Occupy

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Thats not surprising either. Conservatives have always used violent rhetoric as if they are sociopaths and that law is just a suggestion when it applies to them.

That and ive already seen conservatives on the internet saying that for about a month now.

[I_Kicked_Kennedy]

It's possible that I'm confusing festivals, Trip, or maybe even the band involved, but, the mud slinging bit would have probably been in 94 or 95, so maybe it was Lollapalooza. I'm also not sure about the Woodstock thing now if it was in 99, as I was 18 then. Unless the idea had been floated around in previous years.

pretty sure the mud slinging was the Green Day performance at Woodstock 99 - I remember watching it on TV in high school

oh thank god for youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h275pulfwHE

Not to be that guy, Cram, but mud throwing was Woodstock '94 in Saugerties (or however you spell it). Woodstock 99 was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, it was twenty minutes from my house, and we didn't throw mud.

We burned shit down and got the riot police called on us.

Too bad we were listening to nu-metal for much of the weekend. It would probably be more notable if we had an awesome soundtrack like Woodstock '69.

To be fair, that should have been a lesson to the capitalists... you get enough of us together, charge $150 for tickets, $5 for beer, $4 for soda (this is 12 years ago, mind you), $12 for personal pan pizza, slap logos* on every damn thing you see...

Shit|Will|Catch|Fire

Instead, boomers decided Gen whY wasn't the children they wanted, and they decided to cash in the metaphorical 401k and leave us no inheritance whatsoever. Lessons learned... we didn't burn enough shit.

_{*[Oracle even sponsored a pacifier distribution at the nightly raves (George Clinton's b'day). They may not want to admit to it today, but I still got it in my closet]}

[Cramulus]

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/11/occupy_la_arrested.php

Occupy LA got a run for its money but is still intact. The cops went through underground tunnels and emerged in the middle of the protest. Surprisingly, the LAPD were on their best behavior. The protest reconvened elsewhere in LA.

This whole scene sounds incredible, and I hope somebody compiles the videos of it.



There's a bit of talk about the need for Occupy 2.0 ... "what to do next"

Sixty days of camping felt like enough. It was, in some ways, time to move on: Part-time Occupiers felt that two months of camping -- no matter how well-organized, no matter how many great lectures and workshops and food deliveries took place -- was enough. "This is not the time of Socrates, we can't just listen to talking under shady trees forever," one Occupier tells me.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

You just knew Moore was going to stick his oar in.  Ask yourself this...when was the last time Moore was involved in a successful political campaign or protest group?

You really wanna follow his advice?

I was wracking my brains to think of recent protests in the united states that were successful by some standard, and I couldn't think of any. I'm wondering what the success rate is for nonviolent protests, and if anybody has done a proper analysis of what tactics were used &c.

Gut feeling is that the Situationist techniques stopped working as intended sometime prior to 1970 and nobody took notice.

Critical Mass has been effective in some places in addressing very specific, very local policies. But as to winning public sentiment on a larger scale, Tour De Fat has been infinitely more effective.

I had to look up both of those things. Wikipedia tells me that they are bicycling things, and that Tour De Fat is run by a beer company. You will need to tell me how they relate to protesting, situationist techniques, and success. My cursory attempts at research have not yielded any information about that.

[Cramulus]

Critical Mass combats the hegemonic assumption that roads are for people that drive cars, and that other modes of transportation better get the fuck out of the way.


Most of our road/highway system was built during the New Deal, when Roosevelt was trying to package car ownership as part of the American Dream. Lots of places are built on the assumption that everybody drives everywhere.

And it gets carried too far at times. I mean, if you only live a few miles from your job, you SHOULD be able to bike there, right? But lots of cities don't have bike lanes or anything like that. If you take your bike to work, people are honking at you. Critical Mass establishes - in a very visual way - that people still ride bikes, and there IS a demand for bike infrastructure.

[Precious Moments Zalgo]

_{*[Oracle even sponsored a pacifier distribution at the nightly raves (George Clinton's b'day). They may not want to admit to it today, but I still got it in my closet]}

Do you mind posting a picture of it, because I totally want to see this thing.

PMZ,
Oracle worker-drone.

[Kai]

Thats not surprising either. Conservatives have always used violent rhetoric as if they are sociopaths and that law is just a suggestion when it applies to them.

That and ive already seen conservatives on the internet saying that for about a month now.

As IF they are sociopaths?

