occupy wall st

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

anybody else seen this? did a search but nothing came back from here...

www.occupywallst.org

[qualia]

yep, apparently theres a fuss going around msm is blacklisting it.

can you believe this shit? fucking cunts.

 

[Marcel]

I was so excited about this in the lead up. I offered to sponsor all my NY friends to do it, but they said that they're all "too busy"

It seems the numbers are too small to really get shit stirring. Lovely ideological tone, though. Very representative of the New Way Things Are Done. Radical and fragmented grassroots democracy.

[Rabelais]

Slightly on topic and highly recommended...

BBC Speechless As Trader Tells Truth: "The Collapse Is Coming...And Goldman Rules The World"

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqN3amj6AcE&feature=youtu.be

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

WOW thanks dale. good bit of insider info, aslong as he doesnt have a 1800 hotline already setup with a subscription fee to rip off the already broke and desperate US citizens... hmmmm either way I can feel everything rising and heading toward something significant.

D00d

[Mt.B]

I too was/am excited by this action. There was a # tag for Sydney too. Anyone up that way know if it got off the ground? I just tried to find it but couldn't.

[Marcel]

What's # tag?

[Rabelais]

HAHA, holy crap! I watched their documentary on SBS about the whole Bohpal thing just a couple of months ago. Didn't even recognise him!

Can't believe he got away with it again. Gold!

[qualia]

lol. that was on the real bbc? teehee,

[Mt.B]

What's # tag?

It's a Twitter thing. It helps do searches within twitter for certain things. So say you are at the Occupy Wall Street Occupation and you wanted to tweet to the world something that you saw, you would add #occupywallstreet to your tweet and other people could find it easier by searching for the # tag.

They tried to get other countries to join in at their Wall St equivalents, some did. There's a list of them somewhere...

I found this interview from Day 9 inspirational.

 

[Marcel]

BBC swear that he's a regular on their newscast and he speaks on a number of topics relating to economics. The funny thing is, with enough people thinking that it could possibly be the Yes Men, the effect is essentially the same. Win-win!

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

I personally dont think its the same guy, the DOW video guy looks wired lol

either way, im getting fricking excited! whats this about an aussie chapter. a google search revealed nothing im moving very close to syd in the next week, may have to go into the cbd and check it out

d00d

[Mt.B]

a google search revealed nothing im moving very close to syd in the next week, may have to go into the cbd and check it out

d00d

This is what was planned though it looks like there was no interest in occupying Martin Place;

http://inewp.com/?p=8840

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

not much seems to be happening around aus except for in brisbane. they have a fb page if anyone cares to look.

i found this video, thought id share

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meT8CJgEBQw

d00d

[TheExplorer]

I noticed this thread on Shroomery yesterday:

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/15145609#15145609

I'm pretty sure the guy is from Melbourne or Tasmania.

[Mt.B]

i found this video, thought id share

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meT8CJgEBQw

d00d

Sounds like the old 'divide and conquer' strategy to me.

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

who really knows I guess! lets just hope the right causes prevail :-)

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

it seems to have gotten a nice organic foothold down there, be very intersting what happens next i think

 

[Mycot]

Things happening here at Melbourne and possibly Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth on October 15th.

http://www.shaman-australis.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29439

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

I will be attending sydney on the 16th, they have a fb page, http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=284324328246853

this is the latest on NY, pretty bad!

Updated, 11:55 p.m. | In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.

The police did not immediately release precise arrest figures, but said it was the choice of those marchers that led to the swift enforcement.

“Protesters who used the Brooklyn Bridge walkway were not arrested,” said the head police spokesman, Paul J. Browne. “Those who took over the Brooklyn-bound roadway, and impeded vehicle traffic, were arrested.”

But many protesters said that they thought the police had tricked and trapped them, allowing them onto the bridge and even escorting them across, only to surround them in orange netting after hundreds of them had entered.

“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” said Jesse A. Myerson, a media coordinator for Occupy Wall Street who was in the march but was not arrested.

A video on the YouTube page of a group called We Are Change shows some of the arrests.

Things came to a head shortly after 4 p.m., as the 1,500 or so marchers reached the foot of the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the bridge, just east of City Hall.

