Hey, hey, hey.. Gooood-bye!
November 14, 2011 10:52 PM   Subscribe

Occupy Wall Street is building the barricades at this very moment. NYPD has begun clearing Zuccotti Park.
posted by ReeMonster (2861 comments total) 77 users marked this as a favorite
 
Live feed: http://www.livestream.com/occupynyc

Another live feed: wbai.org
posted by spinifex23 at 10:54 PM on November 14, 2011


http://www.livestream.com/owsoccupyseattle is also providing a mirror if the main feed gets overwhelmed.
posted by spinifex23 at 10:55 PM on November 14, 2011


Good grief.
posted by darkstar at 10:57 PM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


Live coverage from Reuters.
posted by zabuni at 10:58 PM on November 14, 2011


Holy fuck. Hope everybody makes it out of this okay.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:58 PM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


They were pointing out what they say is an LRAD across the park.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 10:59 PM on November 14, 2011


Shit. The NYC crowd is probably the strongest and most organized. If they're kicked out of this park then perhaps they'll find another place? NYC folk, where would another, better place be?
posted by zardoz at 10:59 PM on November 14, 2011


And now we see what the true occupying army is in the cities of America.
posted by hippybear at 11:00 PM on November 14, 2011 [49 favorites]


Our republic is failing... many, many millions. If we remain a republic is to be seen.... but I no longer have hope...

It's all begining to be lost....

I's time to let the world burn...

For as long as we remain...

I'll see you all in the shadows.

Be safe.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 11:01 PM on November 14, 2011 [2 favorites]


I's time to let the world burn...
For as long as we remain...
I'll see you all in the shadows.


*facepalm*
posted by joe lisboa at 11:04 PM on November 14, 2011 [94 favorites]


Seriously, if you are trying to undermine the credibility of OWS, keep it up.
posted by joe lisboa at 11:04 PM on November 14, 2011 [4 favorites]


Mefi's Own Lore has written a piece that is sadly, way too appropriate.
Their main complaints seem to be that politics is influenced by people with political influence, and that powerful people have all the power. In other words, they’re protesting the futility of their own protest. That’s the sort of recursive, discursive incursion I can get behind.

If the vaguely defined “1 percent” have all the power, then no amount of sign-waving, slogan-chanting or locale-occupation will have any influence. So if the protests end in any status other than quo, then the 1 percent is a myth, normal people have plenty of influence, and the protestors were just wasting everyone’s time.

However, if the Occupy movement dies without inspiring any substantial changes in the U.S. political scene, then it will prove that they were right all along.

In other words, the Occupy movement can only succeed by failing completely.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:11 PM on November 14, 2011 [89 favorites]


I would like to see discussion of the allegedly confirmed police planted agent provoceteur mentioned in the deleted duplicate thread.

I have no doubt whatsoever that such a thing is possible, but having confirmation is notable, and I'd like to hear about it.
posted by flaterik at 11:11 PM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure alluding to the NYPD as an "occupying army" is especially helpful to the Occupy cause. From what I've been reading, neighbors have been complaining about crime and noise and refuse attendant to OWS, and local businesses even staged a small counter-protest to draw attention to the losses they've sustained. It seems that a substantial and growing number of citizens object to OWS and want them moved, and the police are responding to those calls.

During the weekend events in Portland, Occupy participants characterized the mayor's decision to clear them out (peacefully) as "violent." I suppose there's a school of thought that sustains that, that any kind of force qualifies as "violent." But if that's the route, then I wonder if the occupation itself doesn't qualify. Certainly, "building barricades with tables and pieces or scrap wood" would.

I hope no one is injured in New York, protestor or police.
posted by red clover at 11:12 PM on November 14, 2011 [14 favorites]


Come on, it's not like these OWS idealists have some sort of right peaceably to assemble, or to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, or to be secure in their persons and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 11:14 PM on November 14, 2011 [141 favorites]


I'll see you all in the shadows.

In these golden years.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:14 PM on November 14, 2011 [5 favorites]


If the vaguely defined “1 percent” have all the power, then no amount of sign-waving, slogan-chanting or locale-occupation will have any influence.

The problem is that the 1 percent have too much power, not all the power. Which also nicely takes care of this supposed inconsistency.
posted by grouse at 11:16 PM on November 14, 2011 [45 favorites]


Well, they do -- but they don't have the right to play drums 24/7 and irritate the shit out of everyone who lives nearby.

I kinda think not reining in the drummers was the proximate cause of their eviction.
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 11:16 PM on November 14, 2011 [8 favorites]


Curiously, Questlove of the Roots was a major tip-off on this (for me, at least!)... made a Storify link here of his tweets. Read this on Twitter, fired up a livestream and now I'm here. Technology is amazing.

I really do hope that no one gets hurt. And I really do believe that these types of actions will only make the message clearer and stronger. Godspeed.
posted by raihan_ at 11:16 PM on November 14, 2011 [2 favorites]


The other NYPD raid thread that appeared moments after this one (and was taken down as a double just a quickly) said something about the OWS people positively identifying a particularly rowdy provocateur as part of the official NYPD presence. Anybody know anything more about this, with links to confirm? I had suspected that the police had plenty of moles in Zuccotti, but this could be pretty big if true.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:17 PM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


OSF, about that link... could you really post it? (You left it out. Your link points to this post.)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:17 PM on November 14, 2011


these OWS idealists have some sort of right peaceably to assemble, or to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, or to be secure in their persons and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

This is what I was responding to.
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 11:17 PM on November 14, 2011


I kinda think not reining in the drummers was the proximate cause of their eviction.

Or the best possible excuse.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:17 PM on November 14, 2011 [4 favorites]


It's Wall Street. Nobody lives nearby (and I say that as someone who used to live about as close as anyone lives to "nearby." It's not at all a residential area.)

Tahrir Square stood strong. Let's see what happens here.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:19 PM on November 14, 2011 [6 favorites]


I kinda think not reining in the drummers was the proximate cause of their eviction.

Or the best possible excuse.


Yes, of course. But why would they just hand the cops such a good excuse?
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 11:20 PM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


From what I've been reading, neighbors have been complaining about crime and noise and refuse attendant to OWS, and local businesses even staged a small counter-protest to draw attention to the losses they've sustained. It seems that a substantial and growing number of citizens object to OWS and want them moved, and the police are responding to those calls.

Well, painting a group which is voicing opinions you're not comfortable with as dirty criminals who are disrupting the status quo of what you had before is a pretty effective way to make them into an "other" which can be acted against.

The point of a protest is to disrupt "business as usual" in an attempt to make what previously had been tuned out into something which cannot be ignored.

The nation-wide police actions against the Occupy movement only show that The Powers That Be feel that they're coming too close to the mark, and that if they aren't disbanded they soon won't be able to be ignored on any meaningful level.

So now we see the paid occupying armies moving in, doing the bidding of the Powers, and doing their best to make sure this all dies on the vine before the fruit even begins to develop.

Anyway, I'm not the first person to call the NYPD an occupying army. Both them and the LAPD have been called that for decades now in various contexts. The only reason police forces haven't been called that in other cities and towns is largely because there haven't been real occasions to see them in action against the civilian citizens of those places.
posted by hippybear at 11:23 PM on November 14, 2011 [16 favorites]


Because "excuse" and "reason" do not mean the same thing. Reasons are legitimate, excuses are not.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:23 PM on November 14, 2011 [3 favorites]


Here's the post from Skygazer that was deleted:
WBAI.Org radio in NYC is reporting that a huge NY Police presence has amassed around Zuccotti park.

OWS sent a Tweet and SMS broadcast at a little after 1:00AM announcing that the New York Police Department has begun the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street.

A WBAI radio reporter on the scene said the police are being very aggressive and tearing everything down. Although they made a big show of removing the American flag first and folding it military style.

There is also confirmation from the WBAI reporter on the scene that a provocateur (black with beard dyed blond) was identified by the movement tonight as in the past few days he has instigated trouble and harassed women in the park and tonight was part of the police presence.

The occupiers are chanting: THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.

Other links:

LiveStream

WBAI Stream

CBS overhead helicopter (should return soon. Refueling.)

OWS Twitter page.
posted by taz at 11:24 PM on November 14, 2011 [6 favorites]


During the weekend events in Portland, Occupy participants characterized the mayor's decision to clear them out (peacefully) as "violent." I suppose there's a school of thought that sustains that, that any kind of force qualifies as "violent." But if that's the route, then I wonder if the occupation itself doesn't qualify. Certainly, "building barricades with tables and pieces or scrap wood" would.

How is building wooden barricades violent? Barricades don't hurt anybody, and they're certainly no threat to cops with body armor and lethal weapons -- these are a couple of turned-over tables we're talking about, not a bunker covered in hardpoints.

Or is any attempt to resist "peaceful" unconstitutional police action now "violent" simply because it involves something other than immediate and total capitulation?
posted by vorfeed at 11:24 PM on November 14, 2011 [33 favorites]


Including this here from the duplicated thread.
A WBAI reporter mentioned earlier an unconfirmed report that a provocateur (black with beard dyed blond) was identified by the movement. He'd been instigating trouble and had been harassing women in the park and tonight was part of the police presence.
The reporter hasn't mentioned the provocateur in a while, what he's talking about is how there is a huge pile of people's belongings being trashed and ruined by the police. Also, he's expressing sadness with the NY Sanitation workers who're are taking part in this./
posted by Skygazer at 11:25 PM on November 14, 2011


Come on, it's not like these OWS idealists have some sort of right peaceably to assemble, or to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, or to be secure in their persons and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Although their demonstration was mostly peaceful, the incessant noisemaking, piling up of all manner of refuse, the smell, and the enormous loss of revenue for local businesses is why this is happening. Hell, I support their CAUSE 100% but I've been to the camp a number of times and it was a loud, stinky mess. That, and the whirlwind of negative press about the other protests across the country is why the raid is on. Oh well. It was bound to happen. Will be interesting to see what their next move is.
posted by ReeMonster at 11:25 PM on November 14, 2011


Ah...oops. Thanks, Taz!
posted by Skygazer at 11:25 PM on November 14, 2011


At Tahrir Square, there were people ready to engage the security forces in running battles if the need arose. And LOTS of people came out, not some tiny group.

Who will engage the New York security apparatus in violent resistance? No one. It's become a phony little army. You'd have to be insane to fight them.
posted by 1adam12 at 11:25 PM on November 14, 2011


Or is any attempt to resist "peaceful" unconstitutional police action now "violent" simply because it involves something other than immediate and total capitulation?

Yup, pretty much. If you don't follow a police order, you're violating something and need to be immediately subdued and arrested.
posted by hippybear at 11:26 PM on November 14, 2011 [3 favorites]


"Cleaning" the park = destroying laptops, camera equipment, personal documents, etc.
posted by hermitosis at 11:28 PM on November 14, 2011 [11 favorites]


Yes, of course. But why would they just hand the cops such a good excuse?

Maybe cause drumming is good. Drums are good. People need more drumming, more music, more rhythm in their life. It's fun, it's compelling, it brings people together in a spirit of communality. It's been working like that for thousands of years.

Also, what oneswellfoop said just above.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:28 PM on November 14, 2011 [6 favorites]


Looks like the media is being ordered away, including the CBS helicopter that was hovering over Zuccotti park earlier.

Just got a text from OWS saying the cops have cleared a 2-4 block radius around the park. And there are reports of pepper spray being used.

The "People's Library" has been brutally demolished by the police.

...

posted by Skygazer at 11:32 PM on November 14, 2011 [6 favorites]


Maybe cause drumming is good.

Yes. Drumming IS good. Drumming is what I do for a living.

But the drumming at OWS was equivalent to Peruvian pan flute music, only 50x more annoying.
posted by ReeMonster at 11:34 PM on November 14, 2011 [17 favorites]


@ANIMALNewYork: NBC journalist, Post reporter, Daily News, among others are and assembling trying to challenge NYPD as a group. #ows
posted by azarbayejani at 11:34 PM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


From the NYC Mayor's office Twitter: Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protestors can return after the Park is cleared. #ows

Tough to understand how that jibes with a 2am police raid.
posted by auto-correct at 11:34 PM on November 14, 2011 [4 favorites]


I won't call it authoritarianism necessarily, maybe it's just a painfully bourgeois schoolmarm mentality, but whatever the name: the idea that the terrible inconvenience of a few loud noises or bad smells would justify a massive police crackdown on a completely nonviolent protest, with possible mass arrests forthcoming, shows some serious lack of ethico-political perspective.

(And yeah, this has already been said, but bears repeating interesting that protesters' unplanned, random property destruction is "violence" but planned, large-scale police property destruction is just maintaining order.)
posted by RogerB at 11:35 PM on November 14, 2011 [37 favorites]


It's Wall Street. Nobody lives nearby (and I say that as someone who used to live about as close as anyone lives to "nearby." It's not at all a residential area.)

I think the people at 55 Liberty might disagree. The entire Financial District is a lot more residential than it was just a few years ago.
posted by Guernsey Halleck at 11:36 PM on November 14, 2011 [4 favorites]


"Protestors can return after the Park is cleared"

Yeah right... If they can get through the phalanx of NYPD which will be stationed around the square and throughout the neighborhood?

I don't trust that "leave and come back later" announcement at all. Once they're dispersed, why let them back in to amass once more?
posted by hippybear at 11:38 PM on November 14, 2011 [3 favorites]


Yes, this is clearly all about trying to clean up a loud, dirty, dangerous part of the city.

The city always sends cops, special equipment, and spends tens of thousands of dollars in overtime pay trying to clean up the city. Zucotti park just happened to be the last speck of dirt in the 5 boroughs.
posted by cell divide at 11:38 PM on November 14, 2011 [46 favorites]


This still isn't on any cable news that I see. Michael Jackson's doctor warranted interruption of regularly scheduled programs.
posted by hypersloth at 11:39 PM on November 14, 2011 [3 favorites]


Could people please shut up about the drumming? It's become the standard derail in any OWS discussion anywhere.
posted by wayland at 11:40 PM on November 14, 2011 [29 favorites]


ph Socks, there are (per the Census) 153 people out of the tens of millions in Greater New York living on the eight blocks surrounding the park; it's downtown in a commercial district. The vast bulk of these neighbours are in the block west of the park, which is also adjacent to the decade-long major construction project that is the WTC site, and which is plenty noisy.

