What if the 99% Carried Weapons, Like the Tea Partiers?

Laci is off doing last minute holiday things with family, and starting celebrations for the holidays.  But he suggested this post to share with MikeB readers. He's been great about posting for me when I wasn't able to be on line much, so this is my chance to return the favor.

From the Political Newsletter Counter Punch:

December 21, 2011

They Don't Shoot Rightwingers, Do They?

What If Occupiers Armed Themselves?

by BRIAN J. FOLEY

You’ve probably noticed that our government and corporate-owned media treat the Occupy Movement differently from the Tea Party.
Think back to how some Tea Partiers brought guns to their protests, where some protesters even suggested killing President Obama.  They weren’t pepper-sprayed.  They weren’t bashed in the head, and they weren’t even told to take their guns home.
I’m glad police didn’t stomp on the Tea Party. Even ill-informed, inane, racist protests should be permitted. The problem is that the First Amendment prohibits the government from choosing which protests it allows. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t seem to understand that.
Why such different treatment? Some people say it’s because the Tea Party didn’t camp out. But does camping and building a library (which, in a move reminiscent of the National Socialists in 1930′s Germany, the NYPD destroyed) and chanting and sitting-in merit more government attention than armed people threatening violence against the President?
An even more disturbing difference is that the Department of Homeland Security — which is supposed to use its broad powers to protect us from terrorism – may have helped coordinate a national crackdown on the Occupiers’ nonviolent protest. The Occupiers pitch tents, not grenades. They hang expressive signs on buildings – they don’t pilot airliners into them. The Occupy movement shouldn’t even appear on the DHS radar screen.
The mainstream media are similarly “fair and balanced.” The Occupy Movement is widely criticized (as if according to talking points) as lacking a “clear message.” There was no real criticism, however, of the Tea Party’s cacophony of self-contradictory idiocy. Obama is a fascist and a socialist! This Big Business-friendly President is “a Communist”!  Well, where’s my share of the bailout, comrade?
Mainstream media wondered when the movement will be “over” and suggested it would end when temperatures drop.  The Tea Party, which had no encampments, no library, and just a few short protests, was never seen as having an end; it’s been elevated to the status of a political party.
Remember how, after Obama was elected in late 2008, right wingers, believing Obama opposed gun rights, stocked up on guns and ammunition, as if arming themselves for revolution, or a race war? It was reported as just another interesting story. What would happen if Occupiers armed themselves?
The media would report it as foreboding a revolution. Pundits would muse that “we have too many gun rights.” There would be calls for a screening process for dealers. Gun dealers would discriminate.  The Occupy Movement would be designated a terror group – as it just was in London.
Or (perhaps more likely) gun rights would go untouched — the government probably would just shoot Occupiers, as Ann Coulter has suggested.
Recall last January, when Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and killed several others, including a federal judge.  The government and mainstream media seemed to dismiss the idea that Sarah Palin’s targeting Giffords on a map of Congressional districts – with a gunsight — could have motivated Loughner.  The media made it seem as if it were impossible to determine whether Loughner was politically left or right.
But what would happen if someone shot a Republican?  Politicians and pundits would assert that the shooter, even if he’d never actually rallied or camped with the Occupy Movement, was “influenced” by its “dangerous rhetoric,” no matter how vague.  The Occupy Movement would be declared a terrorist group.
The Giffords shooting isn’t the only violence by right-wingers. Death threats were made, and bricks were thrown through the windows of, several Congressional supporters of Obamacare — little media or government attention was paid.  But imagine if Republicans received death threats?
A lesson to be drawn from all this is that, unequivocally, we have a right wing government that’s supported by right wing media. (Can we finally declare dead the myth of the liberal media?)  If you’re right wing, you can protest all you like, in any way you like – apparently, the only way for you to get arrested is if you actually gun down a Member of Congress.
But if you oppose the right wing government, even nonviolently, well, you’re dangerous.
BRIAN J. FOLEY is a law professor, comedian, and author of A New Financial You in 28 Days! A 37-Day Plan (Gegensatz Press 2011).

The Difference Between A Bank And A Gun

Right!