In their march north from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan — headquarters for the last two weeks of a protest movement against what demonstrators call inequities in the economic system — they had stayed on the sidewalks, forming a long column of humanity penned in by officers on scooters.

Where the entrance to the bridge narrowed their path, some marchers, including organizers, stuck to the generally agreed-upon route and headed up onto the wooden walkway that runs between and about 15 feet above the bridge’s traffic lanes.

But about 20 others headed for the Brooklyn-bound roadway, said Christopher T. Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who accompanied the march. Some of them chanted “take the bridge.” They were met by a handful of high-level police supervisors, who blocked the way and announced repeatedly through bullhorns that the marchers were blocking the roadway and that if they continued to do so, they would be subject to arrest.

There were no physical barriers, though, and at one point, the marchers began walking up the roadway with the police commanders in front of them – seeming, from a distance, as if they were leading the way. The Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito, and a horde of other white-shirted commanders, were among them.

Police secured some protesters' hands with plastic ties.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesPolice secured some protesters’ hands with plastic ties.

After allowing the protesters to walk about a third of the way to Brooklyn, the police then cut the marchers off and surrounded them with orange nets on both sides, trapping hundreds of people, said Mr. Dunn. As protesters at times chanted “white shirts, white shirts,” officers began making arrests, at one point plunging briefly into the crowd to grab a man.

The police said that those arrested were taken to several police stations and were being charged with disorderly conduct, at a minimum.

A freelance reporter for The New York Times, Natasha Lennard, was among those arrested. She was later released.

Mr. Dunn said he was concerned that those in the back of the column who might not have heard the warnings “would have had no idea that it was not O.K. to walk on the roadway of the bridge.” Mr. Browne said that people who were in the rear of the crowd that may not have heard the warnings were not arrested and were free to leave.

Earlier in the afternoon, as many as 10 Department of Correction buses, big enough to hold 20 prisoners apiece, had been dispatched from Rikers Island in what one law enforcement official said was “a planned move on the protesters.”

Etan Ben-Ami, 56, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn who was up on the walkway, said that the police seemed to make a conscious decision to allow the protesters to claim the road. “They weren’t pushed back,” he said. “It seemed that they moved at the same time.”

Mr. Ben-Ami said he left the walkway and joined the crowd on the road. “It seemed completely permitted,” he said. “There wasn’t a single policeman saying ‘don’t do this’.”

He added: “We thought they were escorting us because they wanted us to be safe.” He left the bridge when he saw officers unrolling the nets as they prepared to make arrests. Many others who had been on the roadway were allowed to walk back down to Manhattan.

Mr. Browne said that the police did not trick the protesters into going onto the bridge.

“This was not a trap,” he said. “They were warned not to proceed.”

In related protests elsewhere in the country, 25 people were arrested in Boston for trespassing while protesting Bank of America’s foreclosure practices, according to Eddy Chrispin, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department. The protesters were on the grounds and blocking the entrance to the building, Mr. Chrispin said.

source

heres the vid

 

Edited October 2, 2011 by thed00dabides

[dollarjuice]

[El Presidente Hillbillios]

Marines on thier way to protest alongside the others!

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/01/semper-fi-marines-coming-to-protect-protesters-on-wall-street/

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

It's hard to gauge how big its actually getting over there!

[qualia]

WASHINGTON -- Ben Becker, 27, sat in the back of a police-commandeered transit bus on Saturday night, his hands placed tightly behind his back in plastic cuffs. He'd been marching on the Brooklyn Bridge as part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. And like hundreds of other activists railing against the inequities of the financial system, he had been swept up in a mass arrest by the New York Police Department.

Becker was one of the first placed in custody. His bus filled up fast. They waited, tied up for hours, and did not know their charges, Becker said. For many, this was new: the march, the chanting, the arrest.

"Some of the teenagers on the bus were extremely nervous," Becker said.

But this was a scenario Becker knew well. He was the named plaintiff in the Partnership for Civil Justice's 2001 federal class-action lawsuit against the District of Columbia, known as Becker v. D.C. That case stemmed from the D.C. police department's mass arrest of anti-IMF/World Bank demonstrators on April 15, 2000. Becker was one of nearly 700 people arrested during that march. He was 16 at the time.

