oakland hospital.

A crowd began to congregate around the young woman with the mike, some taking the mike to express their outrage over the police assault in Oakland. Someone mentioned Atlanta, where the same night police had cleared occupiers from a city park, arresting 53 people. The plan was to march around City Hall.

The street was empty as they took off and began to holler, “Whose street? Our Street!” Someone had made a crude sign mentioning Oakland. On the south side of City Hall, I noticed a uniformed policeman heading the other way at a brisk walk, as if he didn’t want to deal with these people. Hey, let ‘em have the damn street! A lone taxi drove by, and its immigrant driver honked enthusiastically. The marchers waved back.

Occupiers discuss their occupation under the statue of Frank Rizzo across from Philadelphia City Hall (John Grant)

When they got to the north side of City Hall, the group marched across the street onto the plaza in front of the Municipal Services Building, ending up at the statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo, an Italian beat cop who became police commissioner and then mayor. He was famous for going to his mayoral inauguration with a nightstick in the cummerbund of his tuxedo. Rizzo enjoyed telling people how much he admired an Italian police tactic known as spacco il capo — break their heads. He was notorious during the insurgent sixties and seventies for saying he was going to clear out the city in such a way to “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” Leading some police operation in one of the neighborhoods in the 1970s, he told an acquaintance of mine who expressed some concern about the brutal action to shut up and get off his porch, “Or I’ll come up there and break your back.”

The marchers clustered at the base of the statue of Rizzo extending his right arm. Depending on one’s point of view, Rizzo is either making a warm, paternal gesture or he’s giving a limp parody of the Nazi salute.

Shanghai — I was talking yesterday with the chief financial officer of a US-based drug firm that operates here in China, producing for the Chinese market, and got an up-close look at how bad things are for what used to be called the Almighty Dollar.

The company in question, a joint venture between a very profitable U.S. drug company and a local Chinese company, is quite profitable itself.

The guy was explaining to me that his firm needed to add another factory, because the one they had was running full-tilt and couldn’t keep up with demand. That might sound like a simple problem, and one that most enterprises would be happy to confront, but the shrinking US dollar, and concerns in China about inflation, complicate things.

You would think that it would be a simple matter of the parent company’s sending over the $50 million or so that it would cost to build the new plant and that would be that, but it turns out that the dollar is falling so fast against the Renminbi (RMB), the Chinese local currency, that no contractors or other vendors necessary for setting up a new facility are willing to accept it as payment. That means the company has to try and come up with the construction costs in local currency.

I won’t go into the arcane machinations that involves, except to say that Chinese financial authorities and the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), aren’t letting local banks or foreign-owned banks with offices in China lend money without going through a tough approval process, the outcome of which is iffy, and they are setting interest rates at 6.5% for those loans they do approve, which is a pretty stiff rate to have to live with. So there are no easy options.

The important point is that the dollar is being viewed here in China the way people in the U.S. have long viewed Mexican pesos… or Chinese RMB.
The dollar doesn't buy as many RMB as it used to, and now nobody even wants it in China

London–Sam Berkson, widely known in England as “Angry Sam,” the competition-winning performance poet, stood on the steps of London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral recently reciting one his latest works to an assembled throng gathered at the Occupy London site – a parallel protest to the Occupy Wall Street in New York City.

“Moral messages with twisted policies…Liberty costs money, forget equality…No fraternity, it’s been like this for an eternity,” Berkson said in rhythmic voice.

Occupy London participants set up their encampment in the square outside the famous landmark – one of London’s top ten tourist attractions – after a court injunction barred them from occupying the square in front of the London Stock Exchange less than two blocks away.

Like similar demonstrations around the world, organizers for Occupy London say they are highlighting social and economic injustice, which is as severe in Britain as in the US.

Britain is currently being run by a conservative government in coalition with the Liberals, another conservative party, and this government has been instituting harsh austerity measures which are hammering the most vulnerable members of society. For example disabled persons are being compelled to find jobs or risk losing their already meager government benefits.

