Demonstraties VS #5: Een jaar na de 1ste tweet.

quote:

"End the Fed" Pamphleteers Near Liberty Bell Handcuffed and Cited

Interesting video that went up on YouTube a couple of days ago (the date of the incident uncertain) of two pamphleteers handing out "End the Fed" flyers near the Liberty Bell---Oh the irony!--who are handcuffed on the ground and eventually ticketed by park police. Their flyers were also taken by the park police.

According to the female of the pair of pampheteers, the ticket was for "interfering with agency function" and "failure to obtain a permit."

My 2009 Reason feature on the "End the Fed" movement.

The full video, in which the videographer does a great job being a consistent thorn in the side of the huge pack of park police, and a bystander wonders what sort of lesson in liberty is being taught to her son, there by the Liberty Bell:

Mark and Barb Arrested For Exercising Free Speech Near Liberty Bell And Independence Hall

quote:

Occupy Oakland protesters awarded $1m over police violence during arrests | World news | guardian.co.uk

12 activists to split compensation, including $500,000 for one woman who suffered permanent hearing loss during protests

Victims of excessive police force at one of the most violent flashpoints of the Occupy protests have received a $1m compensation settlement.

The US district court in San Francisco made the award to a group of 12 protesters who complained of brutality during in confrontations with police in Oakland, California, in 2011.

The payouts come in the wake of criticism from independent experts who said the police department was under-resourced and ill-prepared to deal with the protests.

The lawsuits detailed how police reacted to the protesters when they tried to reclaim a camp which had been cleared earlier that day. Suzi Spangenberg and Sukay Sow said they were injured by flashbang grenades thrown by officers. Spangenberg, a 52-year-old seminarian was awarded $500,000 in compensation, while Sow, who suffered chemical burns to her foot, received $210,000.

Spangenberg said on Wednesday: "I was in the middle of telling OPD I loved them when they threw explosives at me. The loud explosion caused permanent hearing loss and unrelenting ringing in my ears. As a result, I can only sleep 2 hours at a time which has had a serious impact on my life, including adversely impacting my graduate school studies, when I graduate, and when I will be ordained.

"It is my hope that there will never be cause for this type of lawsuit again, and the city can instead focus its resources on supporting the marginalized and those most in need of resources, which is what we were protesting for."

Scott Campbell claimed he was filming a police line outside city hall on 3 November when officer Victor Garcia shot him in the groin with a bean bag fired from a 12-gauge shotgun.

He received $150,000. Other plaintiffs will receive between $20,000 and $75,000.

The protesters were represented by San Francisco attorney Rachel Lederman who said she was "pleased with the result".

She told the San Francisco Chronicle: "This is really a good decision by the city and the police department to take some responsibility for the fiasco of their ill-planned response to Occupy Oakland and to take responsibility by compensating some of the people who were the most seriously injured."

Brooke Anderson, 33, was awarded $20,000. She recounted her ordeal to the Guardian on Wednesday: "I was there on October 25 to support the protest and we were there for several hours singing and chanting. It was a really peaceful protest. Towards the end of the evening the police officers moved towards us with metal barriers and I was knocked to the ground. I tried to get up and leave but I was held by police officers who twisted my arm behind my back in a very painful position.

"I was crying and screaming and my friends asked police to let go and several of them were hit and arrested."

Supporters of the protesters created this video, which contains footage of Anderson's arrest:

Anderson was held for about 15 hours in a cell with 40 other women and one toilet. "It was so crowded we had to take turns sitting down," she said.

Lederman, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said the purpose of the lawsuit was to stop the Oakland police department's "dangerous and illegal repression of political protest and the city government's tolerance of repeated, pervasive police misconduct."

"The same officers shot longshoremen and protesters with so-called less lethal munitions during a peaceful antiwar picket at the Port of Oakland in 2003," she told the Guardian.

"At that time, the city and police also agreed to stop those practices and adopt a model policy for constitutional policing of demonstrations, but OPD chose to scrap all that and repeat the same mistakes as soon as they were faced with large protests."

Anderson said her brief experience of incarceration prompted her to donate part of her $20,000 payout to a charity that promotes prisoners' rights. She added: "I felt strongly the Occupy movement was a movement of the 99% who saw their families lose their jobs, their homes, healthcare and rights. You shouldn't get attacked and jailed for exercising your democratic right to protest. I have been back at the protests and I will continue to speak out but we fear these police actions are intended to deter us from exercising our right to protest."

Oakland police has come in for severe criticism in recent years. Former Baltimore police commissioner Thomas Frazier completed a report on their handling of the Occupy protests that painted a picture of an under-resourced department in disarray.

He was later appointed by a judge as a consultant to push through police reforms after it was revealed officers had framed and beaten drug suspects in one of the city's most impoverished neighbourhoods. After several years the court-mandated reforms had not been carried out so Frazier was given the task of overhauling the department.

"These settlements are an important victory for democracy," said Bobbie Stein, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys. "We are hopeful that with these settlements, and the reform process under the watch of the new compliance director, we will achieve a culture shift in the Oakland police department and end the brutalization and wrongful arrests of activists and people of color in Oakland.