On Tuesday, the Partnership for Civil Justice filed yet another class-action lawsuit -- this one again on behalf of Becker and others arrested on the bridge.

"I was telling the young people -- the teenagers -- the people who had been protesting for the first time, when we were sitting on the bus for hours, I was telling them the similarities to April 2000," said Becker, who is currently an adjunct professor at City College of New York and a graduate student studying history.

The mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge resemble a clear, premeditated police tactic that has come to be known as "trap and detain," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice. The tactic goes something like this, she said: the police permit and escort marchers to proceed with their activities before suddenly corralling them into a closed off area and arresting everyone in one sweep.

The police will use a side street, a park, or, in the case of Occupy Wall Street, a bridge -- usually an area where the people trapped cannot disperse, and where they end up having to beg the police to leave, Verheyden-Hilliard said. Journalists, tourists and legal observers are often caught up in these dragnets. A reason for the arrests is crafted after the fact, she said.

The NYPD says its officers warned the activists not to take the motorway. “There were claims police had not issued warnings,” Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police, stated in an email to The New York Times. “In fact, warnings were issued and captured on video.”

The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Huffington Post.

Verheyden-Hilliard said the fact that the so-called warnings were videotaped shows premeditation. She added that the warnings were bad theater -- police were speaking inaudibly into a bullhorn; they were for show only, she said.

Police departments may have popularized the tactic of snuffing out and intimidating protests during the anti-globalization movement a decade ago that criticized corporate capitalism. But Verheyden-Hilliard said the method has gone international in the last couple of years.

"It's been used in London and in Toronto. They call it 'kettling' there in Toronto," she said. “It's a particular tactic, a refined police tactic -- you get boxed by police on all sides or, even easier, when there are buildings or a bridge and you block the front and the back."

The tactic has been deployed by police in Oakland and other cities as well, according to Verheyden-Hilliard. But it was D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department that made "trap and detain" infamous.

On April 15, 2000, according to court records, demonstrators had gathered in front of the Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue NW and marched to a spot close to the International Monetary Fund on 19th Street NW. Police were very much a presence during the march. As the crowd headed toward Dupont Circle, where it was set to disperse, the activists were suddenly penned in on a side street by the police, according to Becker and court records.

The department at the time justified the arrests by arguing that the officers were trying to prevent chaos in the streets. "I apologize for nothing we did," the then-Police Chief Charles Ramsey said at the time. "They have the right to sue us just like they had the right to protest."

Along with the mass arrest, several plaintiffs in the Becker case alleged that they were beaten by D.C. cops. The court case produced a video that showed a police unit charging a group of demonstrators and beating them in the face with batons. The officers had obscured their badge numbers. Another plaintiff said he had been injured with pepper spray and alleged that the cop's attack had been unprovoked.

"There was a police line in riot gear," Becker remembered. "They refused to let us go. We turned around and the police line blocked. We were chanting for almost an hour, 'let us go!'"

Becker said he heard the same chants on the Brooklyn Bridge this past weekend. People were chanting their lungs out when the march started at 3 p.m. Saturday at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, he said. It soon passed City Hall. Only 15 minutes in, thousands of demonstrators had picked out a few favorites.

"Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!" they chanted.

"We are the 99 percent!"

And in honor of the recent execution of a Georgia inmate: "We are all Troy Davis!"

Throughout the march, the throngs stayed on sidewalks. If people spilled onto the streets, police were there within seconds to admonish them to get off the roadway, Becker said. Becker and Joshua Stephens, another demonstrator interviewed by HuffPost, said everyone complied without hassle. "It was a very closely-monitored and marshaled protest up to the Brooklyn Bridge," Becker recalled.

There had been a demonstration the previous day at One Police Plaza over a pepper-spray incident. A white-shirt cop had indiscriminately sprayed several women in the face; it had been caught on tape and gone viral. Becker said a thousand people showed up and said their piece without getting hassled by police.

The march became a bottleneck at the bridge, Becker said. The demonstrators first had to cross a street and then pass a narrow entranceway. Becker said he saw no cops as he passed on to the bridge.