The Job Creators are on strike? I didn't know they were WORKING! They haven't been doing very much for sometime now, if they have been "working".



No tax breaks for them until they do what they say they are supposed to be doing--creating jobs.

Income equality?

OK, all us wealth redistributors (And we are all wealth redistributors--depending on whether you want to see the wealth accumulate on the top or be more equitably redistributed).

This little clip comes from the BBC show Mongrels and tells of the benefits of everyone becoming middle class!


When every one is middle class, there will be no poverty or starvation!



Try the game make Vince Wince if you check out the show's website.

Nothing like a show featuring urban foxes!

Change We Can Participate In

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Are the Police Directing Indigent and Drug Users to Zuccotti Park, in an Attempt to Sabotage Occupy Wall Street Protests?

Transcript of a Keith Olbermann interview with Ryan Devereaux:

DEVEREAUX: Well, it’s a story that’s been floating around the park for weeks now. This is something that people have been talking about. A lot of the folks that are involved in the security operations at the park have been saying that — when they encounter, you know, sort of transient, homeless type of people there in the park — they are hearing reports that the police have been encouraging them to head down to Zuccotti, to “Take it to Zuccotti.”
It’s very upsetting. Particularly, when you consider that some of the people that are arriving to the park have severe psychiatric problems or drug-addiction problems. Why isn’t — if the NYPD is, indeed, suggesting that they go somewhere — why don’t they suggest them to go somewhere that has the resources and the professionals with the capability to handle the particular problems that they have.
OLBERMANN: Any answers occur to you to that rhetorical question?
DEVEREAUX: I mean I — it looks very bad.
OLBERMANN: Sabotage would be — provocateur is essentially — involuntary provocateurs or, in another context, human shields, if you will. That’s the same mentality to it, anyway.
DEVEREAUX: That’s — that’s definitely the sense among the protesters, this is a concerted effort at sabotage. Whether or not we will find concrete evidence that that’s the case, we’ll have to wait and see.
OLBERMANN: Ryan Devereaux, reporter for Democracy Now who’s been at Occupy Wall Street since before the beginning. Great thanks, again, for coming in.

Still don't get the occupation movement?

Yee Haa!

Business as usual: top directors get 49 per cent pay rise

Stephen Foley

The Independent, Friday, 28 October 2011

The directors of Britain's largest companies were last night condemned as "elite greedy pigs" for pocketing a 49 per cent pay rise in the past year, while average workers failed even to keep up with inflation.

Unions exploded with fury after the publication of figures that showed how boardroom pay soared in the last financial year, thanks to rising salaries, bonuses and in particular the swelling value of directors' long-term share plans. The statistics, compiled by Incomes Data Services, provide an annual snapshot of executive remuneration, as reported in companies' most recent reports to shareholders, and show that the chief executives of the FTSE 100 largest companies earned an average of £3,855,172 last year. That is an average 43 per cent rise and, adding in other directors, total earnings rose by an average 49 per cent.

And from the USA

Yet More Grim Inequality News from the CBO

—By Kevin Drum

| Tue Oct. 25, 2011 3:54 PM PDT

The Congressional Budget Office is out with a timely new report on income inequality, which you can find here. Nickel version: The rich are getting richer, and the rest of us are just kind of drifting along.

The main summary chart is the one on the right. Since 1979, adjusted for inflation, incomes of the broad middle class (solid blue line labeled "21st to 80th percentiles") have increased about 40 percent, which comes to a sluggish 1 percent per year. During the same period, the incomes of the richest 1 percent have increased about 280 percent, or 7 percent per year. This is a pretty familiar chart by now, but one thing to note is that the incomes of the rich are pretty volatile: They drop a lot during recessions, but they also bounce back pretty quickly and regain their high growth rates as soon as the recession is over. This chart only goes through 2007, but the same dynamic has been at work in the aftermath of the Great Recession: a steep drop followed by an equally steep recovery.

Murder at Occupy Wall Street

This image demonstrates that murder has been happening at occupy Wall Street.

Note the feet protruding from the garbage toward the centre front of the picture!

These protesters are evil! Murdering other protesters and dumping the bodies in garbage.


Give me a break.