"While we remain optimistic, we are mindful of the 10-year history of broken promises, and we will be watching carefully and ready to take further action if necessary."

Bron: www.guardian.co.uk

quote:

Redacted FBI Documents Show Plot to Kill Occupy Leaders If ‘Deemed Necessary’

quote:

“Did the FBI ignore, or even abet, a plot to assassinate Occupy Houston leaders?” asks investigative reporter Dave Lindorff at WhoWhatWhy. “What did the Feds know? Whom did they warn? And what did the Houston Police know?”

Bron: www.truthdig.com

quote:

Paul Kennedy of the National Lawyers Guild in Houston and an attorney for a number of Occupy Houston activists arrested during the protests said he did not hear of the sniper plot and expressed discontent with the FBI’s failure to share knowledge of the plan with the public. He believed that the bureau would have acted if a “right-wing group” plotted the assassinations, implying that the plan could have originated with law enforcement.

“[I]f it is something law enforcement was planning,” Kennedy said, “then nothing would have been done. It might seem hard to believe that a law enforcement agency would do such a thing, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”

quote:

Obama signs anti-protest Trespass Bill — RT USA

Only days after clearing Congress, US President Barack Obama signed his name to H.R. 347 on Thursday, officially making it a federal offense to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States.

RT broke the news last month that H.R. 347, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, had overwhelmingly passed the US House of Representatives after only three lawmakers voted against it. On Thursday this week, President Obama inked his name to the legislation and authorized the government to start enforcing a law that has many Americans concerned over how the bill could bury the rights to assemble and protest as guaranteed in the US Constitution.

Under H.R. 347, which has more commonly been labeled the Trespass Bill by Congress, knowingly entering a restricted area that is under the jurisdiction of Secret Service protection can garner an arrest. The law is actually only a slight change to earlier legislation that made it an offense to knowingly and willfully commit such a crime. Under the Trespass Bill’s latest language chance, however, someone could end up in law enforcement custody for entering an area that they don’t realize is Secret Service protected and “engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct” or “impede[s] or disrupt[s] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”

The Secret Service serves as the police that protects not just current and former American presidents, but are also dispatched to monitor special events of national significance, a category with a broad cast of qualifiers. In the past, sporting events, state funerals, inaugural addresses and NATO and G-8 Summits have been designated as such by the US Department of Homeland Security, the division that decides when and where the Secret Service are needed outside of their normal coverage.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund tells the International Business Times that the Trespass Bill in its current form “means it's easier to prosecute under 'knowingly,'” instead of both knowingly and willfully, “which is an issue because someone could knowingly enter a restricted but not necessarily realize they are committing a crime.” Speaking with IB Times, Verheyden-Hilliard tries to lay to rest claims that the Constitution will be crippled by the Trespass Bill, but acknowledges that it does indeed allow law enforcement to have added incentive to arrest protesters who could be causing a disturbance.

"[HR 347] has been described as a death knell for the First Amendment, but that isn't supported by the facts," Verheyden-Hilliard adds. "This has always been a bad law."

Gabe Rottman of the American Civil Liberties Union adds to IB Times, "Bottom line, it doesn't create any new violations of the law.” So far, however, it has raised awareness of the levels that the US government are willing to go to in order to make it harder to express ones’ self.

Under the act, protesting in areas covered by Secret Service could land a demonstrator behind bars, and the thing about the Secret Service (in case you couldn’t tell by their name), is that they don’t always make it clear where they are. You could even say that the service they provide, at times, is kept secret.

Presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are now officially covered under Secret Service protection, making it a federal offense to disrupt a campaign stop. That means whether it’s by way of a glitter bomb protest or causing a disturbance on the same Holiday Inn hotel floor that Santorum is staying in, doing such could cause a bit of a legal battle for the persons involved.

Although the G-8 Summit originally scheduled for Chicago this spring would have made much of the Windy City a protected area where crimes could easily be tacked on to arrested protesters, the event was moved this week to the presidential retreat at Camp David. In turn, many have suggested that the White House is only going out of their way to limit protesting rights. While a Chicago summit would have meant the Trespass Bill could have been enforced in the same area where thousands of demonstrators were expected to protest, moving the event to a heavily fortified rural location will instead deter protesters from likely coming close atto the meeting at all.

And before you forget, the president can now detain you for getting too close to his front yard, order your assassination if the country considers you a threat and lock you away for life with no charge if you’re alleged to be a terrorist. You, on the other hand, can’t yell obscenities at Newt Gingrich without risking arrest.

quote:

OWS Punches Walmart In the Gut By Leaking The Scripts Used to Keep Unions Out

quote:

The myth that Walmart doesn’t actively discourage employees from unionizing was dealt a blow today when Occupy Wall Street leaked the actual scripts Walmart uses to teach managers how to discourage employees from forming a union.