No, I get you. Calls for violence do not indicate sociopathy. Tribalism, yes, and the lack of empathy for 'them' that comes with tribalism, but not all conservatives can be sociopaths...right? RIGHT?

[Laughin Jude]

Re: last page:

I've made a cursory argument before that there's probably a mini-generation between Generation X and the Millennials. There's more detail at that link, but one of the big things is that people around my own age (I was born in 1981, but I think it goes for a few years in either direction... think currently late-20's to maybe mid-30-ish) don't fit into Gen X culturally in part because we didn't spend our formative teenage years in constant fear of being nuked (the USSR collapsed when I was 10) and aren't generally apathetic, materialistic self-obsessed shitheads, but at the same time we were outside playing and riding our bikes in places we probably shouldn't without helicopter parents constantly hovering over us. We were latchkey kids and didn't get participation trophies for everything we did, but the internet didn't become a huge thing until around the time we were graduating high school, so we mostly matured without that as an influence on us (and man does that separate us from the Millennials). We had neither Reaganomics nor cell phones. We're arguably a lost mini-generation that grew up on the cusp of massive social change after the end of the Cold War but before 9/11 and e-everything, and we kind of get get lost in between the two major, recognized niches.

[Telarus]

Agreed. I fit in there too.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Thats not surprising either. Conservatives have always used violent rhetoric as if they are sociopaths and that law is just a suggestion when it applies to them.

That and ive already seen conservatives on the internet saying that for about a month now.

As IF they are sociopaths?

No, I get you. Calls for violence do not indicate sociopathy. Tribalism, yes, and the lack of empathy for 'them' that comes with tribalism, but not all conservatives can be sociopaths...right? RIGHT?

I really don't get conservatives sometimes. They're everything that they hate, but somehow it's ok when they do it because somehow that won't lead to a breakdown of order, rights, security or liberty. A good lot of them are fucking blackshirts itching to get out there and bash some commies heads in.

Actually, I might start likening them to blackshirts when possible.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Laughing Jude-

I'm with you for the most part, but I remember taking an interest in the changes in Eastern Europe as it was happening and being relieved that I probably wasn't going to get nuked. I was a weird 6-10 year old, and was always kind of drawn to/horrified by catastrophic end of civilization scenarios. So, add climate change, epidemics and the Book of Revelation on my list of childhood fears too.

But other than that, yeah. I didn't end up using the internet until I was probably 16, and I didn't even bother with a cell phone until I was 24. Parental presence was somewhat minimized for various reasons, etc.

[Triple Zero]

Re: last page:

I've made a cursory argument before that there's probably a mini-generation between Generation X and the Millennials. There's more detail at that link, but one of the big things is that people around my own age (I was born in 1981, but I think it goes for a few years in either direction... think currently late-20's to maybe mid-30-ish) don't fit into Gen X culturally in part because we didn't spend our formative teenage years in constant fear of being nuked (the USSR collapsed when I was 10) and aren't generally apathetic, materialistic self-obsessed shitheads, but at the same time we were outside playing and riding our bikes in places we probably shouldn't without helicopter parents constantly hovering over us. We were latchkey kids and didn't get participation trophies for everything we did, but the internet didn't become a huge thing until around the time we were graduating high school, so we mostly matured without that as an influence on us (and man does that separate us from the Millennials). We had neither Reaganomics nor cell phones. We're arguably a lost mini-generation that grew up on the cusp of massive social change after the end of the Cold War but before 9/11 and e-everything, and we kind of get get lost in between the two major, recognized niches.

That would make a lot of sense because I'm 1980 and the descriptions of GenX and GenY always make me feel a littlebit of both and a littlebit of neither.

But I also believe it's a lot of horoscope-like bullcrap generic descriptions, too.

[Jenne]

I'm 1973 and feel like most of Gen X doesn't apply, but I think that's just how it goes with the general descriptors.  I think folks like mine who were born in '55 but have sibs that were born in the 60's also feel that same "intermediate" thing about the generation "gap."  There has to be overlap as the generations feed into each other.

[Cain]

I'm with Trip.  Horoscope-y bullshit, for the most part, bolstered by wank sociology.

Anyway, back to the actual topic of the thread, which is the Occupy movement.  Yasha Levine, an editor for the eXiled was present at the OLA protests, and unlucky enough to get arrested.  He describes what happened next:

While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media. And the disgraceful truth is that a lot of the abuse was police sadism, pure and simple:

* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.