Some people miss that people can lie with photographs: they can be photoshopped, cropped, misrepresented, etcetera.

See:

• The Camera Never Lies...or does it?

Why I Support Occupy Wall Street

An official NYPD Statement on the Photo of the OWS protester?

OK, I contacted Ofcr. William Jenkins at the 81st precinct, Community Affairs: (718-574-0433). He could not verify that this was a real picture.

He suggested I contact NYPD, Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information (646-610-5000) for an official statement and they were unable to verify the photo. They did not have an official statement. They said that the person who took the photo was the person we should contact.

I contracted the mayor's office with this query:

I am trying to verify a photo that was alleged to have been taken of an Occupy Wall Street Protester allegedly defecating on a NYPD Car (2361) from the 81st Precinct that was published in the British Newpaper: the Daily Mail. I have contacted the NYPD, but unable to help me. Is there anyone in the Mayors office who can provide an official statement regarding this photo?

As of now, the only person who can verify that this was a true picture would be the word of the photographer. That means we have to put any reliability on this photograph to the credibility of the photographer, its source: the Daily Mail, and the general reliability of the picture.

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Occupy Wall Street: Outing the Ringers

Here's a few words from Jay Smooth, the host of New York's longest running hip hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad. Jay has a great video blog, ill Doctrine, check it out!
Jay:



http://twitter.com/jsmooth995
A few thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, I've been watching it and going down there for a while now but hadn't had a chance to speak on it.

By the way when I say some news media people are "ringers," I don't necessarily mean that they deliberately obfuscate, or get orders from some shadowy figure to do so. I think they'll often just have a personal investment in the system and status quo that's being critiqued/threatened, so they'll naturally--without any need to conspire--have their perception skewed by an instinct to protect the status quo they're invested in. So though it's quite possibly not their intention to play the ringer, it's the function they wind up serving nonetheless.

"Rainbow in the Dark" instrumental provided by Das Racist

(Thanks Microdot)

No need to call the 81st Precinct...

Here's the photographer's side of the story:

Around 4ish I decided to head to the office of the Mail Online and file my pictures. As I left the north side of the park I heard a man running to catch up with two police officers, who where walking in the opposite direction to me, yelling: “Officer, you've got do something, there's a guy taking a shit on a patrol car”. In less that 10 strides from the park facing the McDonalds was indeed what appeared to be a middle aged man emptying himself with no great haste, up against the back end of an NYPD police car.

The two Police Officers who had been dutifully informed by a member of the public simply shrugged their shoulders and walked away. I ducked into a phone box and snatched a few shots of the scene playing out before me. The defecating man, oblivious to my presence, then wiped himself accordingly and strolled into the Mcdonalds as if nothing was the matter.

I was expecting a Police response any second, but it never came.

I'll start by saying this wasn't a set up. I didn't hire some random guy to pebble dash a patrol car. This isn't a cut and paste photoshop job. This isn't staged in any way. And this isn't a right wing/Tea Party conspiracy. Seriously! The bare fact is a grown man of his own accord, really did empty his bowels on a Police car in broad day light on the peripheral of a political protest. And by sad coincidence I was there to capture it. (The time of the incident was approximately 4.30pm)

and a better copy of the picture.

Note the van does have the 718 prefix on it. Area code 718 is a New York City telephone area code (overlaid by area codes 347 and 917) in the boroughs of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, as well as the Marble Hill section of Manhattan.

I don't see any visible signs of protesters either.

Of course, the only true test is to contact the 81st Precinct.

One Picture Worth 1000 Words

Refutation of the picture on the left which explains the movement.



If you graduated from university with debt...
If you are part of the long term unemployed, or underemployed and struggling to get by...
If you have a family member who is one of the above...
If you realise that you are a layoff away from being one of the above...

Then you are part of the 99%

FAKE?

This photo purports to show an Occupy Wall Street Protester taking a shit on a police car.


Note on back of the Police Car:

81 PCT

Wouldn't that be NYPD's 81st Precinct? If it is an NYPD car--since the NYPD shield is blocked from sight. Although googling 81st Precinct only turns up the one in Brooklyn.

