How much did the Obama administration coordinate the violent and often sadistic October and November 2011 attacks on Occupy movements across the USA (and noting that journalists were especially targeted)?
[Introduction. By Thanksgiving 2011, it was clear to anyone paying attention that there was national coordination to the active police repression against the Occupy movement from California to New York City. In Chicago, we had earlier seen the same tactics used, from suppression of reporters on the scene (for example, during the Grant Park arrests) to more nasty treatment of those arrested (the treatment of the nurses arrested during the second night of arrests in Chicago). Now Naomi Wolfe had summarized a great deal of what is taking place, and asked us to face the fact that the Obama administration, probably through the U.S. Justice Department, is coordinating these attacks on the protests against the U.S. Wall Street dictators].
Above, in the shadow of the Obama national campaign headquarters, Chicago police on orders from former White House Chief of Staff (now Chicago's mayor) Rahm Emanuel prepare to arrest peaceful protesters in Chicago's Grant Park early in the morning of October 16, 2011. The word "IDEAS" in the background is spelled out in the windows of Chicago's Prudential Building as part of the city's "Ideas Week" celebrating technology. The Prudential Building, three blocks north of the site of the massive arrests on October 16, is the site of the national headquarters of Obama 2012. Substance photo by Kristine Mayle.The Guardians Naomi Wolf discovers the truth about the sudden crack down against the Occupy movement across the United States.
The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy.... The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality
Naomi Wolf. guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 November 2011 12.25 EST http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy?newsfeed=true
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women — targeted seemingly for their gender — screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
But just when Americans thought we had the picture — was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? — the picture darkened.
The Wall Street targets are not only in New York City. Above, the November 10, 2011 demonstration in Chicago targeted the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which was scheduled to receive a multi-million dollar tax break from Chicago and Illinois following a threat that the financial exchange would move out of the state. The Emanuel administration has touted the tax breaks for the rich publicly since Rahm Emanuel was inaugurated in May 2011. Substance photo by John Kugler.The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being — falsely — informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."
In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.
To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.
I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.
Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks — under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop — awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.
That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.
The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
Prior to returning to Chicago with millions of dollars from the "one percent" to assure his election as mayor, Rahm Emanuel served for more than two years as Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama. The two share a basic Atlas Shrugged political and economic philosophy, and despite the dreams of some so-called "progressives," Obama's economic policies have much more in common with Franklin D. Roosevelt's two predecessors in the White House, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge, than with the New Deal.The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.
No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
When I saw this list — and especially the last agenda item — the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).
In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.
But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.
Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.
So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.
Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.
By: John Kugler
Scumbag Media Reporting
from our brothers and sisters at SCC
Friday, November 25, 2011
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2011/11/scumbag-media-reporting.html
Scumbag Media Reporting
Hey jackasses? Your bias is showing. Channel 7 hits a new low:
A Chicago family is searching for answers after police fatally shot a man early Thursday morning.
Devon Ross, 27, was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in the Englewood neighborhood. Authorities say Ross punched the officer several times in the face while trying to take her gun away after a foot pursuit.
Supporters of Ross admit he ran from police, but they say, that did not justify the shooting that ended his life on Thanksgiving.
Yeah, because these people actually know the law, were witnesses to the event, or have some fucking blinding insight into the events of the evening.
"He tried to climb the gate. She pulled him down by his dreads. He was on the ground. He got up. She shot him and killed him; she murdered him," said witness Khristian Triplett.
"She snatched him down by his dreads. He said, 'I ain't got nothing.' He didn't get down fast enough...boom, boom, twice. He went down, and she shot him a third time," said Kenneth Cobbin, also a witness.
[...] "My son wasnt like that he was a good young man, working hard, trying to get his life back on track. He had problems in the early stages of life," father William Ross said.
Not a single one of these people was there. And the problems he had during the "early stages of life" must have just ended a month ago when the assailant was acquitted of multiple weapon charges in a bench trial.
If anyone has the name of that judge by the way, post it here.
"He's an excellent father, working for the government as a postal worker. He never had any type of run-ins with the law," said William Beck, suspect's cousin.
Aside from those weapon charges you mean.
And here's the scumbag comments of the year by Channel 7's very own Jessica D'Onofrio and Jason Knowles. Remember those names boys and girls - they are police haters, plain and simple:
As for the female officer, ABC7 is told she was treated and released from an area hospital after suffering injuries to her hand and presumably injuries to her face, if in fact she was punched.
What the fuck sort of comment is that? A cop does a fantastic job retaining her weapon and dispatching an assailant with a lengthy criminal record who would have done god knows what had he successfully disarmed her and Channel 7 prints and broadcasts this crap? What a load of shit.