The Walmart company line has always been that the stores aren’t unionized, because employees don’t want a union. In 2011 Walmart’s Northeast Communications Director Steve Restivo said, “I think our associates, time and again, have recognized that it’s not a better deal for them. I think we’ve got a pretty good track record, and I can point to some examples, where our associates have turned down the opportunity to join a union, time and time again. I mean, the organizing effort is fairly aggressive. We have a clear and open line of communication with our associates. Our associates recognize that they appreciate that, and they know that the wages and benefits they receive are extremely competitive in the industry.”

The truth is that Walmart aggressively pressures and threatens employees to prevent them from unionizing. The proof of this behavior came today as Occupy Wall Street released the scripts that Walmart instructs their managers to use in order to keep the unions out.

quote:

Anonymous revealed to be under attack from both corporate and government spies

quote:

The attacks were accompanied by threatening emails sent anonymously to those persons JTRIG could identify. When the digital smoke cleared and the attacked servers recovered, chat room participation had dropped 80 percent according to the GCHQ's own documents. The attacks came immediately before a nation-wide crackdown on the Occupy movement, which was later found to be coordinated by a non-profit group called the Police Executive Research Foundation (PERF), which has a board comprised of big-city police chiefs in the United States and Great Britain. The temporary disruption of Anonymous appears to have been done in advance of a wave of brutality against protestors to keep hackivists from organizing online.

quote:

Occupy activist faces up to seven years in jail for 'assault' on police officer

quote:

An Occupy Wall Street activist is due to go on trial in New York on Monday, almost two years after she allegedly assaulted a police officer.

Cecily McMillan, 25, faces up to seven years in jail after being charged with assault in the second degree, a Class D felony in New York. Police allege that McMillan elbowed an officer in the head during a protest in lower Manhattan in March 2012.

McMillan’s attorney, Martin Stolar, told the Guardian that while there was “no question” the officer was struck below the eye by McMillan’s elbow, he planned to argue that no crime had been committed.

“The question for the jury is whether she intentionally assaulted him,” Stolar said. “We’re going to present evidence that indicates: No1 that she had no idea it was a police officer behind her and No2 that she reacted when someone grabbed her right breast.”

Stolar said it was being grabbed from behind that prompted McMillan to throw the elbow.

“That does not constitute a crime. That constitutes a bit of over-policing and an accident as a result of that.”

Protesters gathered at Zuccotti Park on 17 March 2012, to mark six months since the start of the Occupy protests. More than 70 people were arrested as demonstrators attempted to “reclaim” the space, which had served as a hub for Occupy Wall Street until the encampment was evicted in November 2011.

Although McMillan was active in Occupy Wall Street, Stolar said she was not part of the demonstration on 17 March.

“On that particular night she happened to be meeting friends,” he said. “By the time she got down [to Zuccotti Park] to meet her friends the police had decided to clear the park, so she was getting out of the park just like she had ordered everybody else to do.”

McMillan, a student at the New School and a union organiser, has declined to discuss the case while it is ongoing. At the time of the incident, reports suggested she was handled roughly during her arrest. In the days following she told the media she had suffered bruising and had been hospitalised.

“I am innocent of any wrongdoing, and confident I will be vindicated,” McMillan said in a statement in March 2012. She said she had a “long-standing personal commitment to non-violence”.

“She’s very upset about the fact she’s been living behind the eight-ball on this for two years,” Stolar said. “It’s anxiety of living under the cloud of being falsely accused and looking at the prospect of seven years in jail. That doesn’t make anybody happy.”

The case was due to begin on Thursday 6 February, but was postponed while a judge was appointed. Jury selection is due to begin on Monday.

quote:

Inequality After Occupy

When the media became aware of the protest centered at Wall Street during the fall of 2011, a predictable line of questioning immediately appeared - whatever in the world are they protesting? Of course, everyone who came near Zuccotti Park knew exactly why the protesters were there. Given the scale of the economic crisis, Main Street's bailout of Wall Street, and ongoing oligarchy, the "only surprise [was that it took] so long for the citizenry to take to these particular streets." The graphic polarization of their chant - "We Are the 99%" - made it all the more clear.

In the years since the destruction of the occupations, this critique of inequality has only broadened and deepened in the U.S. Occupy should claim credit for getting it on the map, while political iterations old and new have been keeping it there. Today, the fight against inequality is taking greater institutional shape, and seemingly exerting more leverage, in places inspired by Occupy but moving beyond its initial tactics.
Studying Occupy Wall Street in New York from its inception and through 2012, my colleagues and I traced the "enduring impact" of OWS through various measures, including the ongoing movement participation of core participants and the proliferation of "Occupy after Occupy" efforts - what journalist Nathan Schneider described as a "productively subdivided movement of movements."

Joining most observers, we noted that Occupy's impact was most easily traced in the extent to which it had shifted the discourse in the United States. "Income inequality" was suddenly in the headlines. We included a graph that showed how frequently the phrase was invoked by the media pre-, during, and post-Occupy. We found that news mentions of "income inequality" rose dramatically with the outset of Occupy, and in the aftermath remained substantially higher through the end of 2012 (up about a third from pre-Occupy levels).