Previously, the drummers had gone as late as 10:30 PM, which is an ungodly late hour in fucking New York City, where all good Citizens are in bed by 9. Luckily, they'd reached an agreement to only drum during lunch time 12-2 and the evening rush hour, 4-6. Boy, are the cops faces going to be red when they find that out.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 11:40 PM on November 14, 2011 [18 favorites]




Yeah, MSNBC is still showing reruns of their nightly opinion hours. Hardball With Chris "Either My Promotional Photos Are All 15 Years Old Or Else We Have One Hell Of A Photoshop Department" Matthews is happily running without any interruption.
posted by hippybear at 11:41 PM on November 14, 2011 [1 favorite]


Sadly, I have to go to bed now. I'll see what the interwebz news sources have to say tomorrow. I hope everyone remains safe and free.
posted by hippybear at 11:42 PM on November 14, 2011


Not only is what is happening in the park what a police state looks like, not seeing what is happening in the park on the corporate owned major media is also what a police state looks like.
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:43 PM on November 14, 2011 [146 favorites]


24 hour news cycle my ass.
posted by The Hamms Bear at 11:47 PM on November 14, 2011 [11 favorites]


I really hope that media suppression backfires as hard as macing the penned in women did. Absolutely unacceptable.
posted by flaterik at 11:48 PM on November 14, 2011 [3 favorites]


Or is any attempt to resist "peaceful" unconstitutional police action now "violent" simply because it involves something other than immediate and total capitulation?

I'm not on the side of the police, but removing trespassers from private land is not unconstitutional.
posted by atrazine at 11:48 PM on November 14, 2011 [2 favorites]


Some off-camera guy on the live stream just now said the police had forced the press too far away from the park to see what's happening. Said he'd seen them taking press credentials off of reporters. Seems NYPD is making a very concerted effort to prevent this from being reported.
posted by RogerB at 11:48 PM on November 14, 2011 [7 favorites]


Not only is what is happening in the park what a police state looks like, not seeing what is happening in the park on the corporate owned major media is also what a police state looks like.

With no compelling video and no significant reports of violence, the skeleton overnight crews will report the news at the half hours, but there's really no reason for them to go wall to wall on it.
posted by Jahaza at 11:48 PM on November 14, 2011


With no compelling video and no significant reports of violence, because they have been removed by police, the skeleton overnight crews should make the fact that they have been pushed away from the action the top fucking story.
posted by The Hamms Bear at 11:53 PM on November 14, 2011 [36 favorites]


This is crazy and yet, utterly compelling. Late night raid, terrorism units, means of transportation being blocked, people being driven out of a peaceful protest in a park where they were legally able to stay. I should be in bed right now, but I just can't stop keeping up with this situation.

The limiting of press access is the fishiest part of all this though.
posted by cmgonzalez at 11:53 PM on November 14, 2011 [6 favorites]


means of transportation being blocked,

The MTA web site doesn't show any unusual bridge or subway closings.
posted by Jahaza at 11:54 PM on November 14, 2011


Not only is what is happening in the park what a police state looks like...

...it's also what has been happening at protests in North America for as long as I can remember.
posted by Hoopo at 11:55 PM on November 14, 2011 [4 favorites]


This is weirdly the best thing that could possibly happen to the Occupy movement, which I think was guttering a little bit in the last week. It's going to blow up now.
posted by hermitosis at 11:55 PM on November 14, 2011 [4 favorites]


I checked the MTA site as well about 20 minutes ago, but the word was that entrances were blocked.
posted by cmgonzalez at 11:57 PM on November 14, 2011 [2 favorites]


With no compelling video and no significant reports of violence, because they have been removed by police, the skeleton overnight crews should make the fact that they have been pushed away from the action the top fucking story.

Interestingly, they have internet access in the cable network news rooms! They can watch the live stream and see that there's not widespread violent confrontation going on in the park.
posted by Jahaza at 11:57 PM on November 14, 2011


Also, this will surely (at least, temporarily) chase out some of the nastier cruft that had started to gather in Zuccotti in the last few weeks.
posted by hermitosis at 12:01 AM on November 15, 2011


Atrazine: I'm not on the side of the police, but removing trespassers from private land is not unconstitutional.

But this is not strictly "private property." It is something BrookField Real Estate established for "Public Use," in exchange for a special easement that allowed them to circumvent zoning laws.

They had to promise to pay for the upkeep of it. And I'd say if Zucotti Park isn't for public use than the easement they were given, which I'm sure was lucrative in order for Brookfield to go through this deal (although it rings of cronyism to me), than Brookfield should pony up with dollars for the easement it received.
posted by Skygazer at 12:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [20 favorites]


There have been people--young, educated people--on my Facebook stream linking to the live feed of this and crowing that it is like Christmas come early that these "hippies are getting hoofed", and how they wish the chirpy girl hosting the live stream would also get clubbed because her voice is getting on their nerves. Naturally, they're no longer on my Facebook stream.

I feel sick.
posted by Phire at 12:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


Phire - TELL THEM SO. You don't need to argue with them. Just tell them that you find their opinions entirely unacceptable and you will no longer listen to them.

Evil opinions should not go unchallenged.
posted by flaterik at 12:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [21 favorites]


Phire, tell those people I hope that they are being compensated well by their masters. Otherwise they are suckers.
posted by wuwei at 12:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]




Seems NYPD is making a very concerted effort to prevent this from being reported.

From Twitter via zabuni's Reuters link: @antderosa 11:33 PM: I just spoke with the CBS News desk and they were told to leave the airspace above Zuccotti Park by NYPD 11:34 PM: CBS News had the first news helicopter in the area above the park and were forced to leave. 11:39 PM: RT @RDevro: Police are now pushing the press off the block. They just took the press pass off ab NBC news anchor. 11:53 PM: RT @RDevro: The NYPD are now setting up a "pen" for the press as far from the remaining protesters as they can place us.
posted by hattifattener at 12:07 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


This is weirdly the best thing that could possibly happen to the Occupy movement, which I think was guttering a little bit in the last week. It's going to blow up now.

I hope you're right. I can't help thinking, though, that the current mindset in America is so defeatist that people will just take this as yet another win by the 1% and lose a little more hope. It'd be one thing if it looked like there was a media firestorm over it, but I don't think it'll be more than a flash in the pan. I guess we'll see what happens...but I could definitely see this as the beginning of the end, just as easily as I could see it as the beginning of the next phase.
posted by troublesome at 12:12 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


This is what I've let my Facebook "friends" know.

Via Twitter:
OWS Library: NYPD has closed the airspace above the park to prevent news helicopters from filming them. It's an unprecedented violation of free press.

Rosie Gray of Village Voice: Me: "I'm press!" Lady cop: "not tonight".
posted by Phire at 12:12 AM on November 15, 2011 [29 favorites]


The media is not broadcasting, but tens of thousands are awake and watching and reporting, that will prime the pump for the AM media forces.
posted by hermitosis at 12:13 AM on November 15, 2011


The main OWS page from the FPP is chilling:
3:08 a.m. heard on livestream: "they're bringing in the hoses."
3:05 a.m. NYPD cutting down trees in Liberty Square
2:55 a.m. NYC council-member Ydanis Rodríguez arrested and bleeding from head.
posted by Phire at 12:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


I'll see you all in the shadows.

Does that line get you laid? I'm guessing...no.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 12:15 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


This is what terrifies me every time I hear about the militarization of police forces. The LAPD is armed to the teeth with large-scale pain and compliance devices.

I hope these people stay safe. The cops should realize that they're protesting on their behalf, against their employers.
posted by spiderskull at 12:15 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


OWS Twitter: #nypd destroying personal items. #occupiers leaving with their belongings are being stopped #ows #occupyallstreets.
posted by Phire at 12:16 AM on November 15, 2011


Although their demonstration was mostly peaceful, the incessant noisemaking, piling up of all manner of refuse, the smell, and the enormous loss of revenue for local businesses is why this is happening. Hell, I support their CAUSE 100% but I've been to the camp a number of times and it was a loud, stinky mess.

According to the imperialist running dogs at the San Jose Mercury News, the Occupy Oakland camp which was (peacefully) dismantled earlier this evening has accumulated over 36 tons of trash. doubtless pointing this out is going to be derided as hippie punching, but the fact is that when your encampment smells like a toilet it is not a good advertisement for your cause.

Could people please shut up about the drumming? It's become the standard derail in any OWS discussion anywhere.

Well, now you know how some of us feel about drum circles.
posted by anigbrowl at 12:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


It's inconceivable on what grounds they can intimidate, harass, and remove the press with such impunity.

Also, in terms of the Sanitation workers who were brought in, I wonder if they might actually be cops.

The frightening thing is the level of tactical thinking that went into this, from a city government nonetheless? Who designed this? Who did the city consult with for this? Why are there (it's being reported) twin rotor Chinooks hovering overhead?
posted by Skygazer at 12:17 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


what else can an encampment smell like? where do you want all the shit and trash to go? should protests only happen if they're sanitized? maybe over there in the free speech zone (between the hours of 3 and 3:30, please, have your papers in order).
posted by nadawi at 12:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


the Occupy Oakland camp which was (peacefully) dismantled earlier this evening has accumulated over 36 tons of trash. doubtless pointing this out is going to be derided as hippie punching, but the fact is that when your encampment smells like a toilet it is not a good advertisement for your cause.

28 tons of that was "debris" and 8 was "green waste." Are you some kind of synesthete?
posted by one_bean at 12:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


they have to bring all their big boy toys out - it excuses the budget for those things.
posted by nadawi at 12:20 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Well, now you know how some of us feel about drum circles.

Actually, complaining about and/or making fun of drum circles is the norm. There's been plenty of those kinds of comments. Really. More than enough. And it is, in fact, a derail.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [20 favorites]


I wish OWS the best, and I'm sure they'll handle this well however tonight turns out. I just want to say that this is absolutely preposterous:
If the vaguely defined “1 percent” have all the power, then no amount of sign-waving, slogan-chanting or locale-occupation will have any influence. So if the protests end in any status other than quo, then the 1 percent is a myth, normal people have plenty of influence, and the protestors were just wasting everyone’s time.
The same argument could be made against every single social movement in history: if women are really excluded from political influence, the suffragettes won't be able to win themselves the vote; if blacks are really excluded from power, the civil rights movement won't be able to influence anything; if the French really hold all the substantial levers of power in Algeria, Algeria must necessarily remain French. The argument of every liberation movement is that the elite benefit at everyone else's expense under normal circumstances, without upheaval and chaos and the conscious self-assertion of the majority, and the only way for the victims to change the situation is by behaving in a way outside the bounds of normal acceptable behaviour.

The "vaguely defined 1 per cent" (how can you be more specific than saying the majority of income gains have gone to the top 1% of the income distribution?) have all the power when, and only when, the 99% restrict themselves to voting every couple of years, donating to telegenic candidates, and paying dues to quietist trade unions. They must be uppity, unreasonable, radical, irresponsible, dangerous, and unrealistic, precisely because these perjoratives are defined as the kinds of behaviour that might result in a disturbance to the current order.
posted by wwwwwhatt at 12:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [101 favorites]


anigbrowl, I sincerely hope that when things get bad enough that even you need to protest something that the police treat you well whether you stink or not.
posted by auto-correct at 12:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


* put Les Miserables on his iPod *
posted by Jimbob at 12:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Try typing "Zucotti Park" and see what happens on Google Maps...
posted by MattMangels at 12:22 AM on November 15, 2011


They're arresting some members of the press.

Good.

Maybe these members of the press will find their goddamn spines.
posted by tzikeh at 12:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [33 favorites]


Oh wait, actually it's working again. For a while it didn't show up, just went to a map of the whole USA. Still fishy.
posted by MattMangels at 12:23 AM on November 15, 2011


"According to the imperialist running dogs at the San Jose Mercury News, the Occupy Oakland camp which was (peacefully) dismantled earlier this evening has accumulated over 36 tons of trash. doubtless pointing this out is going to be derided as hippie punching, but the fact is that when your encampment smells like a toilet it is not a good advertisement for your cause. "

Two things: First off, I'm skeptical of early estimates like that, no matter the paper — especially since the source has an incentive to be misleading and there's no independent confirmation. Second, the amount that was actually trash versus the amount of "debris" that was busted tents and sleeping bags would have a fairly significant effect on how I viewed the sanitation.
posted by klangklangston at 12:23 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


MattMangels: Try typing "Zucotti Park" and see what happens on Google Maps...

Holy SHIT. Are they fucking kidding? What the fuck is happening right now? How is this happening?
posted by tzikeh at 12:24 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Matt - still not working for me.
posted by tzikeh at 12:25 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I hope you're right. I can't help thinking, though, that the current mindset in America is so defeatist that people will just take this as yet another win by the 1% and lose a little more hope.

People aren't hungry enough, yet. When enough of the former middle class has nothing to lose and remembers losing it, you will see change. Until then you will see snarky comments on facebook.

People are too damned short sighted to do anything but gawk until the the shit hits the fan for them personally.
posted by dibblda at 12:25 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


The guy doing the live stream is now being interviewed by a CBS news person with a camera. The press is getting through. Trying, at least.
posted by cmgonzalez at 12:25 AM on November 15, 2011


Oh wait, actually it's working again. For a while it didn't show up, just went to a map of the whole USA. Still fishy.

No, not fishy. Leave the paranoia out of this. You are only helping to discredit a movement with genuine grievances.
posted by joe lisboa at 12:26 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


MattMangels I've been having problems with Maps all night. For boring stuff. I don't think it's related.
posted by wemayfreeze at 12:27 AM on November 15, 2011


the fact is that when your encampment smells like a toilet it is not a good advertisement for your cause.

Sure, which is why some encampments (Occupy Providence, for instance, which has the benefit of being much smaller, it's true) keep things as clean as they can. But that's on them to do, not the cops.

Seriously people? Trash? Drum circles? You want to take away peoples' right to peacefully assemble because drum circles annoy you? Fuck you. Fuck you and your miserable, myopic, self-centered view of the world. I don't love drum circles either but it'll be a cold day in hell when I'll put that ahead of other peoples' constitutional rights. (Also, you bust up a drum circle by deploying a sound cannon at 3am? In what world does THAT make sense?)

Say it with me now: I do not have the right to never be inconvenienced or annoyed. They do have the right to peacefully assemble. End of story.
posted by mstokes650 at 12:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [178 favorites]


NewYorkObserver NewYorkObserver
Just spoke with credentialed CBS reporter Manuel Gallegas outside barricade "They're kicking everybody out, write about it."
posted by cmgonzalez at 12:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Skygazer: But this is not strictly "private property." It is something BrookField Real Estate established for "Public Use," in exchange for a special easement that allowed them to circumvent zoning laws.

