Category: Uncategorized

Manhattan–After watching the Packers beat the Vikings on Monday Night Football, I had insomnia, so it was kind of an accident that I checked my email at 2 a.m. and discovered the police were clearing Zuccotti Park. Everyone had been expecting an eviction since it all started on September 17, but not expecting it at that particular moment. On my cell phone, there were several frantic texts from Occupy Wall Street begging for community support. So I hopped on a slow subway and arrived at Chambers Street about 3 a.m.

About a half mile north of the park, I was alone on the sidewalk for a couple of blocks. The only indication that something might be wrong was the racket of several helicopters with spotlights. Walking down Church Street, I ran into little clumps of stragglers who described a scene in which hundreds of police in full riot gear arrived at the park and presented a demand that the occupiers pack up their stuff and leave. If they did that, the police said, the occupiers would be allowed to return in a few hours without tents or tarps, after the park was cleaned. Bloomberg had tried that transparent ruse before, so a violent police eviction ensued with dozens of arrests, pepper spray and baton whacking, as the occupiers linked arms and tried to hold their space. Bloomberg and his cops also promised that everyone would get their belongings back after the eviction. But this also was a transparent ruse, as the the police tossed everything, including the 5000-book library, randomly into dump trucks that were in all likelihood destined for a landfill or garbage scow.

“Hey, there goes my tent!” said a kid at the corner of Fulton and Church, pointing at an overloaded dump truck roaring by about 3:30 a.m.

“Heil Bloomberg! This is Nazi Germany, not America!” said one guy giving the Nazi salute to dozens of cops.

“Hey, there are people being shot in the head right now in Egypt,” said another guy.

“That’s supposed to make me feel better about this?” said the first guy.

“I’m just saying that calling the cops Nazis isn’t non-violent communication,” said the second guy, obviously a graduate of the Non-Violent Communication Workshop in the park.

“Do the cops look like SS troops or not?” said the first guy.
Occupy Wall Street is driven out of Zuccotti Square by brutal police action, but is not going away

When it comes to mainstream press reports about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it’s time to check the bullshit detector.
Overload!

Corporate media reports are claiming that the Pentagon and the White House are “worried” or “concerned” that the Israeli government may decide to attack Iran, and that the US is “trying to learn” what Israel’s real intentions are: is there a serious plan to attack or is this all just an effort to blackmail the US into taking stronger measures against Iran?

As CNN put it in a Nov. 4 report:
 

The United States has become increasingly concerned Israel could be preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear program, a senior U.S. military official told CNN on Friday.

The U.S. military and intelligence community in recent weeks have stepped up “watchfulness” of both Iran and Israel, according to the senior U.S. military official and a second military official familiar with the U.S. actions.  Asked if the Pentagon was concerned about an attack, the senior military official replied “absolutely.” Both officials declined to be identified because of the extreme sensitivity of the matter.
 

Bzzzzzzzzzzz!

Oops! The Bullshit detector just went off.

Our tax dollars at work: Israel's Air Force can only contemplate attacking Iran thanks to F-15s and to F-16s like these above built and paid for by the US

London -– Neither overcast sky nor small crowd dampened the passion Duale Yusuf displayed as he denounced the destructive U.S. foreign policy in Somalia during a protest recently outside the American Embassy in this city’s posh Mayfair section.

“There is a Guantanamo Bay prison in Mogadishu where thousands of Somalis are being tortured. American drones are killing people in Somalia. We don’t need drones, we need peace, like in America and Britain,” said Yusuf, criticizing the latest upsurge in American military activity in his homeland in the Horn of Africa.

A few days before that London protest some American news outlets carried a report detailing increased U.S. military activities across the African continent supposedly designed to “fight militants” with measure that include supplying equipment, providing intelligence and expending “tens of millions of dollars.”

That report referenced $45-million in military equipment sent to Uganda and Burundi to support their forces in Somalia plus $24-million to Kenya, which invaded southern Somalia days before the protest.

Kenyan officials said their incursion into Somalia is to end murderous cross-border raids by the Al-Shabaab militia, an organization in Somalia that U.S. officials’ link to al Qaeda.

Yusuf, a member of the Somalia Youth Congress, expressed particular disappointment during his protest remarks with U.S. President Barack Obama for bringing more bombs than books to Africa, breaking promises to Africans that he would institute constructive rather than destructive policies.
The US-backed French military overturn of the recent Ivory Coast election has sparked weekly rallies by Africans in Paris (photo by Washington)

The real story of the Penn State child abuse scandal and coverup is not Joe Paterno or Penn State, or even the abuse of children, as vile as what happened to them is. What it’s about it the lack of basic freedom for workers in the United State of America to speak out.

On paper, we have one of the freest societies in the world. The First Amendment to the Constitution would appear to be pretty damned unequivocal, when it states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

And yet, there are all kinds of laws that abridge freedom of speech and the right peaceably to assemble, as well as the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We’ve all been witness lately to how municipal authorities, no doubt under pressure from the bankers and from the central government’s police and political authorities, have been “abridging,” with the aid of police wielding clubs, pepper spray and tear gas canisters, the supposed freedom of occupy movement activists to peaceably assemble.