I ran the numbers again this week, and I have to admit I was surprised by the results.

As we'd seen before, in the year after Occupy's peak, the numbers stayed higher: 30-50 percent of the pre-Occupy discussion. But beginning in the fall of 2013, the numbers reached Occupy levels again, and this time rising to over 2,000 mentions of the phrase "income inequality" in December 2013 - over 50 percent more than Occupy's peak.

Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised to see this rise. The occupations have gone away, but neither the crisis nor the resistance has disappeared. Low-wage and precarious workers are at the forefront of the fights today, and they are keeping inequality in the spotlight. This past fall and winter we've seen fast food strikes and the "Fight for $15"; other minimum wage fights around the country; Walmart workers demanding $25,000 a year; university adjuncts organizing and striking. Workers, unionists and Occupy veterans, through traditional labor and "alt-labor" organizations are elevating the fight and pushing for concrete change. Tailing these developments, figures from President Obama and Gap Inc. are now simultaneously pushing for (highly inadequate) wage increases.

Media attention to inequality reflects recent electoral shifts as well. Mayors who ran left were decisively elected in New York, Seattle, and Boston. (Occupations existed all over the country, but it would be interesting to probe the relationship between those Occupations and new electoral outcomes. Certainly, these three cities were home to sustained and popular occupations in fall 2011.) Labor's candidates and initiatives did well overall, in the 2013 local election cycle; and in Seattle, Occupy activist and socialist Kshama Sawant was elected to the City Council. While many of the core Occupy activists eschewed electoral politics, we nevertheless see the outlines of their critique emerge in race after race.

As important as Occupy's inspiration has been as the carrot encouraging these new movements and electoral shifts, the ongoing crisis that working people are experiencing and the desperate straits that unions and other progressives find themselves in provide the stick. Labor, in particular, has been working hard to shift course for many years. Occupy's eruption was a major shot in the arm, but many of the campaigns we see today have their roots pre-Occupy.

However, the energy and audacity in today's movements are fueled in part by the experience of Occupy (and the organizers who started the occupations and emerged from them). Direct action and prefigurative practices inform many of the efforts that contribute to today's groundswell, such as the strikes and walkouts. But unions are also exploring worker cooperatives, community groups and activists are forestalling foreclosures through occupations, and activists are tying collective student debt refusal to the demand for free higher education.

The Occupy activists we spoke with two years ago echoed each other, saying that the movement needs to "take the long view" and remember that change doesn't happen overnight. I haven't spoken with enough of those activists today to know their assessment of the fights they see and are participating in today. They are not out there, all day, all week, occupying Wall Street - and it wasn't enough when they were. The scale of necessary social transformation remains daunting, and questions of both strategy and power loom large.

But all day, and all week, more people are talking about inequality and directly fighting against it. And workplace by workplace, franchise by franchise, ordinance by ordinance, council member by council member, co-op by co-op, the struggle continues.

_{[Penny Lewis is an Assistant Professor at the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, School of Professional Studies, CUNY. She is also the author of Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks, The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory.]}

quote:

The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it

The Bank of England's dose of honesty throws the theoretical basis for austerity out the window

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning".

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

quote:

Trial of Occupy activist struggles to find jurors impartial to protest movement

• Series of potential jurors voice opposition to Occupy Wall Street
• Cecily McMillan, 25, faces seven years in prison for assault

It is the most important question being asked of dozens of New Yorkers lined up as potential jurors for the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street activist accused of assaulting a police officer: what do you think of her protest movement?

Unfortunately for those keen on the swift procession of justice, a series of Manhattan residents who presented themselves at the criminal courthouse this week declared that they strongly disagreed with it – and could not promise to be impartial about one of its members.

“I’m involved in Wall Street things. I’m on the Wall Street side, not their side,” George Yih, one of a group of prospective jurors whose names were plucked from a tombola by the clerk, said under questioning from Judge Ronald Zweibel on Wednesday. “They can protest all they want, but they can’t brainwash my mind.”

Yih was removed from a shortlist for the panel that will decide if McMillan, 25, assaulted Officer Grantley Bovell by striking him with her arm at Zuccotti Park in March 2012. McMillan denies the felony charge and says that she was reacting to having one of her breasts grabbed from behind. She faces up to seven years in prison if convicted.

But Yih’s remarks were only the first in a succession of criticisms against the anti-capitalist movement made throughout the day by other would-be jurors. Each said that he or she had ties to a finance industry that holds about one in nine jobs in New York City and pays more than a third of the total wages earned annually in Manhattan.

And as one after the other was rejected – either by McMillan’s attorneys, state prosecutors, or the judge – a jury selection process that the defence had hoped would be completed in one day reached the end of a second with only seven of the 12 jurors’ seats filled.

“For 20 years, my occupation has been, in some fashion, on Wall Street,” said Jason McLean, who said he was an equity trader living in Murray Hill with his wife, who was also an equity trader. “Everything I believe – my morals – are kind of the antithesis of what they represent.” He concluded: “I don’t know that I could be completely objective.”