Yes. Cutting & pasting one of my comments from a previous thread:

Civil rights attorney's take on the legal status of public assembly in Zuccotti Park / Liberty Square. At 1:15 he says: Commission for City Planning is the default jurisdiction over the park's legal open hours and public assembly rules. Rule change procedure for changing open hours requires public hearings and takes at least 50 days to go through. To have full legal force, they would have to give notice, hold an open committee hearing, hold a vote of the Commission to change park open hours.

1:53 Brookfield Properties doesn't have authority or power of law behind their prohibition handouts or recently posted (now removed by protestors) regulations trying to get protestors out.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 12:31 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


what else can an encampment smell like? where do you want all the shit and trash to go? should protests only happen if they're sanitized? maybe over there in the free speech zone (between the hours of 3 and 3:30, please, have your papers in order).

A protest and a permanent encampment are two different things. There is nothing morally superior about wallowing in the dirt; sanitation is a basic good. I'm quite supportive of the Occupy Santa Rosa crowd in a nearby county, because they had the good sense to draw up a code of conduct and prevent their camp from degenerating into a public nuisance. Turns out that working with the city on logistics pays dividends.

28 tons of that was "debris" and 8 was "green waste." Are you some kind of synesthete?

'Green waste' is a euphemism for organic matter. In much of the Bay Area food scraps, diapers go in a green waste bin, recyclables like glass, aluminum, plastic go in a blue bin, and regular trash goes in a black bin.
posted by anigbrowl at 12:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Uh... apparently all the feeds inside just went down too. Not sure if this is an action by the police or an unfortunate technical malfunction.
posted by cyphill at 12:32 AM on November 15, 2011


You can hear bits and pieces of the police radio feed from the area here:
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/?action=wp&feedId=8905
posted by This_Will_Be_Good at 12:33 AM on November 15, 2011


The main feed went down. There is another live feed here: http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99
posted by yertledaturtle at 12:33 AM on November 15, 2011


Police action, I think. There's reports of nearby residents being kept in their buildings, and final arrests being made.
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Uh... apparently all the feeds inside just went down too. Not sure if this is an action by the police or an unfortunate technical malfunction.

They had a different livestream guy on the phone with the first one a minute ago -- sounds like the police are dragging people out "one by one". He said people were "getting violent", also.
posted by vorfeed at 12:34 AM on November 15, 2011


cyphill: All the feeds? They've been cutting in and out for me. Back up now.

Not nearly as bad I know, but the fact this is being done in the middle of the night, and that I've been writing an essay on 1933-39 Germany for the past week means I have this poem stuck in my head:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

---Martin Niemöller
posted by Canageek at 12:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


One cop on the police radio just asked another if he is "committed to protesters right now." He was. Ridiculous.
posted by This_Will_Be_Good at 12:35 AM on November 15, 2011


anigbrowl wrote: Turns out that working with the city on logistics pays dividends.

Or it gets you laughed at and later pepper sprayed in the face, as happened elsewhere.
posted by wierdo at 12:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


"I told you so." - Ray Bradbury
posted by black rainbows at 12:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I am so angry about this. And as the child of an abusive father I've learned long and well that the safest thing to do with my anger is to turn it against myself. But you know what? Fuck that noise.

Because what we're learning now, tonight, for the first time or for the five hundredth time is that we're all the children of abusive fathers. I don't mean that your literal father literally abused you. But that the police--the people who are supposedly protecting us, supposedly keeping us safe--are in fact abusing us. Are in fact one of the greatest threats to our individual and collective well-being.

Make no mistake about this--they are trying to destroy the movement. They are trying to strangle the voice inside of you--the voice inside of everyone one of us--that says, This is wrong. It's wrong that people are starving while food rots in warehouses and sits on store shelves. It's wrong that bankers were given bonuses while the economy was still collapsing due to their machinations. It's wrong that ordinary people have essentially no say in the decisions that effect their lives and futures.

And not only is it wrong, but more importantly--it doesn't have to be that way! That's the most threatening, the most powerful, the most important thing about Occupy Wall Street, about the world people collectively built in Liberty Park--it's a microcosm, a tiny example, of a different way of living. Of relating to each other. That's what they're trying to kill.

And we can't let them. They can re-occupy the physical space, they can use brute force to break up the encampment--there's no way we can stop that. But we can't let them kill the movement. We can't let them murder the dream. You can't let them strangle the voice inside of you saying, this is wrong. It doesn't have to be like this.

The cops--loyally serving the %1--are trying to break the spine of OWS. Let them instead be kicking up a hornet's nest. Let a flood of anger be unleashed--but not an unfocused, storming destructive anger. A constructive anger. An anger wedded to hope, to a vision of transformation. Let all that the cops scatter tonight turn into seeds which spread all over--across the country, throughout the 99%, into the entire world.

Let this be the night that a thousand more occupations are born.
posted by overglow at 12:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [26 favorites]


To those of you who have been to Occupation sites out of sympathy for the cause & found things to be dirty & smelly: did you even try to pick up trash? Wash dishes? That kind of mundane stuff is really REALLY important, but it's so often ignored. Help the Occupation out and clean! It's a public service & the exercise burns calories! C'mon and be a VOLUNTEER OF AMERICA!
I've spent several days each week since October 10th down at the Occupy Bloomington Indiana site at Peoples' Park, picking up all of the trash I could find, changing all of the big trash cans, occasionally washing dishes, and staying up all night to ensure that the other Occupiers could get some sleep. Not all of the bits of "revolution" are the glorious, heroic kind.
posted by frodisaur at 12:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [40 favorites]


Their main complaints seem to be that politics is influenced by people with political influence, and that powerful people have all the power. In other words, they’re protesting the futility of their own protest. That’s the sort of recursive, discursive incursion I can get behind.

If the vaguely defined “1 percent” have all the power, then no amount of sign-waving, slogan-chanting or locale-occupation will have any influence. So if the protests end in any status other than quo, then the 1 percent is a myth, normal people have plenty of influence, and the protestors were just wasting everyone’s time.
This is a bunch of jibberish. Lets suppose we could measure power. Let's call our unit of measure "the dollar". If the richest person had $105 and the poorest person had $95, the the poorest person would have about 90% as much power as the richest person.

On the other hand, if you gave the poorest person $0.01 and the most powerful person $5*109, which is actually about how things are distributed today, the richest person is actually nearly infinitely more powerful then the poorest. How much more can Bill Gates do in the world then a homeless person?

That's the problem. The idea that you can't measure inequality or whatever is nonsensical.
posted by delmoi at 12:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [19 favorites]


Ah well, so they'll finally get what they wanted all along which is a good old ruck with the cops spread over social media.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:38 AM on November 15, 2011


The riot police moved in with zip cuffs and teargassed the occupiers in the food tent
by JoshHarkinson via twitter 8:35 AM +0 GMT

Then they wrestled them to the ground and cuffed them
by JoshHarkinson via twitter 8:35 AM +0 GMT

Everyone I witnessed being arrested was resisting peacefully
by JoshHarkinson via twitter 8:36 AM +0 GMT

posted by Chichibio at 12:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


I don't love drum circles either but it'll be a cold day in hell when I'll put that ahead of other peoples' constitutional rights.

Nobody has an unqualified right to speak or peacefully assemble under US law. Those rights are subject to certain limitations, including what are known as "time, place, and manner" restrictions. For instance, the government cannot prevent you from saying that the president should not be re-elected, but it can prevent you from doing so in a residential neighborhood at 2 am with a megaphone.

If you believe the law should permit all-hours drum-circling no matter how much it inconveniences or annoys other people, that's fair. You can advocate that position, including petitioning your representatives. But it isn't the present state of the law.
posted by red clover at 12:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Try typing "Zucotti Park" and see what happens on Google Maps

It directs me to Zucotti Park in Manhattan, as I'd expect… what does it do when you try it?
posted by hattifattener at 12:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


@frodisaur I really don't think it is about hygine if they are doing it at 1 am in the dark. Just saying.
posted by Canageek at 12:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


East/West coast coordination? I watched Oakland get copified last night (OO is, however, back in Oscar Grant plaza as I type this) and now this in NY. Despite the crude attempts at oligarchic unity I suspect the protesters have WAY more up-to-date communication systems and equipment than the cops do.
posted by telstar at 12:41 AM on November 15, 2011


The frightening thing is the level of tactical thinking that went into this, from a city government nonetheless? Who designed this? Who did the city consult with for this? Why are there (it's being reported) twin rotor Chinooks hovering overhead?
Well, this is bloomburg, the NYPD we're talking about here. These guys are pretty efficient, I would imagine, and they have a pretty huge budget.
posted by delmoi at 12:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


In much of the Bay Area food scraps, diapers go in a green waste bin

For San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Berkeley this is just a flat-out lie. I'd love to know what your definition of "much of the Bay Area" is.
posted by one_bean at 12:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Just listening to the police radio, and it sounded like the "Bronx Task Force" is reporting in for duty at Zucotti. I'm sure the residents of the Bronx are really getting fed up with the drumming.
posted by This_Will_Be_Good at 12:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Hattifattner, I heard someone on the Livestream feed say that Google Maps wasn't giving directions to the park, so I tried typing "Zucotti Park" into the search box (it wasn't listed as a suggestion) and I just got sent to a map of the USA. But I tried it a few minutes later and I got what you'd expect.
posted by MattMangels at 12:46 AM on November 15, 2011


The Ustream video seems to be better than the livestream video right now:
http://www.ustream.tv/theother99
posted by This_Will_Be_Good at 12:47 AM on November 15, 2011


Josh Harkinson's twitter is definitely one of the important ones to read right now.
He [the policeman trying to remove Josh from the park] told me if I stayed in the park I could get hurt. I pointed out that there was no chance of that. I had just been standing around. Cleanup already done for the most part. Then he dragged me in front of a dump truck that was backing up. He said, "Look, this dump truck is backing up, you could get hurt."
posted by tzikeh at 12:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


Is there a reason people are spelling it Zucotti instead of Zuccotti?
posted by sbutler at 12:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


All this talk about the smell and the unsanitary conditions is such bullshit. It's been the narrative that many of the municipalities in conjunction with overhyped nonsense on the news. Liberty park was no dirtier or disorderly than any active campsite, there were a lot of people going through everyday, and what active working space where something important is being germinated and worked on isn't messy to some extent.

Don't buy into it,. It is prime grade A Bullshit, encouraged by Fox on a daily basis. I refuse to even acknowledge it at this point. What's happened tonight is an incredible abuse of Speech rights and Freedom of Assembly.
posted by Skygazer at 12:51 AM on November 15, 2011 [22 favorites]


I think it's probably relevant that this raid is occurring two days before this.
posted by wwwwwhatt at 12:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Is this a photo of a LRAD unit?
posted by Minus215Cee at 12:55 AM on November 15, 2011


Just to be contrarian, I think this cleanout is the best thing that can happen to the OWS movement. honestly, what was the exit strategy? Nobody knew where the encampments were going. The occupations were shifting from protest to just homeless camps, with increasing problems. The point has been made, its clear lots of people are supporting the protests. It's time to move to phase 2, and the police repression is rejuvenating the movement.

Keep cool, stay non-violent, figure out the next move. My suggestion? #occupyvotingbooths
posted by msalt at 1:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


Al-Jazeera is live, globally from the park. No other news outlets are live, even locally. Most aren't covering it at all.
posted by tzikeh at 1:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Those rights are subject to certain limitations, including what are known as "time, place, and manner" restrictions. For instance, the government cannot prevent you from saying that the president should not be re-elected, but it can prevent you from doing so in a residential neighborhood at 2 am with a megaphone.

Nice try there, but the legal status of those protesters in Zuccotti Park is hardly a settled question.

But apparently it should be my responsibility to prove that the protesters shouldn't get evicted by riot squads in the middle of the night, rather than it being the government's job to prove that they do have the legal right to evict the protesters? That seems right to you?
posted by mstokes650 at 1:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


msalt: My suggestion? #occupyvotingbooths

Only works if there's someone to vote for who a) isn't in Big Business's pocket; and b) will have any kind of political clout if they're not.

(Hint: there isn't.)
posted by tzikeh at 1:06 AM on November 15, 2011 [29 favorites]


What fucking cowardice to go in under cover of darkness, and to keep the press away. The government of this city disgusts me more and more.
posted by ocherdraco at 1:07 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


Is this a photo of a LRAD unit?

Looks nigh-on identical to this picture from Wikipedia, so I would guess yes.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:08 AM on November 15, 2011


My suggestion? #occupyvotingbooths

It's not an either/or.
posted by hattifattener at 1:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


[i]msalt: My suggestion? #occupyvotingbooths[/i]

I'd love for that to be a real option, but I watched a completely corrupt mayoral election get bought and sold here in San Francisco last week while people supporting Occupy SF and marching with Occupy Oakland asked me to "vote for them, because they hadn't had time to research."

If the whole point is to throw the bastards out and make changes, you should fucking throw the bastards out and make changes when there's a chance to do, goddammit.
posted by one.louder.ash! at 1:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Canageek:
No, you are correct. Consider my statement a comment on what anyone can do at any time for their local Occupation. And yes, other Occupations do still exist and are not under immanent threat of eviction. Sorry about the derail.

As for NYC, Oakland, Denver, etc.: in a way, their evictions don't really matter, because now, all across the country, a WHOLE bunch of disgruntled people who have been watching this country steadily move in a pro-Big Business direction for decades have gotten a glimpse of just how many of us there actually are. You see, this isn't a whole bunch of Occupations, this is ONE Occupation. I am on the same team as those people in Zuccotti Park. The Occupation of the Mind is more important than any park.
posted by frodisaur at 1:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


anigbrowl wrote: Turns out that working with the city on logistics pays dividends.

Or it gets you laughed at and later pepper sprayed in the face, as happened elsewhere.


Let me get this straight: Occupy Santa Rosa worked with their local city council, went to the public meetings at city hall and participated in them using the existing procedures for public meetings, and ended up with the council voting to grant renewable camping permits. But that's irrelevant because things went differently somewhere else where none of that happened.

To those of you who have been to Occupation sites out of sympathy for the cause & found things to be dirty & smelly: did you even try to pick up trash? Wash dishes? That kind of mundane stuff is really REALLY important, but it's so often ignored. Help the Occupation out and clean! It's a public service & the exercise burns calories! C'mon and be a VOLUNTEER OF AMERICA!