* The bus that I was shoved into didn't move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn't lift a finger.

* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That's because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that's the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.

* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven't recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.

* One seriously injured protester, who had been shot with a shotgun beanbag round and had an oozing bloody welt the size of a grapefruit just above his elbow, was denied medical attention for five hours. Another young guy, who complained that he thought his arm had been broken, was not given medical attention for at least as long. Instead, he spent the entire pre-booking procedure handcuffed to a wall, completely spaced out and staring blankly into space like he was in shock.

* An Occupy LA demonstrator in his 50s who was in my cell block in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center told us all about when a police officer forced him to take a shit with his hands handcuffed behind his back, which made pulling down his pants and sitting down on the toilet extremely difficult and awkward. And he had to do this in sight of female police officers, all of which made him feel extremely ashamed, to say the least.

* There were two vegetarians and one vegan in my cell. When I left jail around 1:30 pm, they still had not been given food, despite the fact that they were constantly being promised that it would come.

* There were 292 people arrested at Occupy LA. About 75 of them have been released or have gotten out on bail, according the National Lawyers Guild. Most are still inside, slapped with $5,000 to $10,000 bail. According to a bail bondsman I know, this is unprecedented. Misdemeanors are almost always released on their own recognizance, which means that they don't pay any bail at all. Or at most it's a $100.

* That means the harsh, long detentions are meant to be are a purely punitive measure against Occupy LA protesters–an order that had to come from the very top.

[Cain]

Additional fun

http://exiledonline.com/max-blumenthal-how-israeli-occupation-forces-bahraini-monarchy-guards-trained-u-s-police-for-coordinated-crackdown-on-occupy-protests/

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote "mutual response," collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent "Occupy" movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, "Law enforcement agencies responding to...Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork."

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in "counter-terror" operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America's security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel's national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department's disclosure that it deployed "counter-terror" measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan's Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement.

http://exiledonline.com/a-visit-to-the-raided-occupy-la-camp-updates-from-freed-protesters-and-bad-news-about-our-legal-situation/

But while not much happened at the meeting, I did manage to meet up with a few of my jail buddies and get more info on some of the abuses I had witnessed and described in my last post. [Read Yasha Levine's account of LAPD's appalling treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters.]

For instance: Remember the seriously injured protester, who had been shot with a shotgun beanbag round and had an oozing bloody welt the size of a grapefruit just above his elbow, but denied medical attention for five hours? I was only able to speak to him for a few minutes when we were locked up at Metro jail and never got his name, but it turns out he was one of the guys who constructed a makeshift tree house between three tall palm trees and sat up there for hours with two other people, refusing to come down. He said they were the last to be arrested, sometime around 4:30 a.m., when the cops finally got hold of a cherry picker platform, and a cop in full-on riot gear forced them down at gunpoint. From what I understand, it was at this point that Chad was shot with a beanbag round.

Chad and his buddies kept the LAPD busy for hours. The cops must have been pissed off, and making an injured kid squirm on a concrete floor with a bleeding wound, hands handcuffed behind his back for hours on end, must have felt like the perfect payback...

So now that most of the detained protesters have been released, what is our legal status? Are we going to be prosecuted? Well, that's not very clear.

I've been charged with misdemeanor# 409PC: failure to disperse (or as my booking officer put down on my prisoner's receipt, it's "fail to disclose"). My court date is set for early January, so I guess I'll find out then. But apparently I shouldn't expect the city to drop the charge. Here is what LA Weekly reported on Friday evening:

   

City Attorney's criminal branch Chief Earl Thomas tells the Weekly virtually no one is getting off scot-free.

    He said that while about 175 people were released today they could still be charged. Those folks were determined to be eligible for the Alternative Prosecution Program, a 90-day love fest in which suspects can enroll and avoid prosecution.

    Thomas said a special agenda would be formulated for the Occupy arrestees, one that would focus on First Amendment education:

   

We'll include a First Amendment law component about having to stay within the law in terms of conduct. We don't care what the message is but we are concerned about illegal conduct.

    Those people don't have the accept the program and can chose to duke it out in court.

Ha! So there you have it folks. Not only does the City of Los Angeles arrest those who exercise their constitutional right to peacefully protest (or in my case simply reporting on a peaceful protest), apparently it now requires anyone caught exercising that right to enroll in a political reeducation camp.