“I like to think of myself as fair,” Alan Moore, who said his wife worked on Wall Street as a bond strategist for Credit Suisse, told the judge. “But in terms of Occupy Wall Street in general, I would give less credibility to that group than average.” Even to a witness in court? “Yeah,” said Moore. “They seem to be people moving a little outside regular social norms and regular behaviour. Therefore I don’t give them the same level of respect as people who follow the line.”

Requests by McMillan’s attorneys to exclude both McLean and Moore from the jury were granted by the judge, despite being challenged by Erin Choi and Shanda Strain, the assistant district attorneys representing New York. Even they, however, conceded that Mary Malone – an Upper East Side resident who previously worked for a bond fund and said: “I have really strong feelings about Occupy Wall Street and the people involved” – and Peter Kaled, a corporate finance worker from the Upper West Side who said that one of his friends had policed Zuccotti Park at the height of the protests, should not make the cut.

However, as they prepared to bring a case that will also test the credibility of officers whose conduct while arresting dozens of protesters on that March evening two years ago attracted sharp criticism from civil liberties groups, the pair of state prosecutors had their own reasons for rejecting prospective jurors.

They had an African American man excluded after he said that a grievance relating to a past run-in with the NYPD could affect his view of the officers expected to testify against McMillan. Patrick Grigsby, an Upper West Side actuary, was similarly banished after expressing mistrust of Bovell when informed that the cop was disciplined by bosses for having five parking and speeding tickets fixed as part of the so-called “Bronx ticketing scandal” of 2011.

McMillan’s lawyers said after the trial was adjourned until Friday that they remained confident the court would “find people that fit the profile” of impartial peers. “We’ve seen people saying they can’t be fair on Occupy, and we’ve seen people who say they can’t be fair on the cops,” Martin Stolar, her lead attorney, said outside court. “A surprising number of people are actually willing to say that they can’t be fair,” said Rebecca Heinegg, his co-counsel.

A fresh air of optimism had blown into the 11th-floor courtroom with the day’s final pool of 60 potential jurors an hour earlier. Yet when Zweibel asked if any of them thought that they could not be “fair and impartial” in considering the trial at hand, a young woman in the second row instantly threw up an arm and was summoned to a sidebar meeting with the judge and attorneys. “I worked at Deutsche Bank,” she could be heard whispering, before being excused.

quote:

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups , and Average Citizens

quote:

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics – which can be characterized
as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of
interest group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism – offers different predictions about which sets of actors havehow much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors,
but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against
each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business
interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens
and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide
substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

quote:

City Will Pay $55,000 To Settle Case of Occupy Livestreamer Josh Boss, Tackled By High-Ranking NYPD Chief

Occupy Wall Street is still proving expensive for the city of New York, who keep having pay out large sums of money to Occupy protesters who were over-enthusiastically arrested by the NYPD. In April 2013, the city paid $365,000 to settle claims over the destruction of the OWS library, and civil rights attorney Wylie Stecklow of Stecklow Cohen & Thompson says he's settled six or seven other Occupiers' claims for unlawful arrests. The latest came just yesterday, when the city agreed to pay $55,000 in the case of Josh Boss, who was livestreaming a December 2011 march when he was thrown to the ground and kneed by Chief Thomas Purtell, then the commanding officer of the Manhattan South Patrol Division, which oversees all marches and protests in the city.

"Purtell is the most senior officer we've ever seen in a physical unlawful arrest," Stecklow tells the Voice. "He got hands on."

Boss was filming the march on the evening of December 17, 2011. As the marchers crossed the street, so did he, camera in hand. Footage of the incident shows that he was in a crosswalk when Purtell came running at him, flung him to the ground, and put his knee on Boss's chest. "Kick his ass, Tom!" another officer can be heard saying in the background.

The video shows Boss lying motionless for the duration of the arrest. Nontheless, Purtell tells him, "Don't resist."

"I'm not resisting anything! I was trying to cross the street." Boss replies. And then, a moment later, "Is that knee on my face really necessary, officer?"

"Oh, I kinda think it is," Purtell replies.

Stecklow's firm released two video segments showing the arrest from various angles:

Chief Purtell Brutal Arrest of OWS Livestreamer Josh Boss

OWS Livestreamer Josh Boss brutally arrested by Chief Purtell

Boss was cuffed with two pairs of plastic ziptie handcuffs. His attorneys say his backpack, filled with video equipment, rested heavily on the double cuffs, cutting off his circulation. (Audio from the video segments shows that after he was arrested, another officer eventually loosened his cuffs, remarking, "His hands are turning blue.") He was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and held for five hours. The charges were eventually dropped, and he sued the NYPD for false arrest, excessive force, and nerve damage to his wrists.

Purtell has denied making an overly brutal arrest. The video released by Stecklow shows a later interview with the officer, evidently conducted by someone with the law firm. "You don't know what you're talking about. He was not struck in the face," Purtell says. "He was not injured. What's perceived on the video is not what happened."