Yes, it is important. I suggest the Occupy movement would be doing a whole lot better if they had made that a priority or themselves from the get-go instead of leaving it for other people, because if you're going to launch a populist movement then demonstrating some consideration for your fellow residents is a Good Idea. To turn your question on its head, why would someone want to join in with or pitch a tent alongside people who have demonstrated a complete lack of respect for their own campsite? Does the phrase 'don't shit in your own nest' ring any bells? I know that mass consumerism has resulted in an unhealthy excess of chemical grooming products that most people don't need and which are bad for the environment, but that doesn't mean that having your campsite smell like a sewer is better.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. You guys defending the right to have a dirty encampment seem oblivious to the fact that you're alienating a majority of the people who pass by you every day. They're not sheeple or conditioned by the mass media or controlled by lizards, they have an understandable and entirely reasonable aversion to things like head lice and random violence. My parents-in-law (who are from North Vietnam and speak little English) thinks it's some sort of weird gypsy encampment/street party despite my wife's best efforts to explain that it's a sort of political movement.
posted by anigbrowl at 1:23 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


I watched a completely corrupt mayoral election get bought and sold here in San Francisco last week

It was more boring than it was corrupt, which is amazing achievement considering there were like 20 people running for mayor. If elections could be as galvanizing as this OWS business you'd see more people at the polls.
posted by quadog at 1:23 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Crowd massing at Pine and Broadway...several hundred at least...seem fired up.
posted by telstar at 1:25 AM on November 15, 2011




The problem with #occupyvotingbooths is that voting happens so rarely. What you need is a movement that sustains these values between elections. That's the brilliance of Fox News—it keeps folks riled up enough that when voting time comes they're raring to get out and do something about it.
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


anigbrowl, I think the reason people are taking offense to your comments is that there's a schism in the discourse here. Some people want to talk about wealth inequality, the power of corporations and the right to assemble. You want to talk about drum circles and the cleanliness of the protests.

I don't think you're taking crazy pills, and I get that you're trying to make a point about how the protests could be more effective. But it really comes across as if you care more about the smell than the substance.
posted by auto-correct at 1:31 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


I wish I could write a lot more but I'm tired, and people have said much of what I would say.

I strongly suggest and hope that every American attempts to practice their 1st Amendment rights as soon as possible - annoying drum circles or not. Do it for yourself, not the OWS or 99% movement, which is currently fragmenting under attack and pressure and a lack of support and has many known problems. Realize that people have problems, and those people don't speak for you.

Do it for yourself. Don't take part in process or assembly if you don't want to. Just show up and observe. Bring a sack lunch. Be a tourist. Go look and watch with your own eyes. Maybe carry a gentle sign reminding that it's nice to share or care.

If only so you can see with your own eyes how restricted it actually is now. You will be outraged by how little the Constitution is being respected or taken seriously, especially the right to assemble. And petition.

Spend enough time doing it and you'll be shocked and dismayed how the police are really mainly tools of Corporatism. This violence against assembly isn't new. It's been going on for a long time.

Meanwhile I just watched the people in the park read the 1st Amendment and NYPD is apparently preparing to reply with mounted police and chemical weapons and truncheons.
posted by loquacious at 1:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [19 favorites]


Oh no. Oh no no no.

Peaceful public demonstrations are not the problem, they are a means to a solution. They are what we can point to and say, look, people can do that! This is how we can expect people not to seek violent solutions to our problems.

If this Occupy thing gets crushed with violence in the end, it will be very bad news. The use of "non-lethal" weapons that are tantamount to torture is not helping things any, either.

The thing that holds the United States together is the recognition that there are public, non-violent solutions to problems that are basically fair. Something you could point to and say, hey, put down that brick, that bat, that gun. Work out your problems; talk it out, see a mediator, go to court, by whatever means. If you laugh at this, well, that's a symptom of the problem -- that recognition has been eroding lately. This is doing nothing to rebuild it.

Over the long arc of history, the people's greviances do get handled eventually, one way or another. The purpose of democracy is to allow it to happen peacefully and fairly. When short-sighted people attempt to use petty means to put it down, they only make it worse when justice, terrible justice, arrives.

(As for Lore's piece above, well, he's written better.)
posted by JHarris at 1:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [15 favorites]


Gödel was right. As always.
posted by AndrewKemendo at 1:34 AM on November 15, 2011


For San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Berkeley this is just a flat-out lie. I'd love to know what your definition of "much of the Bay Area" is.

No, it's a careless mistake because it was 1 in the morning. Diapers should, in fact, go in the black bin. I was answering someone else's question about what "green waste" meant, a phrase that I didn't write but which appeared in a news article that I linked to. Some places do compost diapers. Sheesh.
posted by anigbrowl at 1:35 AM on November 15, 2011



Gödel was right. As always.

He may have been completely right, but I found his conclusions inconsistent.
posted by TwelveTwo at 1:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


You guys defending the right to have a dirty encampment seem oblivious to the fact that you're alienating a majority of the people who pass by you every day.

See, I think the incongruity here is that's not what people are defending. They're defending the right to gather in peaceful protest. It's fine to not totally agree with OWS. I have misgivings about OWS. I'm sure many of the people you're responding to have things they don't like or think could be more effective within OWS. That's not the point. The point is that the police launched a raid on a nonviolent protest, are refusing to allow any sort of press coverage, and there are some very disturbing reports about police behavior--mostly unsubstantiated (it looks like the tear gas story was actually a fire extinguisher), but, well, it's hard to substantiate things when you're not allowing news reporters or helicopters, isn't it?
posted by kagredon at 1:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [16 favorites]


[SF's mayoral election] was more boring than it was corrupt, which is amazing achievement considering there were like 20 people running for mayor. If elections could be as galvanizing as this OWS business you'd see more people at the polls.

I guess we should cancel public financing and ranked-choice voting then. Clearly making the electoral process too inclusive and democratic has unacceptably dampened revolutionary ardor, and we should go back to traditional mudslinging and scorched-earth politics.
posted by anigbrowl at 1:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


From Max Blumenthal's twitter:
People are planning to stay here until rush hour 7 am. The whole occupation is at bway and pine. #ows yfrog.com/nxq7tjxj
I'm pretty sure the NYPD are going to end up regretting doing this on a weekday.
posted by fight or flight at 1:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Trending on Twitter:

Trends: New York · change
#StorageWarsPromoted
Zucotti Park
#iwannabe
The NYPD
Foley Square
LRAD

#HottestPeopleOnTwitter
Broadway and Pine
#juliet
Hate Sleeping Alone
posted by Skygazer at 1:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


No, it's a careless mistake because it was 1 in the morning. Diapers should, in fact, go in the black bin. I was answering someone else's question about what "green waste" meant, a phrase that I didn't write but which appeared in a news article that I linked to.

Then maybe it's time to stop posting for the night. The person "asking" what green waste meant was me - I was pointing out that your linking to an article claiming that Oakland removed 30 something tons of trash from the encampment automatically implied that it all smelled like shit. I pointed out that you were wrong. You suggested it was 5 tons of diapers. But seriously, if you're worried about the smell, go down and work on it. It's not you vs. them.
posted by one_bean at 1:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


You guys defending the right to have a dirty encampment seem oblivious to the fact that you're alienating a majority of the people who pass by you every day.

My hometown is pretty filthy. I sure hope nobody razes it, though.
posted by wwwwwhatt at 1:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


Something important I also want to point out is that "freedom to assemble" means a lot more than simply meeting for an afternoon of waving signs and express some mild discontent with a carefully planned schedule of a march and a few speakers, all according to the permit.

The most important thing I saw happening here in Seattle was people of all ages and backgrounds meeting for the first time and talking and exchanging and inventing new ideas.

It means the ability to build and share libraries. The freedom to share food. The freedom to meet without a set or declared agenda.

Smash the kitchens and tents, throw away the libraries, make it impossible to actually assemble while preserving only the veneer of assembly?
posted by loquacious at 1:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [16 favorites]


The Ustream feed guy has a bunch of people on his case for filming people letting the air out of police tires, and he claims some guy came up to him and put an elbow his throat. Quite an argument going on right now...
posted by MattMangels at 1:55 AM on November 15, 2011


did you even try to pick up trash? Wash dishes? That kind of mundane stuff is really REALLY important

...and it's something grown-ups can do themselves.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 1:56 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Some ugliness on the Ustream feed right now. Looks like anarchists up to mischief are trying to shut down the photographer. Guy is saying they're police provocateurs.
posted by R. Schlock at 1:56 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Kinda believable that those were police provocateurs, since they were so quick to violence.
posted by telstar at 1:58 AM on November 15, 2011


Some ugliness on the Ustream feed right now.

Yeah, I've been watching that. Those "anarchists" or whatever are incredibly creepy.
posted by Skygazer at 2:00 AM on November 15, 2011


That Ustream guy has a lot of eyeballs now and he -and the provocateurs- know it. Now he's reporting that some 'protesters' attacked a cop. It doesn't bode well.
posted by biddeford at 2:03 AM on November 15, 2011


I think it's interesting that they are still using the human microphone (HM) as opposed to just acquiring a bullhorn now. It would seem that all the legal permitting of assemblage is moot given that they are moving their encampment or protest.

I wonder if it is more that the HM is ingrained and folks are used to doing it now or if it is intentionally saying "we will still keep your rules..." I lean toward the former.
posted by AndrewKemendo at 2:04 AM on November 15, 2011


See, I think the incongruity here is that's not what people are defending. They're defending the right to gather in peaceful protest.

You're missing the point. That's like saying the 1% are defending the right to have a functioning economy that creates good middle-class jobs. I'd wager that many of them sincerely believe that laissez-faire capitalism is the swiftest route to mass prosperity, but if so, then many of them are quite blind to the numerous shortcomings of the laissez-faire approach. Likewise I'm sure most of the Occupy protesters sincerely believe in making a peaceful protest, and I support them in that, but they have lost sight of their own numerous shortcomings.

There have been multiple episodes of minor violence emanating from the protesters, and several protest sites have degenerated into an unsanitary and unsafe public nuisance. It pains me to say so, but some of the Occupy protests have gone down the same bad road as the tea Party. I find making excuses for the Black Bloc just as reprehensible as the second amendment wankery and intimidating behavior of the Tea Parties, and the persistent refusal to take responsibility for anything bad reflects incredibly poorly on the occupy movement just as it does on the tea partiers.

It doesn't matter how good your intentions are if your actual behavior is perceived negatively.
posted by anigbrowl at 2:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


It doesn't matter how good your intentions are if your actual behavior is perceived negatively.

Tell that to the NYPD.

I get your point just fine, but I still think there are two totally separate arguments going on in here. One is whether OWS's shortcomings are such that they are failing in their stated mission, and the other is whether the NYPD should respond to the shortcomings by forcibly evicting people in the middle of the night while maintaining a media blackout.

If this kind of dark-of-night attack had happened to the Tea Party, I would be upset, in spite of being pretty much diametrically opposed to their politics. Wouldn't you?
posted by kagredon at 2:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [20 favorites]


Is this stream working for anybody?
http://www.livestream.com/occupynyc

I'm currently watching
http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99

Are there any others?
posted by Defenestrator at 2:20 AM on November 15, 2011


http://occupystream.com broadcasts a number of streams.
posted by syzygy at 2:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Is this stream working for anybody?

not for a while.

Are there any others?

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

Which is splitting their stream with the ustream feed depending on which one has something showing (mostly the ustream feed)
posted by enobrev at 2:22 AM on November 15, 2011


Defenestrator, the Ustream.tv/TheOther99 is the only thing going right now, and the guy is doing a pretty excellent job of covering ground and doing good camera work.
posted by Skygazer at 2:24 AM on November 15, 2011


Tell that to the NYPD.

When the OWS encampment resembles a public health hazard, then you're giving the NYPD the excuse they need. There are a lot of people that find the protests objectionable on a practical rather than a philosophical level and that are calling city officials to complain.
posted by anigbrowl at 2:27 AM on November 15, 2011


but some of the Occupy protests have gone down the same bad road as the tea Party.

Like the rapes, the ODs, and the people pooping all over the streets?
posted by codswallop at 2:30 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Are there any others?

The CBS helichopter is currently up on broadway (IIRC).
posted by titus-g at 2:31 AM on November 15, 2011


I just left Pine and Broadway, am home now and watching on livestream. This has been such a depressing night. I can't even begin to describe how heavy the police lockdown was- everyone was pushed at least a few blocks away from Zucotti park. Every street and intersection was manned with armies of police in riot gear, no matter how far away from encampment I tried to circle. The overwhelming show of force (shock and awe!) sent out to remove what's a relatively small group from a small concrete patch of parkland and stop press or onlookers from witnessing the police actions defies any explanation other than the powers that be find the ideas being expressed at OWS to be so threatening that no amount of force to stop it is too much. I have never said we live in a police state. I am saying it now.
posted by stagewhisper at 2:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [59 favorites]


When the OWS encampment resembles a public health hazard

Nope, sorry. You know what really is a public health hazard? The American healthcare system.
posted by mek at 2:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [61 favorites]


When the OWS encampment resembles a public health hazard, then you're giving the NYPD the excuse they need. There are a lot of people that find the protests objectionable on a practical rather than a philosophical level and that are calling city officials to complain.

If the point is to stop OWS from disrupting the surrounding area, why did NYPD go in at 2 in the morning after corralling anyone with a press badge far away from where they could cover the ensuing events? I still haven't seen a logical explanation for this.
posted by kagredon at 2:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


stagewhisper: I can't even begin to describe how heavy the police lockdown was

When I first tuned into the CBS feed 1/2 an hour ago or so, there really were an impressive number of people out in the street. It took a moment to click that it was actually a massive fuckload of cops corralling and kettling a significantly smaller number of protesters.
posted by titus-g at 2:49 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Seems to be moving to Foley Square
posted by adamvasco at 2:51 AM on November 15, 2011


I can't get over the clearing of the press. Then again, they got away with the "free speech zones" a few years back, so nothing should surprise us at this point.
posted by theredpen at 2:55 AM on November 15, 2011


So we're using police state tactics to protect laissez-faire capitalism?
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [24 favorites]


You know what really is a public health hazard? The American healthcare system.

Nope, what is a real present public health hazard is para-militarized cops armed with fully automatic machine guns, these guns loaded with ammunition banned by the Geneva Convention; pointed at unarmed, non-violent protesters, the cops not following the most elemental safety practices by NOT pointing their weapons at people and keeping their fingers off their triggers. Their ammunition is live and lethal over a mile's distance, so if they miss their primary target or get a ricochet, little seven year old Susy Parker asleep in her bed 9 blocks away is going to get a rapidly-expanding hollow point bullet to the brain. It's going to take ONE cop opening fire because someone threw a water balloon at him and, just like that recent incident in Florida, every cop present will empty multiple clips, striking dozens of innocent bystanders and even their fellow officers.