The “current examinations to assess fitness to work [approves] two-thirds of claimants as fit, including those with terminal illness,” wrote Claire Glasman of the disability rights group Winvisible in a comment posted on the website of the Crossroads Women’s Centre located in North London.

Blasting government budget priorities, Glasman wrote, “Bankers and politicians have come off relatively unscathed. Why should the most vulnerable pay to clear up their mess?”
Diane Richards experienced police abuse first hand when 30 London cops raided a hair salon she was a client at

With Mumia Abu-Jamal’s sentence of death now formally vacated, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week not to consider an appeal by the Philadelphia District Attorney of a Third Circuit Court panel’s ruling that that sentence had been unconstitutional thanks to flawed jury instructions from the trial judge and a flawed jury ballot form, many of those who have long called for his execution are now saying, fine, let him rot in prison for the rest of his life.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, the leading newspaper in his hometown of Philadelphia, in more genteel language, said essentially the same thing in an unsigned October 13 editorial, opining that with the death penalty vacated, the default sentence of life in prison without parole was “appropriate” and “in the best interest of justice.”

The editorial urged DA Seth Williams not to exercise his right within the next 180 days to seek to obtain a new death sentence by asking for a new jury trial on the penalty only. The paper made this plea not because the editors felt such an effort to re-sentence him would be unseemly, but because of the cost to the struggling city of Philadelphia.

But hold on here. Putting aside for a moment the matter of whether Abu-Jamal was even fairly convicted in a trial that was viewed as a shameful farce at the time in 1982 even by the editors of the Inquirer, is it really “in the best interest of justice” or in any way “appropriate” for Abu-Jamal to simply be switched over from a death sentence to a sentence of life in prison without parole, now that, as the Inquirer correctly noted in its editorial, “four federal judges have ruled that Abu-Jamal’s 1982 death sentence was unconstitutional,” and that “he was denied a fair sentencing at his original trial.”

No. It is manifestly not just or appropriate!
Abu-Jamal no longer has a death sentence, but remains in solitary on death row thanks to a vengeful, or gutless, DA and supine judges

It is the end of the day.

The trouble is we are dying. . .
Nobody talks like that,
But surely the setting sun understands this language.
But the wind,
If you want the wind to hear now, you shout.

The wind is busy mocking the weather report.
There is a turbine on the ridge that needs to turn,
A roof to blow off,
A flower to stir,
A prayer to deliver,
An old eagle to loft. . .

Shout: The trouble is we care!

The clouds travel over us
And sometimes look down!

Don’t let us be road kill!

We are crossing now,
Almost to the double line now.
There is a roaring in our ears;
We are just like turtle, moving from swamp to pond,
Deer in search of cover,
Making a dash for it,
Mouse racing the juggernaut!

Eagle is scanning in our direction,
But not for us my sister,
And not for the tear in which
Our fear is reflected, my brother.

How can anything be understood
Amidst this cacophony of prayer?
All this crazy praying
For all the things
That were once given. . .

Because we are crossing now
We are praying.
Our fear is praying for us!
So small, so small in time and space.
Is this really all we are?

Is this really our day to die?
Our warm bodies full of blood and breakable. . .
Fathers and mothers and children crossing.

Naked, anxious,
Leaving one side to cross to the other.

This black path
We are crossing. . .
With respect, we pray,

Let us cross!

They worked many late night hours since this past spring creating a unique vehicle – part grassroots initiative and part cutting-edge technology – for countering the most corrupting force in American politics today: corporate dominance now controlling too many elected leaders on Capitol Hill.

Months before the Occupy Wall Street movement captured attention, inspiring millions across America while alarming this nation’s political/corporate class, they began fashioning plans to enable honest people to run for elected office.