Stecklow says that the arrest was disturbing not just for its brutality, but because of the presence of at least 20 younger officers around Purtell: "This is what we've seen time and time again. They're training the junior officers. What are they learning? When a guy is laying prone on the floor, yell, 'Stop resisting!' so you have reason to use force and make a bad arrest."

The attorney adds that these settlements are "unfortunate," in that they come out of taxpayer money. "It falls on all of us taxpayers instead of the individual officers. I'm not happy about that," he says. "I believe that if even ten percent of the payout money came out of the police pension fund, there'd be a sharp decline in the number of these type of incidents." The same would be true, he adds, if protesters were allowed to sue the officers who witnessed their unlawful or brutal arrests but did not intervene.

"The majority of police officers are good," Stecklow says. "They want to help. And if we put pressure on the majority to intervene, again, we can start to reduce these kinds of incidents."

Purtell was once demoted in 2003, after he led a mistaken raid on a woman's apartment. The woman, 57-year-old Albert Spruill, died after a concussion grenade was thrown into her home by police. According to a New York Times report, the Chief Medical Examiner ruled that Spruill "died from the stress and fear caused by the detonation of the concussion grenade and from being handcuffed."

Although Purtell was reassigned to the Housing Bureau for a time, he worked his way up to Manhattan South, and has received two promotions since the Josh Boss arrest. He's now head of the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau. A Times story from February claims that he's being considered for yet another promotion, to replace either the current chief of detectives or the head of the Internal Affairs Bureau.

quote:

Occupy Wall Street activist found guilty of assaulting police officer

quote:

Cecily McMillan was on Monday afternoon found guilty of deliberately elbowing Officer Grantley Bovell in the face in March 2012. After a trial lasting more than four weeks, the jury of eight women and four men reached their verdict in about three hours.

Judge Ronald Zweibel ordered that McMillan, 25, a graduate student at the New School, be detained. He rejected a request from her lawyers for bail.

quote:

McMillan's conviction is the most serious of the dozens against members of the protest movement, which sprung up in the autumn of 2011. Hers is believed to be the last of more than 2,600 prosecutions brought against members of the movement, most of which were dismissed or dropped.

quote:

Protesters set up camp at net neutrality rally outside FCC headquarters

Occupy-style protest against proposed 'open internet' rules that protesters say will give control of the web to major corporations

Protesters set up camp outside the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) on Wednesday to fight plans they say will create a two-tier internet and hand control of the web to major corporations.

The rally – reminiscent of the Occupy-style rallies that started in 2011 – started outside the FCC’s Washington headquarters at noon with protesters from Fight For the Future, Popular Resistance and others unfurling banners reading “Save the Internet”.

Protesters then announced they intend to camp out outside the FCC until 15 May when the regulator is expected to announce new rules for the internet that will formalise plans for higher speed internet for those able to pay for it. On Wednesday Google, Facebook and Amazon joined around 100 other technology companies in signing a letter to the FCC rejecting "individualised bargaining and discrimination" for internet traffic.

"[The FCC must] take the necessary steps to ensure that the internet remains an open platform for speech and commerce," the letter says.

Public interest groups have become increasingly concerned that the new rules will end “net neutrality” – the concept that all internet traffic should be treated equally on the web. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has defended his plans for what he calls the “open internet”.

The future of net neutrality has effectively been in limbo since a federal court struck down most of the FCC’s open internet order in January in a case brought by Verizon. The loss paved the way for fast lanes that have the major broadband providers have lobbied hard for, and for which they plan to charge extra to their biggest users.

"We don’t have armies of paid lobbyists at our disposal but we can not let the freedom of the internet be hijacked by giant monopolies,” said Evan Greer of Fight For The Future.

More than a million people have now signed petitions to the FCC calling for them to enshrine net neutrality rules and prevent a tiered system.

A group of 86 organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Free Press and Reddit, are asking the FCC to reclassify broadband companies as "telecommunication services", which would give the commission the authority to impose net neutrality rules on them.

Wheeler has said the FCC’s new rules will protect net neutrality.

“The Internet will remain like it is today, an open pathway,” Wheeler wrote in a FCC blogpost in April. “If a broadband provider (ISP) acts in a manner that keeps users from effectively taking advantage of that pathway then it should be a violation of the Open Internet rules.”

Critics charge, however, that cable firms will successfully challenge any new rules to tie their hands unless the FCC’s regulatory control over them is increased and point out cable firms have already effectively created a two-tier system. After the FCC lost to Verizon in January, a tiered system has already started to emerge with Netflix and others striking deals for a faster service with cable firms.

“The internet is as necessary to our society as shelter and water, people should have equal access to it,” said Greer. “We have seen an unbelievable amount of support from people since these new rules emerged. It may seem technical but it affects everyone’s life and people are not going to just stand by and let this happen.”

quote:

http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/save-internet/

We're camping out day and night on the FCC's doorstep to defend net neutrality and keep the Internet free from discrimination and "slow lanes"

The FCC is proposing new rules that will be great for Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, but terrible for the rest of us. This agency has been surrounded by corporate lobbyists for too long. Help us surround FCC headquarters with people who love the Internet and want to keep it open.

quote:

Join us at the FCC!

