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As I headed out in my ’94 Volvo to drive from Philadelphia to Washington for the first day of October2011.org, the occupation of Washington, I spotted some trouble: the ABS warning light on my dashboard panel was lit. Stopping at my neighborhood mechanic to get his okay for the drive, I found him busy inflating the tire of a new white Mercedes. As the driver, a well-dressed middle-aged woman, looked on, he asked me what my problem was. I asked if it was safe to drive the car to D.C. with the ABS not working.

After telling me my brakes were fine and I just didn’t have skid prevention, he asked why I was going to the capital. “To cover the first day of the occupation there,” I said.

The woman interjected, “Oh, is that part of those protests against corporate greed?”

As I pulled onto the Interstate and headed for Washington, I thought about her question. Clearly, something huge has just happened. Occupy Wall Street, and the wave of occupations that have spread to over 100 cities across the country, have broken through some invisible wall in American consciousness. If this member of the upper class, or at least upper middle class, with her $50-60,000 car, can casually talk about “corporate greed,” a term that is also starting to appear in the nation’s mainstream media, we are in a new place.

I got the same sense of being in some kind of alternate reality or new world as I joined thousands of people marching through the streets of Washington, first denouncing President Obama at a stop in front of the White House, then briefly blockading the entrance and shutting down the US Chamber of Commerce building just down the street from the White House, and then finally blocking traffic on K Street, the home of the big corporate lobbying offices. Unlike at prior anti-war demonstrations I’ve attended over the past decade in Washington, nobody heckled or cursed us out this time for inconveniencing them at rush hour. Nobody derided our signs or our rousing chant of “Banks got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out!” In fact, we got cheers, beeping horns, and raised fists and peace signs from passing drivers and people standing along the sidewalks–including men in tailored suits and women in heels.
Chris and Jerry McDonough, union activists from Madison, WI, came to occupy Washington (photos by Lindorff)

Check out this cartoon by Portland, Ore. film company Softbox of Dave Lindorff being interviewed by Flashpoints host Dennis Bernstein on how the US spends 53% of the annual budget on war and the military.

Tax Dollars at War

London – The many criticisms of capitalism leveled over a century ago by Karl Marx, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, may prove to be more right than wrong.

Evidence both anecdotal and empirical of many of Marx’s observations abounds across London, the city where the German-born Marx, who held a doctorate in philosophy, lived for three decades before his death in 1883.

Income inequity – an element of the capitalism Marx criticized – is at historic high in Britain as in the US.

The richest ten percent in Britain live 100 times better off than the poorest, according to a report published last year in the Guardian newspaper.

In London, the richest capital city in Europe, 41 percent of children live in poverty, according to statistics listed in a Museum of London exhibit.

That Guardian report placed average household wealth for Britain’s top ten percent at the equivalent of $1.3-million-U.S. dollars compared to the equivalent of $13,531 for Britain’s poorest.
Marx spoke of the immiseration of the workers, and today's capitalists are proving him right (Washington photo)

This statement was released after a unanimous vote of Occupy Wall Street’s general assembly:
 

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
Wall Street and the corporatocracy are behind America's rampant militarism

Check it out on Radio Free Kansas

New York — I took the subway down to Zuccotti Park on Saturday morning to go on the Slut Walk. Since it was on the official schedule of Occupy Wall Street, and since I had heard it promoted by various members of the Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals, I figured that the Slut Walk was an official Occupy Wall Street event. I envisioned a few dozen Non-Male Identified Individuals raising a ruckus and making a spectacle and wreaking havoc in and around Zuccotti Park.

Instead I found the park to be stuffed with an unusually large proportion of Male Bodied Individuals of unknown identification who were preoccupied with revolutionary pursuits other than the Slut Walk, which was nowhere in evidence. I asked several Male Bodied Individuals where I might find the Slut Walk, and none of them knew.

This presented an unanticipated problem. It was almost noon, and I was in danger of missing the Slut Walk entirely, wherever it was. Yet my mother raised me in such a way that I would never ask a Non-Male Identified Individual, “Hey, where’s the Slut Walk?”

So I perambulated the park a couple times searching for a Non-Male Identified Individual who would not think I was making untoward assumptions with my ever more urgent query. “I will know her when I see her,” I thought. And I did. I knew her because she was wearing blue jeans and a negligee and she had “SLUT” written in foot-high black letters from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the Slut Walk is, would you?”

“Union Square,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get there, would you?”

Thus it transpired that I accompanied Mariah Bracken and her recently acquired friends Dana and Brianna to the No. 4 Train. All of them were 22 years old. Mariah and Dana were dressed like…um, ya know…and Brianna was dressed normally. Nobody on the subway seemed to notice.