Liz Abzug

A problem was how to get those honest, regular people to run for Congressional office without the need for those candidates to seek or accept money from lobbyists just so as to be able to afford the purchase of the TV ads traditionally presumed as essential for effective campaigning.

Their solution: new open source software that affords candidates opportunities to get their messages to voters with full transparency, in tandem with social media, thereby circumventing another scourge of campaigning, the staged manipulation of traditional televised political debates.

On October 17th – the one month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street – they launched OccupyGovernment.org during an informational activity at ground zero of the Occupy Wall Street effort: the former Liberty Plaza Park now known as Zuccotti Park in New York City.

The immediate goal of the non-partisan OccupyGovernment.org is to elect a majority of new corporate-money-free representatives in Congress next year, thus flushing-out those congresspersons on both sides of the political isle that are beholden to the interests of corporations and private wealth, including the Tea Party- aligned representatives awash in Koch Brothers cash.

 
As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator — and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story.

Patrick Howley
Editorial Assistant, The American Spectator
 

Here’s a story from the annals of fools posing as journalists.

After a pepper spray melee October 8th at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC in which several people I know were painfully sprayed, it was revealed that one of at least two provocateurs whipping up the guards and cops was a writer from a right-wing magazine, The American Spectator.

Op-ed News photographer Cheryl Biren was at the museum and noticed a beefy man in a black t-shirt whose aggressive actions seemed to her the actions of a “provocateur.” She sent out a query with 27 shots of the man to see if anyone knew who he was. He’s seen charging a guard in Biren’s photo below; the man directly behind him in a tan jacket is American Spectator Editorial Assistant Patrick Howley.

Those of us who have worked for decades as non-violent antiwar peace activists talk about these sorts of individuals in cretinous terms. They are the bane of our existence. Why? Because they intentionally whip things up to a frenzy to distract from a protest’s intended message. They do this by provoking the police into what might be termed cop-riot-mode where they feel the need to indiscriminately whack people with batons and/or spray them with pepper spray.

This is exactly what happened October 8th at the Air and Space Museum, where these men and possibly others shoved their way into the museum lobby and went a long way toward creating a melee out of what was to be a moral protest of the US drone program.

Patrick Howley is behind the beefy man, here, shoving his way into the museum lobby. Photo: Cheryl Biren/opednews.com

The Economist, a respected international news magazine, wrote about Howley’s operation in the Air and Space Museum and called him a “conservative jackass.” The online Economist writer M.S. was making both a reference to the TV show “Jackass,” where people do stupid, dangerous things on camera, and, presumably, reflecting on Howley’s thinking as he was rushing around in the Air and Space Museum like John Wayne hitting the beach at Iwo Jima.

Mike Whitney wrote a great column recently titled “Is It Immoral to Vote for Obama?” Based on Obama’s predilection to kill large numbers of people around the Middle East in pursuit of foreign policy objectives, Whitney argued, it would indeed be immoral to vote for him. He isn’t the lesser of two evils. He is worse than Bush, which makes him evil, period.

I would argue that it is immoral to vote for Obama because he is guilty of the negligent homicide of 70,000 American citizens every year.

Consider what negligent homicide is. Legally it means that somebody died, and that the defendant should reasonably have been aware of the risk and instead of doing something to stop it, he “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly” acted in such a way that the death occurred.

Ethically, it means that you could have prevented a death at little or no risk to yourself, and you chose not to. It means that if you see a child crawl into a refrigerator and shut the door, and you don’t let him out, you bear responsibility for his death.

Now consider what Obama did on September 2. It was Friday before Labor Day, an infamous date almost every year because politicians use it to announce things that make them look bad. Most voters are traveling for the long weekend and aren’t paying attention. So just the choice of date proves he was aware that his decision was rotten, just as flight indicates consciousness of guilt.

He announced that day that he would not implement new regulations recommended by his own Environmental Protection Agency that would have cut the amount of smog we all inhale with every breath.
Obama cut the rules that limit air pollution by utilities and other major polluters