445 12th St SW, Washington, DC

We have food, coffee, and wi-fi

All day, all night, until May 15

quote:

In the Breaking Bad city, trust in the trigger-happy police has broken down

Albuquerque's people are struggling with poverty, mental illness and drugs – and have had enough of a police force that has killed 25 in four years

The bloodstains have faded but bullet holes remain etched in the peach-coloured wall where Mary Hawkes, a troubled 19-year-old, died in a blast of gunfire. Two crosses, a teddy bear, some candles, plastic flowers and polystyrene cups – she liked her soda – formed an improvised shrine on the pavement this week.

A poster showed an image of her hugging a dog, and messages read: "RIP Mary. God bless U and your family"; "Never forgotten"; "She was never unloved"; and "Beautiful girl lost. Don't shoot to kill." Municipal workers have painted over other messages, which accused the Albuquerque police department of murder.

The killing happened at 5.50am on 21 April. The sun had yet to rise over the Sandia mountains – this city on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert was still in darkness. Hawkes was pounding down Zuni Street, pursued by officers who suspected her of earlier stealing a truck.

"I heard sirens. I thought it was an ambulance," said Maria Gonzalez, 45, who lives in a trailer on the other side of the wall. "Then I heard shots. I told my husband to duck. We didn't know what was happening."

According to police, Hawkes stopped and pointed a handgun at an officer who was closing in on foot. He fired, killing her on the spot. Yellow tape sealed the scene, little yellow cones marked the bullet casings, a yellow sheet covered the corpse and Mary Hawkes officially became the 24th person shot dead by the APD since 2010. This week a swat team killed Armand Martin, a 50-year-old US Air Force veteran, after a standoff at his home. He became number 25.

For a city with a population of 555,000 it is a remarkable figure, one that is fanning fears that the police have become a militarised, out-of-control cross between Robocop and Dirty Harry. In a chaotic civic revolt last week, protesters briefly seized city hall and attempted a citizens' arrest of the police chief.

"When are they going to quit killing people and start taking them into custody?" said one of the protesters, Ken Ellis, whose son, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, was gunned down in 2010. "They have to address this issue. They can't sweep it under the rug anymore."

The hit TV series Breaking Bad depicted Albuquerque, a usually sleepy city dwarfed by the vast New Mexico sky, as home to fictitious meth-fuelled drug wars. Lethal police violence, however, is real. No officer has been prosecuted for unlawful killing, yet the city has paid $24m in legal settlements to victims' relatives.

Last month the US department of justice issued a 46-page report that detailed a pattern of excessive force, including a policy of shooting at moving vehicles to disable them, and officers being allowed to use personal weapons instead of standard-issue firearms. "Officers see the guns as status symbols," it said. "APD personnel we interviewed indicated that this fondness for powerful weapons illustrates the aggressive culture."

Concern about police heavy-handedness is spreading. Elsewhere in New Mexico this week state police killed Arcenio Lujan, 48, outside his home after he allegedly pointed a rifle. Dozens marched on police headquarters in the Texas town of Hearne after an officer shot dead a 93-year-old woman, Pearlie Golden, who allegedly brandished a gun. Las Vegas and Los Angeles have also been rocked by anger at police shootings.

Police and sheriff departments in towns and hamlets from Iowa to Connecticut have fuelled anxiety by snapping up the Pentagon's offer of mine-resistant ambush-protected armoured personnel vehicles, behemoths known as MRAPs, back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Albuquerque was leading the backlash even before activists chased councillors from the city chamber in Monday's fleeting "coup d'etat", a simmering campaign centred in the aptly nicknamed War Zone. Only a few miles from the shiny offices, hotels and cafes of downtown, where tourists munch Breaking Bad-themed doughnuts with blue icing, is a landscape of trailer parks, fast-food joints, taco stands, pawn shops, gas stations, peeling paint and bleached facades. Stand at a bus stop long enough and you will be asked for cigarettes and change, or offered drugs and knock-off clothing. The broken teeth speak volumes about poverty. The nickname is a product of decades of domestic beatings, gang feuds and drunken brawls.

In a fit of Orwellian marketing in 2009, the city renamed this sprawl of Latinos, Asians and other ethnic minorities the "international district". The name didn't stick. A year later locals noticed that police, never gentle, were becoming increasingly lethal. Confrontations that in the past might have ended in handcuffs instead ended with municipal tableaux of death: yellow crime scene tape, cones and sheets.

"My son was unarmed. They were watching him. They didn't give him a chance," said Mike Gomez, whose son Alan, 22, was shot in the doorway of his brother's home in May 2011. "When they take away a family member it leaves a hole in your heart. All you have left is the past." Police said they thought he was armed and holding hostages. The city accepted no liability but paid the family about $900,000 in a settlement.

There are no official figures but, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, three-quarters of those shot by the APD had psychological problems. Many were homeless, or living on the margins.