And the sad ending to all of this, this possible Kent State moment x20, will be that most of the people killed will not have viewed the police as their enemy. It's a tragedy that has been prevented in other municipalities but between watching the actions in Oakland and NYC, I feel those are the two flashpoints from whence will rise a new version of Ohio. And I feel absolutely wretched that these lives must be spent this way to bring about change.
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 3:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


I'm watching the choppers over Zucotti from my window half a mile away.

Feels like a police state more than ever around here.

Hey NYPD, just following orders huh?

I'm closing my last remaining account with Chase bank today in solidarity. (already closed a chase account, 2 credit cards, and a Merrill lynch brokerage acct).

If you haven't transferred your money out of a too big to fail bank, today would be a good day to do it.

The movement will get stronger. Next stop; general strike.
posted by spitbull at 3:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


NPR keeps parroting Oakland about how much the police activity is costing. Pro tip: if you are worried about cost, you might not want to shoot people in the head with tear gas cannisters who will sue the shit out of you for their (non socialized) medical bills.
posted by benzenedream at 3:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Simple solution wrt cost: don't surround people with an insane amunt of cops and choppers. The cost will go down considerably.
posted by jaduncan at 3:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. You guys defending the right to have a dirty encampment seem oblivious to the fact that you're alienating a majority of the people who pass by you every day. They're not sheeple or conditioned by the mass media or controlled by lizards, they have an understandable and entirely reasonable aversion to things like head lice and random violence. My parents-in-law (who are from North Vietnam and speak little English) thinks it's some sort of weird gypsy encampment/street party despite my wife's best efforts to explain that it's a sort of political movement.
Where's the empirical evidence that people, in large numbers, are being alienated? (more so then they otherwise would be, that is) I mean, it's all well and good if Occupy Peoria works with it's local city council, but OWS was intended to be an act of civil disobedience. If the original protest had simply been something in the middle of nowhere, with a permit, and dissipated when the permit expired, none of this would have ever started in the first place. The only reason Occupy Peoria matters is because of the movement that has actually started.

Anyway, the reason I ask about empirical evidence that people are being alienated is because we often hear about how people need to present a certain image, or whatever to be taken seriously but how true is that really? If a bunch of protesters gathered up with placards declaring "Ice cream is delicious" I doubt that people would stop eating icecream because they found the protesters themselves uncouth. The "99%" messaging is pretty inclusive, and lots of people feel they are getting screwed over by the banks pretty hard.

I've seen polling that indicates OWS is pretty popular, particularly with independent voters. Now I'm hearing that people are being 'alienated' but where are the polls?
He may have been completely right, but I found his conclusions inconsistent.
I'm not sure what AndrewKemendo meant, exactly but Gödel thought he found a 'bug' in the constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a fascist dictatorship.

I'm watching the Ustream now. They were doing the human microphone thing, then the streamer took off to look at other things. I have to say it's really damn brilliant. I've seen it used to interrupt political speeches and so on.
It doesn't matter how good your intentions are if your actual behavior is perceived negatively.
Yeah, like other people said: What about the NYPD, or the Oakland PD for that matter. Perception is a form of power. If people have a positive view of you, that gives you power. But it's not the only way you can get power.

And keep in mind there were plenty of Agent Provocateurs causing trouble in the civil rights movement. People have a really, really, sanitized version what actually happened during the civil rights movement. Plenty of people hated MLK, jr while he was alive.

---

Also, I found this comment in the 'check-in and chat' window on the Ustream
TheClitSlayer is this a joke? You bums get a job and stop crying. Ron Paul 2012!
posted by delmoi at 3:12 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Oh shit... "Our stream, earlier, was over nine thousand"
posted by delmoi at 3:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


It was over 11k at some points as I was watching in the past couple hours.

I'm just glad they found a place to hang out and not get terrorized for a bit.
posted by Defenestrator at 3:24 AM on November 15, 2011


Has anyone said, why today? What's the "official" line for why they chose this morning to do this?
posted by Houstonian at 3:34 AM on November 15, 2011


Call 212-766-3200 with a credit card ready if you want to order food for Zuccotti refugees in Foley Square in NYC.
posted by delmoi at 3:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


This is gonna be a banner day for Corte Cafe.
posted by Houstonian at 3:36 AM on November 15, 2011


Hope they're ready.
posted by Defenestrator at 3:37 AM on November 15, 2011


Menu for Corte Cafe. Do you think you order something specific, or just say, "Send $X worth of food out"? Phone line is busy...
posted by Houstonian at 3:40 AM on November 15, 2011


Mayor Bloomberg's statement on the eviction of Zucotti park.
posted by omnikron at 3:51 AM on November 15, 2011


If the point is to stop OWS from disrupting the surrounding area, why did NYPD go in at 2 in the morning after corralling anyone with a press badge far away from where they could cover the ensuing events? I still haven't seen a logical explanation for this.

Seriously? You can't formulate a good, logical reason for such tactics? Darkness provides cover. Moving in at night maximizes your control over the crowd. It also minimizes the actual number of protesters present, since there is a good portion of them that leave the scene at night. Corralling the press 1.) keeps them out of the way, and 2.) controls what they see/report. Seems logical to me from a tactical standpoint.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


> did you even try to pick up trash? Wash dishes? That kind of mundane stuff is really REALLY important

...and it's something grown-ups can do themselves.


So why don't people try to help do it? Never mind at protests, why not do it at your own damn city park? You see trash there too, right?

I swear that's relevant -- the whole "grown-ups can do this for themselves" attitude is the exact kind of self-centered, "fuck you, I can take care of myself other people should be able to do the same" attitude that is getting us into this mess. It's a short hop from that to "fuck you, I earned my billions, others should be able to as well."

What happened to "why not do something FOR other people for a change"? Why NOT pick up trash that isn't yours and improve things for everyone? Why NOT let the people getting off the subway get out first? Why NOT go to the smaller local shop and support them rather than going to wal-mart because it's cheaper?

Because "let the people getting off the subway off first" and "pick up trash that isn't yours" is how you build up to "the last shall be first" and "picking up people that aren't you and yours" and it's how the world improves for ALL of us, not just you.

For fuck's sake, grown-ups can do things themselves, but even grown-ups need HELP with shit now and then, you know?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [55 favorites]


After watching these live streams for a couple of weeks, I know I won't be able to take the broadcast TV news even vaguely seriously ever again. I hereby pronounce "The News" dead as Khaddafi.
posted by telstar at 4:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


"Corralling the press 1.) keeps them out of the way, and 2.) controls what they see/report. Seems logical to me from a tactical standpoint."

The laaand of the freeee, and the home of the brave.
posted by jaduncan at 4:20 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


My parents-in-law (who are from North Vietnam and speak little English) thinks it's some sort of weird gypsy encampment/street party despite my wife's best efforts to explain that it's a sort of political movement.

Couldn't it be all three?
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


This wave of police actions is only going to spawn a counterwave of even more strident protests
posted by Renoroc at 4:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm struck by how reasonable Bloomberg's statement sounds, to be honest. It doesn't match the reality of what happened -- describing that militarized raid and suppression of press as "members of the NYPD and Sanitation Department assisted in removing any remaining tents and sleeping bags" is farcical, and this is a real problem this country is going to have to own up to sooner or later. But I have trouble refuting arguments for reasonable restrictions on indefinite camping in a public space.

Seriously, I've been going in circles on this, because I am totally behind occupy, and I can't justify why. If someone were to ask me whether anyone should be allowed to set up camp in a public space indefinitely, I would say maybe, but I recognize we have laws against that and I can understand the need for them, because public spaces might otherwise become tent cities and eventually slums. I can respect the need to regulate such behavior because of the negative effects on the surrounding area as well as health risks to the inhabitants of such places, and the loss of the space which is meant for the public. This is essentially Bloomberg's argument, and the argument of every mayor who I've heard speak on the topic.

Does the fact that they are occupying it for a political purpose change things? I don't know. If they were right-wing nationalists would I be cheering them on? Probably not. Somehow the content of this message is what makes it important, and it trumps everything else. Often the message is derided, or the messenger ("they don't even know why they're protesting; they're lazy and should get jobs; etc") which seems to imply, to me, that IF the message was good enough and the people righteous enough, we would let them stay. But as soon as you say this out loud -- that you are requiring eviction because of what they're saying, or who they are, you've instantly lost on the first amendment. So of course the mayors are talking about health and safety, because it's all they CAN talk about. (But at the same time once I say right-wingers aren't allowed, *I'VE* lost on the first amendment. You see the difficulty of this position.)

But was this brutal police response consistent with health and safety, or with putting down a revolution? Did they respond with such force only because they feared the protesters might become violent, or did they do so because the protesters are threatening the powerful? It feels like every action is consistent with the latter, yet designed to be explained as the former. So to with the endless erosion of rights since 9/11, ostensibly in the name of safety and security, but perhaps really done to cement power for the powerful? Sometimes it feels like we live in Wonderland, where nobody says what they mean, and everything is an illusion. To the point where I wonder if maybe I am imagining all this persecution of the vulnerable; maybe's it's not even real, like they say. But if that's the case, why would they need to clear the press?
posted by PercussivePaul at 4:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [21 favorites]


My parents-in-law (who are from North Vietnam and speak little English) thinks it's some sort of weird gypsy encampment/street party despite my wife's best efforts to explain that it's a sort of political movement.

My parents-in-law, being Korean, would wonder what the hell these kids are doing sitting on their asses in parks. Back in the 80s (and many times before and since), Koreans from all walks of life took to the streets (and died in their literal thousands, in total) because they were hungry for democracy, and just weren't going to take that old shit any more.

I've often thought in the past couple of months that the OWS folks, bless their hearts, could learn a few lessons from the Korean people power movements of the late 20th century.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


PP: actions speak louder than words, which has always been how one can saw through the psyops bullshit.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:48 AM on November 15, 2011


Shit
posted by angrycat at 4:51 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


They're not allowing the protesters into City Hall to hear Bloomberg's press conference: http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99
posted by enobrev at 4:52 AM on November 15, 2011


I remember seeing news films of Korean protests. The cops were wearing helmets and carrying clubs. And the protesters...were wearing helmets and carrying clubs.
posted by tommyD at 4:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


News is they crushed the library.


I'm going to go throw up and never stop.
posted by The Whelk at 4:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


And the protesters...were wearing helmets and carrying clubs.

Not always.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


People have a really, really, sanitized version what actually happened during the civil rights movement. Plenty of people hated MLK, jr while he was alive.

Lies. A bunch of good black and white folk marched hand in hand, sang 'we shall overcome' without resistance, and then LBJ passed the civil rights bill out of the goodness of his heart.
posted by the mad poster! at 5:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [17 favorites]


This NYTimes article reports only 200 people were in the park and only 70 arrested. Are those numbers agreed upon? I had the impression there were a lot more people there.
posted by Perplexity at 5:29 AM on November 15, 2011


My father said that British police used thermal imagining at their encampments and showed that nearly everyone was going home at night to sleep. He probably heard that on Fox News, but I think it might be true regardless.
posted by gerryblog at 5:32 AM on November 15, 2011


This NYTimes article reports only 200 people were in the park and only 70 arrested. Are those numbers agreed upon? I had the impression there were a lot more people there.

Even people who believe in economic justice often like to sleep in their own bed.
posted by jaduncan at 5:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


From the mayor's statement:

From the beginning, I have said that the City had two principal goals: guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protesters' First Amendment rights.

But when those two goals clash, the health and safety of the public and our first responders must be the priority.


Methinks the mayor has gotten it exactly backwards.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 5:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


This NYTimes article reports only 200 people were in the park and only 70 arrested. Are those numbers agreed upon? I had the impression there were a lot more people there.

Gothamist says there were 400 in the park as late as 3 am.
posted by oinopaponton at 5:33 AM on November 15, 2011


There's one aspect to Zucotti Park that everyone glosses over - it's technically private property. I think it's too much to ask Brookfield Properties to take on the liability of a permanent, 24 hour protest. If something were to go wrong (through crime, or a fire, or someone suffering injury from exposure to the elements) there are sure to be a line of lawyers standing by with ideas on how to make someone pay.
posted by double bubble at 5:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Thermal imaging, that is, though I'm tickled by the idea of what thermal imagining might entail.
posted by gerryblog at 5:34 AM on November 15, 2011


If you're expecting help from those you're deriding (aka, the people who aren't letting people off the subway, or aren't helping pick up someone else's trash, or are shopping at Wal-Mart), you can't be baffled that they don't want to help you.

So, you're saying that disapproving of selfishness is a bad thing now?....When did that happen?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Maybe if the Mayor was so concerned about health and safety he could put up some potties and a first aid tent and make sure there were a couple friendly uniforms within earshot and maybe have a fireman wander through every other day to point out problems? JUST A THOUGHT
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [36 favorites]


If the police army so outnumbers the protestors, and the protestors can keep them out until rush hour, then at least the scale of the raid will be harder to hide, and some of any traffic disruption will be the result of official tactics. :-/
posted by -harlequin- at 5:37 AM on November 15, 2011


My father said that British police used thermal imagining at their encampments and showed that nearly everyone was going home at night to sleep. He probably heard that on Fox News, but I think it might be true regardless.

This, as with most Fox News stuff, was not true/incredibly misleading. It was the right wing press, not the police, and the camera was found not to be able to reliably pick people in tents up when turned down to the lowest sensitivity. The resulting photos were proven to be unreliable when the same camera was rented and people intentintionally went into tents and were not detected.

Fox News: we agitprop, you decide.
posted by jaduncan at 5:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


There's one aspect to Zucotti Park that everyone glosses over - it's technically private property.

As mentioned upthread, it's technically property made available for public use, which is a different animal altogether from simple "private property."
posted by titus n. owl at 5:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


I never should have let my guard down! Thanks jaduncan.
posted by gerryblog at 5:39 AM on November 15, 2011


@EmpressCallipygos: Sadly, I think that turning selfishness into a virtue has been a project of a significant section of the right for some time now.

Of course, heaven forfend that working and middle-class people develop the kind of healthy selfishness that demands a society organised in their interests, rather than rigged to serve a corrupt minority.

What I'm wondering is if anyone will take a leaf out of Anonymous's book and find a way to name, and then take direct vengeance on, the individuals responsible for this grotesque violation of citizens' rights.
posted by lucien_reeve at 5:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Like three helicopters just buzzed past my building, no idea whose.
posted by The Whelk at 5:40 AM on November 15, 2011


My father said that British police used thermal imagining at their encampments and showed that nearly everyone was going home at night to sleep. He probably heard that on Fox News, but I think it might be true regardless.