The 81st Precinct is located in the north central area of the borough of Brooklyn. This neighborhood is known as "Bedford Stuyvesant." A small section along the southern border is referred to Stuyvesant Heights.

Zucotti Park is at 1 Liberty Plaza, New York, NY 10006, in the 1st Precinct, which Google maps estimates as being close to 6 miles away!

I'm curious as to what a car from the 81st Precinct is doing in the First?

Does this really show what it claims to show? Somebody needs to check where car # 2361 from the 81st Precinct was stationed on the day this phot was alleged to have been taken. Although, it does stink that a car from a Brooklyn Precinct (especially from a high crime area such as Bed-Stuy) would be in Manhattan.

It seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this:

Only one problem - the NYC police car is clearly marked that it's from the 81st Precinct - and the 81st Precinct is in Brooklyn, not Manhattan. Now before someone decides that the officer must have been there helping with crowd control, standard operating procedure for big city police departments like NYC, Chicago, LA, etc. is for police to be called in to that duty off-shift, and to provide their own transportation to the area - they do not take patrol cars from other parts of the city, or other boroughs, to do crowd control somewhere else - and they wouldn't be parking them on the street if they were there for a long term assignment like that. Also, notice the green post office storage box. Unless they put them back, the Post Office removed them from Wall Street and environs after 9/11 so that they couldn't be used to hide a bomb. The shoes are quite a bit out of date as well - frankly, the guy looks to be a homeless guy and not a protester. Allegedly, the police ignored people who told them some guy was defecating on their car - does that sound like any police officer you know or have heard of? It appears someone is playing fast and loose with the facts here.

See this from another New Yorker questioning that this shows what it purports to show. In fact, New Yorkers are sceptical that this show what it claims for the basic reason stated: an 81st Precinct Officer wouldn't be in Manhattan.

It should also be noted that this photo first appeared in a British Paper, The Daily Mail, with a reputation for poor journalism, rather than a paper from New York, such as the Daily News or New York Post, for which this type of story is their bread and butter.

In short, this isn't passing the smell test.

The Occupy Movement Explained

Dumb people need pictures.



If some people read and understand what they have written here, they would understand they have far more in common with the occupy movement than the Tea Party.

Many officials of the Democratic Party have either personally appeared at Zuccotti Park to express support or sent statements of support for the protesters. Likewise, a number of union leaders joined a large protest rally held in New York City’s Foley Square on October 5 to show sympathy for the protesters.

Then there are the liberal political pundits and media outlets such as the New York Times that are also trying to build bridges between the Democratic Party and the Occupy movement in an effort to channel the protesters’ energy to the party’s electoral machine. For example, New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote: “And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans. . . . But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies. . . . Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over.”

On the face of it there is nothing wrong with the Democratic Party officials or union leaders expressing support for the protesters. In light of their actual economic policies, however, that support can be characterized only as hypocritical. The Democrats are as much responsible for the economic problems that have triggered the protests as their Republican counterparts. The Obama administration has played an especially destructive role in pursuing a devastating neoliberal austerity agenda in terms of bailing out the Wall Street gamblers, extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, expanding the US wars of choice—and then cutting vital social spending to pay for the financial resources thus usurped.

Equally blameworthy are union bureaucrats who have enabled the White House and the Congress in the implementation of such brutal austerity programs. Hollow posturing aside, the AFL-CIO has opposed neither the neoliberal austerity policies at home nor the imperialist wars of aggression abroad. Well-paid union officials have not even seriously challenged factory closures; nor have they earnestly resisted brutal cuts in workers’ wages and benefits.

In projecting sympathy for the Occupy Movement, the Democrats are essentially trying to have their cake and eat it too! Their efforts to express support for the protests can be interpreted only as opportunistic and utilitarian: to identify themselves with the rapidly spreading popular protests against the status quo, to mask the Obama administration’s neoliberal devotion to Wall Street, and to harness the energy of the protesters in order to garner their vote in the 2012 elections.