"Every time I see them I get on the floor. I'm scared of them," said Michael Clarke, 48, who lives at the Albuquerque Rescue Mission, a shelter. "They're taking people out left, right and centre over stupid stuff. They see a shining pin, they shoot."

The APD did not respond to an interview request. A policeman at a Family Dollar grocery store, which had just been robbed, shook his head when approached. "No way, bro. All this stuff you guys in the media are giving us – no way can I talk."

Some locals praised the police for keeping a semblance of order in a fraught environment. "It's a tough job. A lot of these people have mental and addiction problems. They're very unpredictable," said one shelter worker, who declined to be named.

New Mexico is the second-poorest state in the US, according to census figures, and hovers at or near the bottom for jobs, nutrition and healthcare. Fatalities from drug overdoses are twice the national average. Many officers have resigned from the police over low morale and pay cuts, and their replacements, critics say, are not vetted or trained properly. They also say police videos of shootings – taken from cameras on lapels or helmets – were often incomplete or absent.

In 2011, detective Byron "Trey" Economidy prompted an outcry after shooting Jacob Mitschelen in the back after stopping him for a traffic offence. Reporters discovered that he listed his occupation on Facebook as "human waste disposal". He was suspended for four days. Mitschelen's family accepted a settlement of $300,000.

On it went, a cycle of killing, protest and payout, with little response from the Police Oversight Commission, city council or mayor. "We had a breakdown in the checks and balances. The establishment turned its head away," said Joe Monahan, an Albuquerque-based political blogger.

After the department of justice began investigating in 2012, however, that began to change. In February police chief Ray Schultz was replaced by a respected outsider, Gorden Eden. After the DOJ report, the APD banned the use of personal guns and the practice of shooting to disable moving cars. Other reforms are expected.

The changes have not placated activists, who stepped up their campaign since a video surfaced in March showing police pumping bullets into James Boyd, a mentally ill homeless man. And on Monday activists attempted the symbolic arrest of Eden and occupied councillors' seats. "A symbolic coup d'etat", Andres Valdes, a veteran activist, said with satisfaction.

At a tense but more orderly session on Thursday, activists took turns to speak from the podium, then turned their backs on the councillors and raised fists in silent protest. Security guards and police escorted them out as one broke into the civil rights song Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round. Leading the protest, Ellis displayed a photograph of his late son, Kenneth, who had held a gun to his own head during a standoff with police which came to an end when a detective shot him in the neck.

One councillor, Rey Garduño, issued something close to a mea culpa. "For four years they have been telling us to act and we have done nothing," he told colleagues. Turning to Ellis, he added: "I'm sorry this has happened to you."

quote:

Operation American Spring: Ret. Colonel Creates March On Washington, May 16, 2014

Harry Riley, COL, Ret. is calling upon millions of patriots to march upon Washington D.C. to remove Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder from Office.

He has termed it “OPERATION AMERICAN SPRING – Beginning Of Tyranny Housecleaning” and it’s due to commence May 16, 2014.

There are 3 primary phases to the plan:

Phase 1 – Field millions, as many as ten million, patriots to assemble in a peaceful, non-violent, physically unarmed

Phase 2 – At least one million of the assembled 10 million to stay in D.C. as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office.

Phase 3 – Politicians with the principles of a West; Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson, Lee, DeMint, Paul, Gov Walker, Sessions, Gowdy, Jordan, to comprise a tribunal to convene investigations and recommend appropriate charges against politicians and government employees who have violated the Constitution

God bless Colonel Riley and all patriots in this historic effort to restore our country!

One can easily see why this administration fears and loathes veterans. It’s patriots like Colonel Riley that can undo their tyrannical agenda.

Let’s make 2014 the year we take our country back!

quote:

Occupy activist Cecily McMillan sentenced to three months in prison

McMillan to also serve five years' probation for deliberately elbowing a New York police officer at a protest in 2012

An Occupy Wall Street activist has been sentenced to three months in prison for assaulting a police officer as he led her out of a protest.

Cecily McMillan, who had been facing a maximum sentence of seven years, was told on Monday morning by Judge Ronald Zweibel that she "must take responsibility for her conduct".

"A civilised society must not allow an assault to be committed under the guise of civil disobedience," said Zweibel at Manhattan criminal court. However, he added: "The court finds that a lengthy sentence would not serve the interests of justice in this case."

McMillan, 25, received a three-month sentence to be followed by community service and five years of probation. Having been remanded at Riker's Island jail for the past two weeks, she will receive credit for time served.

McMillan was earlier this month found guilty of deliberately elbowing Officer Grantley Bovell in the face at Manhattan's Zuccotti Park in March 2012.

Following her conviction, nine of the 12 jurors in her trial wrote to Zweibel, asking him not to send her to prison and to show her leniency. Their letter was followed by similar requests from members of the New York city council and prominent pop musicians. Two members of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk activist group, visited McMillan at Rikers and also wrote to the judge.

McMillan's support team also delivered a petition to Zweibel and Cyrus Vance, the district attorney, bearing what they said were 43,000 names of other people asking that she not be sent to prison.