What Penn State has done is expose an even bigger problem: the lack of freedom for workers to speak up or to petition for redress of grievances.
Free Speech stops at the workplace door in America, and we all pay the price

What a devilishly sneaky guy that Jose Danial Ortega Saavedra is!

Why this president of Nicaragua, and former leader of the Sandinista rebels in their successful 1979 overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in order to win re-election this fall, as he appears to have done, according to the New York Times, “shrewdly adopted policies aimed at pleasing his base of poor and working-class Nicaraguans, including supplying them with government-donated food”!

Why of all the nerve! What a crook and a scheister! Imagine catering to the needs of the poor in order to win an election. How low can a politician stoop?

Except that, wait a minute. Isn’t that what politicians are supposed to do: to adopt policies aimed at pleasing their base?
Daniel Ortega allegedly helped the poor in order to win votes, and re-election to the presidency of Nicaragua

 
We’re living through an interesting juncture in history. On one hand, there’s the amazing bottom-up Occupy Movement, and no one knows quite where and how far it will go. Then, there’s the field of Republican neo-Know-Nothing, nativist candidates with each one tripping over the other to be more divorced from facts, history and reality. The strutting, cock-of-the-walk Herman Cain is currently the most interesting of this pack.

For a week now, Cain has been denying the obvious, that as leader of the National Restaurant Association he “sexually harassed” — ie, hit on — three women who worked under him who were offended by the attention and wanted nothing to do with him. Now, a fourth woman has gone public with a story of Cain’s intimate groping in a car. Despite all his vague and contradictory dismissals, his prurient assertiveness was persistent and obnoxious enough that the Restaurant Association felt it had to pay a total of $80,000 to two women — who are now legally silenced from telling their side of the story.

Herman Cain never looking back and dealing with the future

Instead of adhering to what seems his usual instinct of waving off questions as politically-correct, liberal nonsense, in this case Cain has followed the more traditional route of denial and cover-up, which as we’ve all learned only makes the press hungrier.

At this point, Cain and his Campaign Manager Mark Block — he of the bizarre You Tube smoke-break commercial — have decided to drop the cover-up and, instead, have declared it’s time to move on “to the real issues impacting this country.” That is, issues like Cain’s famous “9-9-9 plan,” which has been shown to be corporate-friendly and to increase taxes for the poor, and his lethally-electrified fence along the Mexican border, a program that was serious, then a joke, then serious again.

As far as any pain and suffering he may have caused his three silenced women accusers, at least one of whom is married, his new tack is: Never look back. The past is what it is, and it’s more important for the nation that he look to the future.

Once again we got a cheery report from most of the media about employers hiring, albeit “not enough,” and about the jobless rate falling, albeit “it’s still too high.”

The proximate cause of this latest round of propaganda from the corporate media is the latest monthly jobless figure reported out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that employers had added 80,000 net new jobs (actually they found that private sector employers had added 104,000 jobs while public agency employers had pink-slipped 24,000 people), and that the official unemployment rate was 9.0 percent, just a notch lower than last month’s 9.1 percent figure.

The Associated Press, which is now the de facto national desk for the eviscerated national newsmedia, trumpeted these anemic results with a headline reading: Employers add 80K jobs, Rate dips to 9.0 pct. This was followed by an upbeat lead, credited to AP Economics Writer Christopher S. Rugaber (who surely should know better if he’s an economics specialist) that read: “WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. jobs crisis may be easing slightly on the strength of a fourth straight month of modest hiring and a dip in the unemployment rate.”

Only it’s not that simple. For one thing, economists agree that the economy would have to be adding 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the number of people who are entering the labor force, and double that to make any real progress towards lowering the jobless number, so 80,000 jobs is really going backwards. For another, most of the jobs being created are low-paying and often temporary, which is not going to do much if anything to boost consumer spending, which accounts for almost three-quarters of Gross Domestic Product in the hollowed-out US economy. (In fairness to Rugaber, a day later he wrote a better, less rosy piece, in which he pointed out that among the country’s 14 million officially jobless, the percentage receiving unemployment benefits has fallen from 75% last year to just 48% this year, because so many people have been out of work for more than a year–a third of all those unemployed–that their benefit checks have run out. That gives a hint about how serious the joblessness really is, though it ignores the reality that only half of those who lose their jobs even qualify for unemployment benefits in the first place.)

Credit goes to Yahoo! News, which at least acknowledged right away that these latest stats from the BLS mean things are basically bad, not good news. In this dispatch, headlined October Jobs Report: Deja Vu All Over Again, reporter Daniel Gross correctly called attention to the fact that the public sector was undermining the meager job gains made by the private sector, as well as the fact that the decline in the jobless figure is not the result of the new jobs, but of more people just giving up looking for non-existant jobs and being dropped from the statistics.
Real unemployment is around 23%, not the official BLS figure of 9.0% (Courtesy of Shadow Stats)

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.

___________________________________________________________________
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.