That was published in one of the London newspapers, but later debunked.
posted by PercussivePaul at 5:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Mod note: I understand that people may feel their blood boiling about events, but please let's not turn this discussion personal and/or use it as a way to vent by attacking other users
posted by taz (staff) at 5:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


My father said that British police used thermal imagining at their encampments and showed that nearly everyone was going home at night to sleep. He probably heard that on Fox News, but I think it might be true regardless.

If you need some hard evidence, from the Guardian: Occupy London empty tent claims based on "rubbish science".
posted by fight or flight at 5:44 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


I've been to Zuccotti Park three times. The first two times (late September and early October) I was able to enter the park, buy myself a halal chicken on the food cart, find a place to sit, and have my lunch while checking out the protesters. In other words, I was somewhat able to *use* the park - the protesters were definitely occupying it, but it wasn't an overwhelming presence (never mind the constant fucking drumming, of course).

I had to go to Jersey City last week and decided to stop by again on my way back after I got of the PATH, and maybe do the same thing - go in there, check out what's going on. This time I couldn't. Zuccotti park became a tent city, packed to the gills. It was hard to go in, impossible to move in there, not to mention the shitload of *very* dodgy looking types walking about. I'm sorry to say folks, but the whole thing had become a very real health and safety hazard. The silver lining was that the drummers were on a curfew, but outside of that, it was clear that Zuccotti Park was growing out of control.

Another thing that called my attention was the SHITLOAD of cops around the area, needed to police the thing. The apparatus just looked expensive, with all the overtime NYPD must be spending on it.

So yesterday I saw the news that on Thursday, to mark the 2-month anniversary of the occupation, the protesters were planning on shutting down the NYSE and then march to Brooklyn Bridge, which struck me as the most idiotic of moves at this point. Honestly, if that was really the plan, the protesters overstepped their bounds, and there's the result now.
posted by falameufilho at 5:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Though I abhor the eviction and the NYPD's tactics (and the NYPD), in some way I see this as forward movement.

OWS will only get anywhere if its got enough staying power to persist for years, and the live-in-tents fever-pitch thing isn't sustainable for that long. If the movement can be destroyed by being thrown out of a couple of encampments, then the movement isn't sustainable. If it can be destroyed by a winter, it isn't sustainable.

I think/hope there's a lot of desire to reorient OWS to put it onto a more sustainable and longterm long-game footing, and this might provide just the impetus that we need.
posted by tempythethird at 5:53 AM on November 15, 2011


As mentioned upthread, it's technically property made available for public use, which is a different animal altogether from simple "private property."

Sure, but in the world we live in, there's going to be a grieving parent who will be willing to believe that Brookfield is negligent in allowing the protest to continue regardless is how misguided it was for their idealistic child to attempt to sleep outdoors through a blizzard. From the company's perspective, that's risk of, at a minimum, significant legal costs.
posted by double bubble at 5:57 AM on November 15, 2011


So long as the reasons that led to the Occupy protests doesn't go away, I don't think the protests will either. There's always another spot to gather, at least until every city decides to go full-on police state and forbid all public gatherings.

Zucotti was the start, but I doubt it's the finish. I hope it isn't.

Re the "dodgy types" and trash, etc, I had seen from several sources reports that cops themselves were directing homeless people to go to Zucotti; and of course they tend to have gotten indifferent to dirt, which is what living on the street does to you. At any rate, would the city have allowed portapotties or other means of alleviating sanitation issues? Doubtful.

As others have said, it's...interesting the extreme amount of police manpower and resources devoted to what has been a very peaceful protest by and large. Considering that your average major city usually has other crimes to deal with, ones that actually threaten the lives and health of citizens.
posted by emjaybee at 5:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


hippybear: "Or is any attempt to resist "peaceful" unconstitutional police action now "violent" simply because it involves something other than immediate and total capitulation?

Yup, pretty much. If you don't follow a police order, you're violating something and need to be immediately subdued and arrested.
"

Oh for pete's sake.

By your logic, all that's necessary to silence dissent is to have police officers demand that people disperse every time there's some kind of protest. And if the protesters don't, well, then they are being violent and any kind of force is acceptable to subdue them.

Oh wait, that is exactly what has been increasingly happening.

I like the term nonviolent resistance. You are resisting, but doing so in a non-violent way. If I lie down and refuse to move, I am causing physical harm to no one, whether or not I am disobeying police orders to do so. If and when they forcibly remove me, they may or may not choose to use violence to do so, but I have been non-violent. Their violence is their own fault, not mine.
posted by Deathalicious at 6:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]




wwwwwhatt: "I think it's probably relevant that this raid is occurring two days before this."

For posterity, "this" is the November 17th International Day of Action, abbreviated as N17.
posted by Deathalicious at 6:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I'm saying that saying "you're selfish, now come help us" is a pretty self-destructive position to take.

*shrug* If that's how you interpreted what I was saying, I'm not sure what I can do about that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


msalt: "Keep cool, stay non-violent, figure out the next move. My suggestion? #occupyvotingbooths"

Oh sure, just after #occupycandidateswhoarentshillsforcorporateinterests
posted by Deathalicious at 6:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


emjaybee: "I had seen from several sources reports that cops themselves were directing homeless people to go to Zucotti"

I am going to call bullshit on that for the 1000th time. I am not say it didn't happen at all, as the odd cop may have felt like trolling the occupation by sending a homeless guy their way, but accounting for the bulk of dodgy people (not all of them homeless, a lot of them just fucking dodgy types looking for some action, whatever you can define as action) on a police action of sending them to Zuccotti park assumes that homeless people and dodgy types would never go after free food and shelter by themselves. Occam's razor, people. There's a party going on 24/7 with free food, shelter and college girls and you expect these guys to not show up?
posted by falameufilho at 6:11 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The word on Twitter is that they've got a restraining order against the police and the marchers who left the park on a Direct Action (planned in advance and unrelated to this raid? a spontaneous response to the raids to get some people out of the park for a few hours and fire them up to retake it later?) are on their way back to retake the reopened park. A call is going out for reinforcements, and lawyers have been called in to serve the restraining order directly to the police at the park. This ain't hardly over yet.
posted by Scientist at 6:13 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The live stream is pretty interesting now, they're presenting the court order, trying to head back to Zuccotti: http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99
posted by Perplexity at 6:15 AM on November 15, 2011


The dude on The Other 99 stream is going around telling people about the temporary restraining order. Gears are turning as both NYPD and the Occupiers figure out what to do with this.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:16 AM on November 15, 2011


I'm somewhat amused by the idea that people are now inspired to take Foley Square, in addition to Zuccotti Park. Way to manage blowback, NYPD.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


double bubble, that doesn't change the legal realities of what the park is and that it isn't simple private property.
posted by titus n. owl at 6:22 AM on November 15, 2011


I honestly think it's for the best to shut these things down for the winter, anyway. Everyone who made contacts there should keep in touch, and spend the next few months planning for the spring. Bigger and better and more organized.
posted by empath at 6:23 AM on November 15, 2011


free food, shelter and college girls
posted by falameufilho

"Girls," huh?

You continue to confirm my initial impression of you at every turn.

Know this for a fact: every ham-handed effort by the police state we live in to shut this movement down has, to date, led to a nearly exponential increase in public support and recruitment. This will be no different.
posted by spitbull at 6:26 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


kagredon: "When the OWS encampment resembles a public health hazard, then you're giving the NYPD the excuse they need. There are a lot of people that find the protests objectionable on a practical rather than a philosophical level and that are calling city officials to complain.

If the point is to stop OWS from disrupting the surrounding area, why did NYPD go in at 2 in the morning after corralling anyone with a press badge far away from where they could cover the ensuing events? I still haven't seen a logical explanation for this.
"

Yeah, isn't much easier to clean up when it's sunny and you can actually see what you're doing? No wonder the police accidentally destroyed so much private property. Oh, if only they'd had the foresight to do this during the day. Or even come up with some kind of logistics plan so the occupiers could gather and pack up their things! They'll do things better next time, when they have more than 2 months to come up with a plan.
posted by Deathalicious at 6:26 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


For all the talk about garbage, drums, and whatnot, let's take a moment to consider this:

Of all the city's resources, they deployed a militarized NYPD against the encampment at Zuccotti Park.

Is that really about health and safety? About noise? About possible fire code violations?

Come on.

That's repression. And that was going to happen whether or not there was a smell, there were drums, or whatever.
posted by entropone at 6:26 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


.
posted by likeatoaster at 6:27 AM on November 15, 2011


Oh no, "dodgy types" in addition to noise and bad smells? Arrest everyone immediately! I'm beginning to think that the police apologists among us believe LRAD, batons, and pepper spray to be cleaning devices. Let the mighty hand of Cop sanitize our great nation from head to toe!
posted by RogerB at 6:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


...because public spaces might otherwise become tent cities and eventually slums....

If true, we should examine just why people would choose to live in tent cities or slums. Political protest aside, the only reasons I can think of for people making such a choice is that it is the only one they have, or they are mentally ill. In either of those cases, making the activities illegal seems like the wrong approach.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


...the protesters overstepped their bounds, and there's the result now.

Why is the implicit assumption always that the protestors have to know their place or stay inside some "bounds" but NOT that big banks and insurance companies need to?
posted by DU at 6:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [16 favorites]


If that restraining order is real, that's amazing. I hope these OWS folk hang in there.

Be brave. Clench fists.
posted by dazed_one at 6:31 AM on November 15, 2011


Cops aren;t obeying the order, groups are at land owned by Trinity church, which has allowed them to stay.
posted by The Whelk at 6:31 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Whenever I'd stopped by OWS, I was always staggered at how organized it was. I wouldn't have known where to start, as far as randomly stopping by to clean.

Also, word is that Trinity Church will host the Occupiers.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:31 AM on November 15, 2011


...that was going to happen whether or not there was a smell, there were drums, or whatever.

Full support of OWS, anarchist, glad of this morning's injunction against the police, &c, &c. However, this WOULDN'T have happened, definitely not today, if the people in the park had actually had their shit together enough to clean and manage it. Yeah, they were hobbled by the city's choice not to allow portapotties and generators. Yeah, they were being constantly intimidated by a huge police presence all the time. But they had a whole heap of political good will, and not a lack of money on which to actually set up cleaning crews, some sort of planning committee for tents, self-imposed curfews and standards of behavior, etc. Being a filthy anarchist means being an iron self-disciplinarian, not a carefree hippy. If the place wasn't littered with garbage and developing a seedy element, this raid wouldn't have happened. Not today, at least.
posted by cthuljew at 6:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Wow, I didn't know Frank Miller had this much influence. (seriously though, stay safe)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


I didn't see fucking trash anywhere in the plaza at any fucking time and I was there all the fucking time.
posted by The Whelk at 6:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [24 favorites]


However, this WOULDN'T have happened, definitely not today, if the people in the park had actually had their shit together enough to clean and manage it.

I do not believe that for one single second.
posted by inigo2 at 6:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


there WAS an organized clean up crew and they were amazing
posted by The Whelk at 6:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]


I agree OWS should become more robust and better organized. I'm not in a position where I can camp out in a park for a week (my six year old wouldn't get it) but I'm in full support of the movement even as it currently exists. Tear this shit down, set it on fire and start over. Wouldn't be the first time.
posted by PuppyCat at 6:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


If the place wasn't littered with garbage and developing a seedy element, this raid wouldn't have happened.

You really believe that? Really?
posted by Think_Long at 6:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


PercussivePaul: "If someone were to ask me whether anyone should be allowed to set up camp in a public space indefinitely, I would say maybe, but I recognize we have laws against that and I can understand the need for them, because public spaces might otherwise become tent cities and eventually slums."

Slums are also a form of political protest. They are an signifier that the economic system in which those people live is so fundamentally unjust that the possibility of legally obtained housing is unreasonably difficult. Yes, many in the OWS can afford things like rent and food, but still. Distasteful as they are, slums serve an important purpose: they broadcast the existence of poverty.
posted by Deathalicious at 6:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Saw this thread, turned on CNN, thinking they'd be covering the story in some way; instead, I get stories about Black Friday shopping, Jay-Z getting the GQ cover, and the Penn State creepercoach.

Crappy News, ow.
posted by weirdoactor at 6:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


That's repression

Well look - if its really repressing the voice of the people, then the people will rise up again, if its clearing out a bunch of people looking for "Free food, shelter, and college girls" no one will care. As others said above, it was inevitable that something like this would happen.

Bloomberg's and Kelly's decision making just seems terrible here, unless they are using polling that says most NYers disagree with the OWS movement, in which case its the will of a large group of people (who yes, might be acting against their own interests it must be said). My read was the movement was not grabbing popular support at the rate it needed to in order to grow - w/o getting into a discussion on why that is - and the protest was likely to slowly wither away.

Note: I tend to think it was a terrible decision, and I tend to think the movement will continue, hopefully get stronger, but I don't think Bloomy is willfully stupid. He's a lot of things, but not that.
posted by JPD at 6:35 AM on November 15, 2011


I was there last week and walked all around the park. I didn't notice any garbage or foul smells. Not sure where this meme is coming from, but it's not reality.
posted by gwint at 6:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


IT IS FURTHER ORDERED, that, until this matter is heard on the date set forth above, respondents/defendants are prohibited from:
(a) Evicting protesters from Zuccotti Park, a/k/a Liberty Park, exclusive of lawful arrests from criminal offenses; and/or
(b) Enforcing "rules" published after the occupation began or otherwise preventing protesters from re-entering the park with tents and other property previously utilized.
The restraining order is making the rounds online right now.
posted by RogerB at 6:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


I agree with what was said above. in recent weeks Occupy has seemed increasingly fixated on the right to sleep outside in winter, to the exclusion of everything else. But this is not sustainable, especially in the context of increasingly violent confrontations with police. Someone is going to get killed defending what started out as *symbolic* but seems now to be becoming the actual focus.

The movement needs to be bigger than encampments now.
posted by gerryblog at 6:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


If the place wasn't littered with garbage and developing a seedy element, this raid wouldn't have happened.

This explains why even the poorest NY neighborhoods (not to mention the subway) are always sparkling clean. The city cares deeply about cleanliness.

How about we stick to the real explanation: The Powers That Be want the protests to stop.
posted by DU at 6:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


If the place wasn't littered with garbage and developing a seedy element, this raid wouldn't have happened.