When Marcel Cartier, 27, started marching on the bridge's motorway, he said the police only insisted on keeping one lane open for cars. "We began marching on the street with police right next to us not saying anything," he told HuffPost. "The most that was said -- 'Excuse me brother, could you move over?' They kept one lane open for cars. It was fine. It was perfectly okay for us to be on that street on the bridge."

After about 15 minutes on the bridge, the march came to a halt as the police formed a line and stopped the marchers, Becker said. Cartier and Becker both moved up to the front.

A police official took out a piece of paper and read from it into a bullhorn. "It was inaudible," Becker said. "I couldn't hear."

Cartier didn't get the message either. "I heard absolutely nothing," he said. "No announcement that they were going to arrest people." He didn't know he was in trouble until three others were hauled away. Then a cop pointed at him and a few officers pulled him out and cuffed him, he said. He was the fourth activist arrested that day.

Becker, before he was arrested, asked an officer: "Why are you doing this?" He pressed that the police were the ones blocking traffic. Another cop grabbed him and escorted him to the police bus, he said. It would be the second arrest in his life, the first being in April 2000.

"I certainly was not expecting or wanting to be having a repeat encounter," Becker said. "The arrests in 2000 were horrible for the people that went through them...There is still a lot of legal work to be done to correct that. This movement that's developing has to take this on as a major issue."

The April 2000 lawsuit resulted in record settlement with the District of Columbia in 2009 agreeing to pay $13.7 million to those arrested. The litigation also resulted in a ban on the "trap and detain" tactic. U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman wrote that it reminded him of the old discredited police responses to anti-Vietnam War protesters -- "when thousands of demonstrators were arrested on a theory of 'group' probable cause on the steps of the Capitol, in West Potomac Park, and on the streets of the District of Columbia."

A subsequent case was brought against the Metropolitan Police Department over the arrest of 400 individuals in Pershing Park in September 2002 for, once again, demonstrations involving anti-globalization activists.

Like the other "trap and detain" cases, the police surrounded the downtown-D.C. park and hauled away everyone inside -- including tourists and nurses who weren’t necessarily involved but were merely taking a break from a nearby convention. That case, also filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice, was settled with the city in late 2009 for $8.25 million. A second lawsuit stemming from Pershing Park has yet to reach a settlement.

The NYPD, Verheyden-Hilliard said, should expect a similar fight. "I think people have to recognize the police are acting deliberately and intentionally," she said. "It's not that they're reacting to some protest or misconduct or that they're overreaching or maybe they had probable cause to arrest someone. They did not have probable cause to arrest anyone. They have been engaged in a pattern and practice to suppress dissent for years."

"They ordered the arrest buses from Rikers," she added. "When you are ordering arrest buses, you are intending to make mass arrests."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/04/occupy-wall-street-mass-arrests_n_995047.html

[Marcel]

My wife and I lived in NY for a bunch of years and we were once caught in one of these "trap and detain" tactics. It was just after the twin towers came down and the US launched its first attacks on Afghanistan. Thousands and thousands of people marched onto Times Square. It was huge. The biggest rally I've ever seen, by far. (To my horror, none of the network news channels even mentioned it.) Anyway, after standing in Times Square for about an hour, chanting and talking, the police put up barricades along the outside periphery of the majority of the people. Effectively, this means that something like 20+ streets plus the main thrust of Broadway have been blocked off. A few people tried to get past the barricades and leave, but police told them that they'd get arrested if they crossed a police line. Then the police just stood back and waited. They do nothing; just standing there with hands on hips. The protesters start to freak out. My wife has a mini-panic attack. We stand there, pushed together, tight and sweaty and nervous for another 30 minutes or so. People ask the police when we will be able to leave, but the police refuse to answer any questions. Then, without prompting, they step forward and let out a chunk of people, then block it off again. Then 5 minutes later, they let out another chunk. And so on, until every nervous protester has been let out, running for fear of arrest or further detainment.

It was really amazing how they used our self-inflicted grouping against us, by removing the option to un-group. It's like they said: "Oh, you want to pack into Times Square? Fine, we'll pack you in so tight that you won't be able to leave, then we'll see how much you care about the Afghanis."