Night Raids, Mall Attacks, BOA Internal Memos

Here's my question. So when Homeland Security's Urban Shield kicked into gear all over our nation – how did they plan on handling the lawsuits that will result from things like a petite woman happening upon a mall antiwar demo in Austin, TX, briefly holding someone's sign, and getting three broken ribs for it? Pepper spray in NYC and then Davis, tear gas canisters in Oakland, batons everywhere, cherry pickers, ropes and ladders in Wash DC.

Won't a lot of judges have a lot to say about a lot of this thuggery on the part of police -- eventually? It's clear corporations own the Supreme Court, but does the 1% think it controls the entire judiciary?

Hooray for LA, which passed the first city resolution I've heard of to overturn the Citizens United ruling! Corporations are not people, is one of the core beliefs of the 99%.

Militarized urban police departments turning out against unarmed, nonviolent protestors hasn't looked good, and there will be a raft of lawsuits – at the taxpayer's expense. This is the sort of thing community policing was supposed to address. There have been mass actions with police violence prior to this, and the chief of police of one of them, in Seattle, has now recanted, but I think we have clearly entered a new phase. Homeland Security is giving out tanks for “free” to cities.

This is what comes of taking lessons from the skilled and brutal security forces from Israel and Bahrain. Top cops all over the globe are putting their heads together at secretive meetings, and the result is cops start aiming “non-lethal” tear gas canisters directly at people's heads, as they have been doing for years at West Bank demos. Scott Olsen became an instant hero of the revolution by getting his skull cracked at Occupy Oakland, as we all saw the dramatic images of his companions rushing to his aid. Bradley Manning has been there all along as a dramatic victim, too, and will finally get his first day in court next week. I wonder if he knows how much of a celebrity he is. It's clear he knew he was doing the right thing, but he wouldn't have known he would get so famous.

Stuff people were allowed to pick up after Zucotti Park raid. photo: Mel, Codepink NYC

So people are getting evicted over and over again, losing their stuff, their laptops, disrupting their lives even more than the meltdown of the economy as we knew it – which continues apace.

This week an internal memo showed Bank of America recognizes it has a p.r. problem around foreclosures, as the 99% turned from the cold, raided streets toward occupying foreclosed or threatened buildings. 

Nonviolent methods needed now, more than ever. Let's win! (The video I wanted to use here, of UC Davis students' powerful use of silence on the university chancellor ,has 1 million+ views.)

Occupy Climate Change

Patience, at Occupy Detroit, makes a beautiful statement.

Ok I finally got to visit Occupy Wall St. and it was a freak early wintery mix of a storm -- before Halloween for cripes sake. Three inches of slush accumulated on the streets in Jersey, while in Manhattan it melted more quickly into soupy puddles. At Liberty Plaza only a few hardy souls were leaning into a wet wind, some under light cover but most hunkered down inside tents with flys made out of tarps. We didn't stick it out very long as we were drenched and it was coming down hard. I have a lot of respect for the occupiers. There were a lot of police vehicles, watching.

The few people out in the occupy space looked really cheerful though, despite the fact that the fire dept took their generators and fuel, including used cooking oil, for "safety." The real reason is that the chief purpose of generators is the charging of digital devices used in media work, to get the message out. Squelching real news while pretending to be doing something completely different is a hallmark of corporate rule, is it not?

There were boxes of organic bananas being offered while we were there, a lot of recordings happening, and more food in the kitchen, which I read they were going to simplify for a few days while they regrouped and made some plans for feeding so many every day.

Occupy Walll St. made the evening news in New Jersey as occupiers were compared with 320,000 other people who lost electricity, in the latter case due to heavy wet snow bringing down tree limbs and power lines.

But weather doesn't change the reason people are occupying everywhere. Check out Mimi Pierre Johnson delivering a message about her home mortgage to Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.


Occupy Denver had scuffles at the capital building resulting in police using rubber bullets on the unarmed crowd; they were being swarmed by riot police later at their occupation site, and using the people's mike to joyfully recite their constitutional rights -- when the livestream video feed went dead.

Occupier Janet Weil of CODEPINK had this to say:

Please tell folks that 1000 people, myself included, came to Occupy SF the night of  Oct 26/27 to avert a police attack -- and the attack WAS averted! It helped a lot that 5 city supervisors and several union reps were there, but overall the numbers of people were crucial. While every such victory is fragile, we CAN protect our Occu-pies, but it takes a human presence on site -- as well as calls to officials, media work, etc.

Statement posted by Desiree Fairooz of VA on Facebook (not sure if she is the author or not, but I like it):

We will not stop until the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites, stops. We will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. We will not stop until students no longer have to go into massive debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. We will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. We are the 99%.