There already were organized cleaning crews, there already were standards of behavior, there already were strict curfews on things like drums, etc. which is why there was almost no litter at Zuccotti Park.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


because @Iron_Spike is a pearl beyond price

"Before OWS, The Repub's fave topic was the lack of jobs. Post-OWS? "Get a JOB!" Srsly? No disconnect at all there? Great work, everybody."
posted by The Whelk at 6:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


You really believe that? Really?

Absolutely. It may have lasted another month or two before the huge and inevitable raid.
posted by cthuljew at 6:39 AM on November 15, 2011


More from Twitter:

Michael Hastings, contributing editor to Rolling Stone: Mayor Mike "Mubarak" Bloomberg said journalists were barred from covering the raid "to protect members of the press." #ows

How brazen would you have to be to release an official party line involves the admission that the police evacuation plan was so aggressive and indiscriminate that it necessitated the "protection" of bystanders...?
posted by Phire at 6:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


cthuljew, as someone who was there, a lot, recently, let me say it was both the cleanest fucking tent city I have ever fucking seen and not once did I pick up any "seedy element", maybe it was all the grandmothers and grad students helping out. They where blocking my view of the seedy.
posted by The Whelk at 6:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [25 favorites]


AND IN NYC POLITICAL NEWS: Christie Qunin is going to have to come up with some SUPER AMAZING EXPLAINATION about why she doesn't truck with any of this blocking the press shit if she wants my vote.
posted by The Whelk at 6:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


The latest tweet from the Mayor's Office- MB: We were ready to re-open the park at 8am, but will wait until court order - which we haven't seen yet - is clarified. #OWS Court order- that's the restraining order he's referring to?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:43 AM on November 15, 2011


People complaining about the dirtiness of the camps - do you really believe that public sanitation is the reason the police cleared them out? Do you really think that the police are that concerned about odor control? I live a few miles south of a sewage treatment plant; in order to get downtown I have to take a bridge that goes directly over it. It will make me gag if I leave my windows down. Should I call the police?
posted by desjardins at 6:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


That tweet from the Mayor's office is totally ridiculous, as the parties were served sometime around 6:30am.
posted by likeatoaster at 6:44 AM on November 15, 2011


I remember when the city ordered the NYPD to clean out that garbage filled empty lot near my friend's place in Bed-Sty with all the rats and needles ....oh wait.
posted by The Whelk at 6:44 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


The Whelk: I will take that under due consideration. I'd read a few stories that contradicted what you said (for what good that is), and am in part responding to what I've seen a bit of at OccupyMN, where there is some mess and disorganization (although having fewer people and not allowing tents mitigates things a lot). If what you're saying is right, then, well, fuck da police (and the State, etc), and this was just another raid on another peaceful protest. I just get upset when I hear about supposedly left-wing people completely failing at self-organization, as I've heard about these protests all around the country — with, of course, varying amounts of spin and credibility. I perhaps spoke more harshly than I should have.
posted by cthuljew at 6:45 AM on November 15, 2011


Probably would not have happened on a Republican watch, it occurs to me this morning. In that people could maintain the illusion that only if they were in control, things could change for the better. It took a Democrat (with a platform of change) to show people that the system is broken and not changing without the system changing.

Very interesting times.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 6:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


We were ready to re-open the park at 8am, but will wait until court order - which we haven't seen yet - is clarified

The hearing's at 11:30, right? So are they just going to ignore the order until they get their "clarification", meaning wait until the hearing is over?
posted by Think_Long at 6:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Is there a general strike happening? The sanitation department hasn't picked up trash or recycling here in Brooklyn for over a week now.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 6:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I understand your skepticism cthuljew, but the Wall Street encampment was better run then the majority of music festivals I've been to. Hell it had more services then some towns I've lived in. The infrastructure! The Planning! The resources! They had grey water recycling for christsakes.
posted by The Whelk at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


desjardins: The dirtiness wasn't a good reason for this to happen. Without it as an excuse, this wouldn't have happened yet.
posted by cthuljew at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2011


How brazen would you have to be to release an official party line involves the admission that the police evacuation plan was so aggressive and indiscriminate that it necessitated the "protection" of bystanders...?

A good amount of the powers that be in NYC are basically organized thugs. (Good time to relisten to this.) But until now, for all his faults, I didn't count Bloomberg in among the thugs. Guess I was wrong.
posted by tempythethird at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


As a crazy thought experiment, let's start from the presumption that the city is acting in relative good faith and see if we can make that work.

Bloomberg increasingly gets reports from his advisers that the city and/or Brookfield is facing immense legal liability and public outrage if someone dies or is seriously hurt in the camp. From a public health perspective, indications are that the level of sanitation in the park has become unacceptable. Additionally, local interests are increasingly losing patience with the protest (there are people who live nearby, though admittedly not right on the park; more importantly to me, there are about 20 or so vendors who make a shoestring living selling food to office workers down there, including the world's nicest chicken and rice guy, and I worry about how they're making out).

So let's say that the decision to clear the park was made, and maybe you don't agree with the reasons, but they're not so terribly nefarious. It's a decision that really comes from a balancing of competing interests in a way you have to do in a crowded city. Frankly, the city's general willingness to leave people alone at Zuccotti Park for two months has purchased them a little credibility in my book.

Given that decision has been made, is there any other way this could have been executed? There's a lot of concern being expressed over the paramilitary police, etc., but let's face it, protesters would not leave if asked nicely. This is probably the minimum level of organization and force that could plausibly guarantee that they could clear the park without anyone getting hurt.

I don't really know what I think about it, but I'm not so certain this is such an evil thing. I just think it's worth complicating our understandings of what's going on beyond this us/them oppositional logic.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


The media narrative wins again in general, and at least makes a very strong showing on MetaFilter. Protesters have to be fucking perfect. But cops and government? Well, shrug! Cops gonna cop; government's gonna gov.
posted by ignignokt at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [34 favorites]


The sanitation department hasn't picked up trash or recycling here in Brooklyn for over a week now.

MASSIVE POLICE RAIDS ON BROOKLYN IN INTEREST OF PUBLIC SAFETY.
posted by Think_Long at 6:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Also: imagine what it's like to be handled by police and see the press being hustled out of sight.

Imagine.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 6:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [21 favorites]


Is there a general strike happening? The sanitation department hasn't picked up trash or recycling here in Brooklyn for over a week now.

I dunno where you are, but our recycling day is Tuesday morning, which happens to have been Election Day last week, which is one of those holidays that city workers have off but nobody else thinks of. So there was a lot of recycling sitting on the curb for a long while this week.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 6:49 AM on November 15, 2011


The other side
posted by The Whelk at 6:49 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


I support Occupy, and I do earnestly want to see dramatic radical change. But what can I do to help? I sit here at work in Central Illinois in a medium-sized town where I think there might be a smallish #occupy movement but I have only seen them once. I have to pick up my three-year old daughter after work and make sure she has dinner and fun and is read to before bed time. I can't risk losing my job.

I believe, and am outraged. But what can I do?
posted by tr33hggr at 6:49 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


The seediest thing I saw at OWS was when a guy was being loud and unhappy and then the other Occupiers drowned him out by singing "You Are My Sunshine."

The seediest thing I ever heard of? here was a sexual assault at OWS. The (alleged) perpetrator was booted from the park and his picture was posted all over the place to prevent him from ever, ever coming back.

This is basically exactly what happened in my neighborhood when there were four or five sexual assaults (and attempted rapes). The perps were not caught, but their sketches are everywhere.

Even for all that, I don't consider Park Slope to be all that seedy. The cops certainly haven't raided us (yet).

MB: We were ready to re-open the park at 8am, but will wait until court order - which we haven't seen yet - is clarified. #OWS Court order- that's the restraining order he's referring to?

Yes. The City has to appear at a hearing at 11:30am to show cause.

I'd read a few stories that contradicted what you said (for what good that is), and am in part responding to what I've seen a bit of at OccupyMN, where there is some mess and disorganization (although having fewer people and not allowing tents mitigates things a lot).

I've been stopping by Occupy quite a bit. Check my Flickr if you don't believe me. Those "stories" are completely off.

I can't speak for OccupyMN, just as - at the risk of sounding curt - you can't speak for OWS. I believe you if you say that OccupyMN has a hygiene problem. However, at OWS, there is a very palpable sense of order. It feels more like a little town than it does like a stereotypical tent city.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:50 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Given that decision has been made, is there any other way this could have been executed? There's a lot of concern being expressed over the paramilitary police, etc., but let's face it, protesters would not leave if asked nicely.

Are you SURE they wouldn't have done?

As for "other ways this could have been excecuted" -- advance notice, informing residents that this WAS mandatory but giving them a few hours to pack up their stuff, would have been VASTLY preferable to storming in at 4 am, chasing everyone away and then tearing down tents -- including tearing down the medical tent while someone was inside of it being treated -- and ripping everything to pieces with their bare hands.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:52 AM on November 15, 2011


occupiers on the march.....
posted by The Whelk at 6:52 AM on November 15, 2011


Though their cause is just and right, I am a bit leery of how they make themselves felt. They have been largely ignored by the entities they would change: Wall Street and Congress. Those two groups have gone merrily on their way, paying no heed to those crying for change.

Is there a way to make legitimate issues and complaints made so as to bring needed change?
what ideas come to mind?
posted by Postroad at 6:53 AM on November 15, 2011





Is there a way to make legitimate issues and complaints made so as to bring needed change?
what ideas come to mind?


Revolution?
posted by dazed_one at 6:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


and ripping everything to pieces with their bare hands.

Hey you think when you're dumping 5 thousand books into a sani truck it ever crosses the mind of the people doing it that destroying a library is what the bad guys do?
posted by The Whelk at 6:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [46 favorites]


March has split into two, some going back to the plaza, some at the Trinity property
posted by The Whelk at 6:55 AM on November 15, 2011


they are about to reach the plaza...

http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99
posted by The Whelk at 6:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


So let's say that the decision to clear the park was made, and maybe you don't agree with the reasons, but they're not so terribly nefarious. It's a decision that really comes from a balancing of competing interests in a way you have to do in a crowded city.

There's a mental change that needs to happen, but hasn't happened yet. These protests aren't something to be tolerated for a month or two, and then enough's enough.

We live in a society that has failed so thoroughly that, until major reforms happen, there will be no normal. We do not get normal. We should learn not to expect normal.

This is what instability looks like. The only way to get rid of it is to make the needed reforms, or to become a police state. Bloomberg and the like don't yet realize this. They think they can say "enough's enough" without resorting to Iranian tactics, but they can't. They'll realize this soon enough.
posted by tempythethird at 6:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


ha ha a black bloc jerk just got GROUP SHUNNED
posted by The Whelk at 6:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


and they're right in front of the ghostbuster's fire house!
posted by The Whelk at 6:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Another shallow eyewitness's two cents. I was there over the weekend, and my impressions were:

The park was completely choked up with tents, making it hard to move around. You've got to have your shit very together when operating above capacity like that, and I thought they were more or less up to the task. The level of organization was impressive. Donations being taken in and handed out, the kitchen, the teach-ins, etc. Apart from some of the people, it was not smelly; certainly not the open sewer Bloomberg was making it out to be.

As for the memetics and optics, my impression was one of stagnation. On-site, the energy and importance of the 99% movement was diluted in the mix of the standard issue lefty grab bag of causes. Please don't misunderstand me! I'm not against freeing Tibet, building schools in Chiapas, or feeding the homeless. But I'll admit that my selfish priority is re-establishing the social contract at home. (My pet issues: Campaign finance reform, class consciousness, reinvigorating Labor, making Democrats act like Democrats.) IMHO, now that the dialog has begun, a diaspora might not be a disaster.

Finally, wow there was a big police presence. They also struck me as really well organized. In hindsight, I should have recognized the pieces being put into place.
posted by whuppy at 6:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


fuck these occupy guys. As part of the 99%, it really pisses me off that they think they are speaking for me.
posted by H. Roark at 6:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Since when is Howard Roark part of the 99%?
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [34 favorites]


Is there a way to make legitimate issues and complaints made so as to bring needed change?
what ideas come to mind?


Your point's a good one, Postroad.

I think protestors are reacting to the fact that they don't really have a realistic way to "speak" to the government and the business world. The problems are too deeply entrenched to really discuss in a concrete way. It took something as silly and absurd as camping out near Wall Street to get masses of people to even talk about those economic issues which had been boiling for the past 30 years.

The best choice at this juncture would be to feverishly campaign for local and national politicians who will help fix the problems which have plagued the United States.

Electoral reform would be my number one issue, if I had to pick one. Campaign finance reform as another, if I had to pick two. Both of those would have to be Amendments, though, which is rough considering the group of jerks that we have in Congress, a few exceptions here and there.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:00 AM on November 15, 2011


tr33hggr: I believe, and am outraged. But what can I do?

Everybody's a specialist in something. I'm in Iceland, a whole ocean away, and while I do my tiny bit for Icelandic change, I've also done some translation work into Icelandic for OWS. It's a million degrees removed from anything that will change the world, it is what I can do and at the very least it won't hurt the cause.

You have knowledge and contacts that no one else has, find a way to channel that. There are tons of various OWS working groups and a network of local organizations that support OWS or are in sympathy with their aims. There is plenty you can do, all you have to do is go look. Start Googling, start asking your friends and acquaintances. You probably won't change the world on your own, but just like it take a thousand ants to build a mound, it takes a thousand humans to change anything.
posted by Kattullus at 7:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]



fuck these occupy guys. As part of the 99%, it really pisses me off that they think they are speaking for me.
posted by H. Roark at 9:59 AM on November 15 [+] [!]


Funny thing; I'm fairly certain the OWS people would fully endorse your right to voice your dissent with them in a protest. I bet they wouldn't get the cops in to evict you were you to do so.
posted by dazed_one at 7:02 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


tr33hggr: I believe, and am outraged. But what can I do?

Educate yourself. Find a part of the movement that you find interesting and maybe confusing and check a book out of the library that seems like it might have something worthwhile to say about it.

Become more politically active, especially in local politics where your voice carries more weight. Call or write your local government and let them know that you support the Occupy movement, and that you vote in local elections.

Check up on the activities of whichever Occupations are closest to you and maybe make a point of stopping by if you can, when there's an event such as a march or a teach-in or a featured speaker that interests you.

Send donations of money and/or supplies, if you can afford it. Your support and solidarity would be greatly appreciated by the people who are making the commitment to actually go out there and protest in person.

Follow the movement on the internet, keep up with developments, and talk to people about what you're hearing and seeing. Keep the conversation going, make sure that people know that you know that the world is fucked up, that you can see through the lies, and that you're outraged and want change.