“Because there’s a serial rapist loose in Brooklyn right now and the police are saying, ‘If girls stopped dressing like sluts, then they wouldn’t be raped’—that’s why I’m going to the Slut Walk,” said Mariah, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “We are trying to reclaim the word ‘slut.’”
Arrested on the bridge by devious NYPD officers, this Wall Street occupier lets everyone know, he's still occupying The Street (Lindorff photo)

 

It’s no accident that the New York Police have been so assiduous in their protection of the big banking establishments that are housed on Wall Street and environs.

The banks don’t like paying taxes, but they know how to buy the protection they need, as this page from JPMorgan Chase’s website makes clear.

It boasts that the company has bought the police a bunch of toys for their squad cars, and that is has financed spying software (they call it “security monitoring software”) for the NYPD’s main data center.

Given what we know about the NYPD’s links to CIA domestic spying, and to its record of spying on and infiltrating legitimate, peaceful protest organizations, both in the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention, and to the current Occupation of Wall Street, it seems clear that all this is being done with Wall Street cash.
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This kind of behavior is just like a doughnut shop or restaurant letting cops eat free, only at $4.6 million, it’s a much bigger bribe that’s being paid. Whether a doughnut shop or a bank, it’s a kind of corruption designed to win better protection from the police than the rest of us get, and in this case, it appears to be aimed at protection from us.

Probably the biggest accomplishment of the Occupy Wall Street movement to date has not been the light these courageous and indomitable young activists have shined on the gangsters of Wall Street, as important as that has been. Rather it has been how they have exposed the police of the nation’s financial capital as the centurions of the ruling class, and not the gauzy “people’s heroes” that they have been posing as since some of their number, along with many more firefighters, nobly gave their lives trying to rescue people in the doomed World Trade Center towers on 9-11.

That image of cops as heroes was always largely a PR creation. Not that many cops actually died in the towers (23 from the NYPD and 37 from the Port Authority Police, vs. 343 firefighters). Most of the city’s cops that day and every day before and since 9-11 have spent their time patrolling the streets of the city as usual, harassing young people, poor people and people of color, conducting random stop-and-frisk searches, handing out parking tickets (often undeserved) and making the occasional arrest of actual criminals.

There are certainly good cops and bad cops, but the good cops are for the most part not heroes. They’re decent people doing their job properly, just like most of the rest of us in this society, whether we’re janitors, teachers or even journalists. The problem is that the bad cops — and there are way too many of them in police departments across America — are a menace because of the unchecked authority they wield and the weapons they carry.

As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell put it in an opinion piece called “Last Word” on the cable network that was sadly unique for television in its brutal honesty, “Every day in America police are too tough, every day in America police cross the line and abuse citizens, every day in America police get away with that,” and nothing is done about it. It gets covered up by any “internal investigations” that get done.

The gratuitous brutality on display by New York police during a Saturday march that was part of this Wall Street Occupation action, and the hundreds of wrongful arrests, the excessive police presence, the countless beatings of young people who are doing nothing but expressing their disgust with the nation’s economic ruling elite, the battering of people with cameras who try to exercise their First Amendment right to videotape police officers abusing others, the spraying of toxic chemicals into the eyes of young women who are just standing behind police lines doing nothing, that went on that day and through the night, and the automatic justifying of all these atrocities by police authorities and the office of the mayor, are, to put it gracefully, the actions of pigs.
Supervisor Anthony Bologna using pepper spray on retreating demonstrators (oink, oink)

 
Honorable people like to debate whether the United States of America is a “police state,” but when it comes to shutting down the expression of ideas on the political left, there’s little room for argument.

We are inundated in this country with propaganda boilerplate about being the greatest democracy in the world. No, we’re not a police state like our friends in Saudi Arabia or our former friends, and current enemies, in Iran. Our police agencies have figured out how to accomplish police state repression in a “softer,” more sophisticated manner.

Look at the video in the September 26 report by Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC on what he describes as a “violent burst of chaos” caused by armed “troublemakers” from the New York Police Department.

It was a peaceful demonstration against Wall Street greed. At least it started out that way. All evidence suggests it was, then, sent careening into chaos by the police strong-arming of young protesters who had done nothing but express their views in public.

Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, left, on a pepper spraying spree, the woman he sprayed in the face and a brave recorder of the melee

In one incident, young women on the sidewalk observing the arrest of a young man in the street are corralled by cops using orange plastic nets. White-shirted Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, then, walks up, un-holsters his pepper spray gun and sprays the women full in the face. He re-holsters his weapon and walks away. Another video shows him doing the same thing indiscriminately to others in an apparent violation of NYPD rules that say the spray is only authorized to disable someone resisting arrest. Over 80 people were arrested in the melee.