If successful, this would not be the first time the Democratic Party would have derailed and dissipated social struggles for change; it has a long record of such policies of betrayal, going back all the way to the Populist Movement of the late 19th century. Barack Obama’s promise of change in the 2008 elections in pursuit of garnering the grassroots’ vote was only the latest of the Democrats’ strategy of playing the good cop in order to contain radical energy. Two years earlier they had managed to undermine a vigorous antiwar movement by voicing the protesters’ demands to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if they won the majority seats in the Congress. Having thus gained the control of both houses of the Congress in the mid-term election of 2006, they shamelessly backed away from their promise to antiwar voters.

One can only hope that the Occupy Movement is armed with the knowledge of the Democratic Party’s record of cooptation and betrayal of radical movements; and will therefore chart a political movement of the working people and other grassroots independent of both parties of big business.

A Guide To The Smear Campaign Against Occupy Wall Street

Media Matters has come up with A Guide To The Smear Campaign Against Occupy Wall Street. The right-wing media have engaged in a relentless smear campaign against the Occupy Wall Street movement, including calling the protesters socialists and Marxists, saying they represent the "fringe of the fringe of the fringe," and claiming they "sound like the Unabomber," among other attacks.

Media Matter analyses the criticism here.

The Debt Crisis; for Jim

Comedy is funniest when it is also the most true and accurate.

This is especially for Jim, because this interview elaborates on how the 99% have been ripped off and exploited by the 1% acting unethically and in some cases illegally. And it also explains why the 99% of us have been left in debt, without the resources we should reasonably have expected to have for our working years. This is not the entire picture, the whole problem, but it illustrates a part of what the 99% are properly angry about.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Ellen Schultz
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Clean up on Aisle Zuccotti!

Funny how you never see the right wing covering this stuff. The protesters had arranged - from long before the 'clean up' tactic was announced - to use power cleaners to clean up the park area. However, the owners of the park, who have ownership contingent on the park being a public park available 24/7 for public use, have denied the protesters access to water or power for the power washers (or anything else). So in order to clean, the protesters have brought in water in containers for cleaning, along with green clean up products and other cleaning supplies which were donated. The support for the protesters is so large, so broad based (so not just 'hippies') that they can not possibly use all of the offered cleaning supplies.

A point of information, there has been daily clean up of Zuccotti park, by protesters, prior to this video.

Protest

for Laci, 'homme et chien'.  (Looks like someone on the right was wrong about this movement going bust and going away.)  From MSNBC.com:

Wall Street protesters march to Times Square

Demonstrations expand to cities across the US, and abroad

Mary Altaffer  /  AP

Demonstrators affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street rally Saturday in New York's Times Square.

NBC News and news services

updated 1 hour 0 minutes ago

NEW YORK — In its biggest day yet, thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters rallied in Times Square on Saturday, buoyed by a global day of demonstrations backing their month-long campaign against economic inequality.

"Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!" protesters chanted from within police barricades. Police, some in riot gear and mounted on horses, tried to push them out of the square and onto the sidewalks in an attempt to funnel the crowds away.
Sandy Peterson of Salt Lake City, who was in Times Square after seeing "The Book of Mormon" musical on Broadway, got caught up in the disorder.
"We're getting out of here before this gets ugly," she said.
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators had marched north through Manhattan from Washington Square Park earlier in the afternoon. Once in Times Square, they held a rally for several hours before dispersing. Over the course of the day, more than 70 people were arrested.
Police spokesman Paul Browne said 42 of those were arrested in Times Square on Saturday night after being warned repeatedly to disperse, and three others were arrested while trying to take down police barriers.
Two police officers were injured during the protest and had to be hospitalized. One suffered a head injury, the other a foot injury, Browne said.

Protesters assembled at Washington Square Park for an after-party Saturday night, but as midnight park curfew fell, squads of police swept the park as demonstrators chanted and marched away. About a dozen who stayed behind were expected to be arrested, protest organizers said.
Over the past month, the protests have expanded from New York's financial district to cities across the United States and abroad. Demonstrations were called this weekend in the U.S., Canada and Europe, as well as in Asia and Africa.
In New York, where the movement began when protesters set up camp in a Lower Manhattan park on Sept. 17, organizers said the protest grew to at least 5,000 people as they marched to Times Square from their makeshift outdoor headquarters.