These are some possibilities, anyway. There are thousands of ways to commit to making positive social change. You don't have to be out there, not everyone can be. But you can still be a part of reshaping our society.
posted by Scientist at 7:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


On-site, the energy and importance of the 99% movement was diluted in the mix of the standard issue lefty grab bag of causes

See also: Anti-war protests, 2003 and 2004.
posted by empath at 7:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Damn UStream guy's battery is dying, he's been daisy chaining the camera off a mac book
posted by The Whelk at 7:05 AM on November 15, 2011


thanks for updating here, whelk.
posted by qnarf at 7:05 AM on November 15, 2011


So UStream guy accidentally gave out his phone number on the air while trying to get a new battery, which caused everyone on the internet to phone him, which cut off his stream (it was from a camera phone) so that's a nice bit of 21st century detail right there.
posted by The Whelk at 7:09 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


I love this goofy, affable conversation on UStream about getting the guy a new charger.

See also: Anti-war protests, 2003 and 2004.

You know, though, in retrospect, I don't think there was anything those marches could have done anyway. The Bush Administration had war fever. The US had war fever. The falseness of the WMD accusations wouldn't be proven until later. The failure of the neoconservative prediction that they'd "welcome us as liberators" wouldn't be proven until later.

Which is not to say that those marches weren't also plagued with "FREE MUMIA" etc.

(NB: I didn't see "FREE MUMIA" at OWS until about a month in. Good job, guys!)
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:10 AM on November 15, 2011


"we're dealing with the trolls" "trolls?" "You know ....internet."
posted by The Whelk at 7:13 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The problem with marches is that everyone involved knows that that's all they are. That's what makes OWS different and makes me so excited about it as a whole. Everyone knows that the marchers will show up, make their demands "heard", and then leave. Which means, 24 hours from now, the only evidence that there had been a march is the abandoned cardboard signs. Occupy is here to stay. Occupy you might be able to ignore for a month, but two? Three? Six? I hope actions like this will make it grow. I really hope this raid brings a lot of new blood into the mix.
posted by cthuljew at 7:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Police, bull horns, on motor bikes "ON THE SIDEWALK. THE SIDEWALK!"
posted by The Whelk at 7:15 AM on November 15, 2011


(oh and in the chat channel, to combat people reposting his number, they're flooding it with fake numbers, I love you internet)
posted by The Whelk at 7:17 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Funny you should mention that, empath. At the beginning of OWS, several of my bleeding heart compadres' reaction was to point'n'laff at the dirty hippies. (OK, that's not fair. It was more like condescension to their naive and ineffectual ways.) I had to send them a bunch of links to bolster the case that this was something different. After telling them about this weekend I'm getting a bunch of toljya so's. Sigh.
posted by whuppy at 7:17 AM on November 15, 2011


they're like six blocks away now.
posted by The Whelk at 7:17 AM on November 15, 2011


* put Les Miserables on his iPod *

Glad I'm not the only one listening!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:19 AM on November 15, 2011


Whelk, where are you and what's their route?...I've heard a few conflicting things.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:21 AM on November 15, 2011


Sizable homeless encampments certainly shouldn't be permitted in New York City parks so I for one am glad. While I hate Giuliani, I think he would have handled this better than Bloomberg did.

Looks like I may have missed my chance to go down there and see it. This whole time I really wouldn't have known that OWS existed if I hadn't occasionally read about it online.
posted by knoyers at 7:21 AM on November 15, 2011


I'm at home watching the stream, the peel off march is right in front of the Hilton Millennium right now
posted by The Whelk at 7:21 AM on November 15, 2011


At the beginning of OWS, several of my bleeding heart compadres' reaction was to point'n'laff at the dirty hippies.

I thought OWS was incredibly stupid at first. Then OWS changed my mind.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


"Arrestees for this morning are being released, all headed straight to Duarte Square"
posted by The Whelk at 7:23 AM on November 15, 2011


they're at the park, police still blocking it off.
posted by The Whelk at 7:24 AM on November 15, 2011


Police not letting anyone in. Barricades are still up.
posted by The Whelk at 7:24 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Thanks for the live updates Whelk
posted by Think_Long at 7:26 AM on November 15, 2011


First they ignore you - check
then they laugh at you - check
then they fight you - happening right now
then you win.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:26 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


U stream battery dead, now showing clip of a performance from a while ago, and I can not for the life of me get livestream to work.
posted by The Whelk at 7:27 AM on November 15, 2011


I believe, and am outraged. But what can I do?

I don't know how much I can do to help OWS other than be a silent supporter -- or support in the ways suggested by Kattullus and Scientist -- but my belief is that you are already helping by not falling for the media/government/law enforcement meme that these are a bunch of dirty hippies that need to be cleaned out to make life normal again for all of the "rest" of us. That meme has multiplied in the past few weeks, for whatever reason, after a very brief window during which the movement was given at least some sympathetic coverage by the media. Now it's dirty hippies 24/7. I look at the one-sided coverage being given the Occupy Oakland movement and cringe -- but then what did I expect from the Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times (the Times' coverage is actually slightly less rabidly "clean the bums out" than the Chronicle's).
posted by blucevalo at 7:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


How are the barricades up? Isn't that directly violating the restraining order, which explicitly states that the NYPD are "prohibited from preventing protesters from re-entering the park"? What the fuck, like you can just ignore a restraining order if it suits you?
posted by PercussivePaul at 7:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


While I hate Giuliani, I think he would have handled this better than Bloomberg did.

Wait.

You're saying that the mayor that got accused of 35 First Amendment violations during his stint as mayor, and lost 22 Civil Rights violations lawsuits, would have handled a First Amendment issue better?

Are you out of your cotton-pickin' mind?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Top stories on Today Show (NBC) this morning: Penn State nearly 15 minutes, Justin Timberlake, Pippa Middleton. Was something interesting happening across town from the studios? Who knew?
posted by Stoatfarm at 7:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


If anyone missed it, Deathalicious and wwwwwhatt observed that Thursday 17 November is International Day of Action, aka #N17.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:28 AM on November 15, 2011


I thought OWS was incredibly stupid at first. Then OWS changed my mind.


Interesting. I had almost the exact opposite opinion. For the last three years I've been sitting around waiting for people to wake up to the fact that we were losing this crisis as a way to roll back decades of terribly de-regulation, and I thought OWS was going to be people finally figuring that out. Once they made it clear they weren't interested in working towards that, but instead was some much bigger amorphous movement I sort of gave up. Admire what they are doing, don't think they are likely to be successful even though I would like them to be.

Also the early days student loans thing really really struck me as politically deaf. Not something you can build a mass movement off of.
posted by JPD at 7:29 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Occupy is here to stay. Occupy you might be able to ignore for a month, but two? Three? Six?

It's obvious that the city governments aren't ignoring this, and have no incentive to allow this to go on indefinitely, as it can cost millions a month in city maintenance and law enforcement.
posted by FJT at 7:29 AM on November 15, 2011


Giuliani would have left the city tarred and feathered if half the stuff he did to clean up the city was caught on cell phone cameras and posted to YouTube.
posted by griphus at 7:29 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


YEOWZA he's back. Kinda. They are trying to deliver the court order to the police.
posted by The Whelk at 7:31 AM on November 15, 2011


Giuliani would have had everyone shot and fed to geese
posted by The Whelk at 7:31 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


I'm glad to see 'em go - its about time.
posted by blaneyphoto at 7:31 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Police are refusing to acknowledge the order. ......
posted by The Whelk at 7:31 AM on November 15, 2011


griphus: "Giuliani would have left the city tarred and feathered if half the stuff he did to clean up the city was caught on cell phone cameras and posted to YouTube."

Do you think pre-Giuliani New York was a better place or just disagree with the methods?
posted by falameufilho at 7:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


The antiwar protests of 2003 are, in part, directly responsible for OWS. In that they didn't work. I was there, they were amazing...so many people you never actually got to the end of the route before the march ended. But the media dismissed it and nothing changed and nobody in power gave a shit. So liberals were demoralized and concentrated on the elections, got Obama in, briefly felt hope, then that crashed again as we realized how much he lacks any true liberal values. (or at least the will to act on them).

And then everything went to hell economically and stayed there. And Tahrir Square happened.

And here we are. What's next? It's not going to be "everyone goes home and shuts up" because we're all still screwed.
posted by emjaybee at 7:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


"Each and everyone one of these officers is in violation of a court order, sir do you know? Do you know about the court order stopping you from doing what you're doing now? He says No."
posted by The Whelk at 7:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm glad to see 'em go - its about time.
posted by blaneyphoto at 10:31 AM on November 15 [+] [!]


The cops, because of the restraining order, right?
posted by dazed_one at 7:32 AM on November 15, 2011


I'm glad to see 'em go - its about time.

You do realize that nobody is going anywhere, right?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


A thought, after being appalled at seeing how aggressively (and how easily) the press was cowed and pushed out of the picture by the cops -- this seems like a place where do-it-yourself UAVs could come in really handy. Rather than big, noisy news choppers -- citizen journalists sending up small, quiet cameras with wings, painted matte black. They don't have to be fancy, $6K pieces of kit (best not in any case, because a drone that isn't controlled by the police could escalate the tension unnecessarily) -- you can make a UAV carrying a $37 HD pocket camera out of balsa wood. I don't know that much about the technical specifics -- could you create a reliable eyes-in-the-sky livestream? How quiet can the motors get, and how tightly can they be controlled? What about thermal imaging, for what's going inside the tents during the police raid? -- but I'm looking forward to learning. I enormously admire the courage of the livestreamers on the ground, but I want records of the raid that can't be taken out with a baton or a phone call, and which provide a comprehensive look at the riot squad (and which doesn't put people into immediate danger in the line of fire). This would be a great hackerspace project. Festo Penguins for the people!
posted by finnb at 7:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [19 favorites]


Top stories on Today Show (NBC) this morning: Penn State nearly 15 minutes, Justin Timberlake, Pippa Middleton. Was something interesting happening across town from the studios? Who knew?

Now it's dirty hippies 24/7. I look at the one-sided coverage being given the Occupy Oakland movement and cringe -- but then what did I expect from the Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times (the Times' coverage is actually slightly less rabidly "clean the bums out" than the Chronicle's)

Propaganda and lack of media control is a bitch isn't it?
posted by lpcxa0 at 7:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


hey NPR, do you want another cent of my donation money? Well why not live coverage of the super exciting thing happening in the middle of a major world city?
posted by The Whelk at 7:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [31 favorites]


Police are refusing to acknowledge the order
Then it's time to send in the National Guard, like they did in the 50s.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Just wanted to weigh in as another person who went to OWS last week and it wasn't smelly at all. It was very crowded.

I went by Foley Square about 30 minutes ago and there were about 20-30 protesters there, a bunch of them in sleeping bags around the fountain. There was a lot of press and two of the few protesters there had full facial tattoos. I wouldn't be surprised if they figured prominently in some MSM "lookit those rabble-rousing freaks" coverage.
posted by Mavri at 7:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Do you think pre-Giuliani New York was a better place or just disagree with the methods?

The latter. Not to Godwin this for the sake of a Godwin, but his cleanup of NYC is definitely a "at least the trains run on time" sort of affair.
posted by griphus at 7:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


CNN finally mentioned the OWS story...for thirteen seconds. The Jay-Z on the cover of GQ story got four and a half minutes. Sigh.
posted by weirdoactor at 7:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Do you think pre-Giuliani New York was a better place or just disagree with the methods?

Honestly, I think a couple elements of pre-Giuliani New York were indeed better.

Some elements were improved, yes, but at what cost? How much money did the city lose paying for Giuilani's defense when he violated the Constutition?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


International Day of Action

Oh gee, they're really invoking Tiananmen Square? The poster does look nice, but I don't really see much relation between Tiananmen and what's going on in Zucotti Park.
posted by FJT at 7:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Great idea, finnb. Here's a lo-tech variant: Stash a whole bunch of cheapo cameras everywhere and turn them on (remotely if possible) when the hammer's about to drop. Also! How about tethering them to helium balloons?
posted by whuppy at 7:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


It was pretty heavily covered on NY1 this morning, which is to be expected. It was kind of like, weather, fine? traffic fine? Ok, let's look at this shot of the mayor's podium and wait for the press conference to start.
posted by sweetkid at 7:38 AM on November 15, 2011


Regarding the OWS library that got trashed - anyone know what titles were in the collection? Had a bibliography been kept?
posted by Hesychia at 7:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


according to scanner people are marching down Broadway to return to Liberty/Zucotti
posted by The Whelk at 7:38 AM on November 15, 2011


From the mayor's statement:

The dangers posed were evident last week when an EMT was injured as protestors attempted to prevent him and several police officers from helping a mentally ill man who was menacing others..

Throughout, and especially in Oakland, the homeless, mentally ill and drug addled have been regarded as dangers or threats--both to the movement and to the police and residents nearby. They're seen as unwanted parasites by some movement participants, and used as pretexts for police crackdowns.

Yet homeless people, drug addicts and the mentally ill are the gravest, most representative symptoms of the problem of maldistribution of wealth, not troublemakers or parasitical hangers on. They exist in such numbers because of deep flaws in the flow of money and healthcare. They suffer most from the system, and should be treated as the core of any movement for justice.
posted by Gordion Knott at 7:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [41 favorites]


At the beginning of OWS, several of my bleeding heart compadres' reaction was to point'n'laff at the dirty hippies. (OK, that's not fair. It was more like condescension to their naive and ineffectual ways.) I had to send them a bunch of links to bolster the case that this was something different.

It is something different, but it's really kind of a symptom of a problem with society. OWS is 'unrest' of a peculiar and unusually organized kind, probably made possible because of twitter, facebook and other forms of social media, but it's still civil unrest and has the same cause as other forms of civil unrest. If this particular manifestation of that unrest is put down by police tactics without attacking the underlying cause (economic inequality, lack of political representation and so on), then it's going to keep popping up in more and more forms, and the tactics used to suppress it will become more and more authoritarian, and the unrest will adapt more and more radical tactics to oppose the suppression. It's a spiral that's going to be hard to stop without either some real political leadership in Washington or a miraculous turn around in the economy.
posted by empath at 7:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


and this would be them - http://occupystreams.org/item/occupy-nyc-liberty-plaza
posted by The Whelk at 7:38 AM on November 15, 2011


could you create a reliable eyes-in-the-sky livestream?

Someone did something like this in Warsaw. Although I don't think that was broadcast live.
posted by Serf at 7:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Once they made it clear they weren't interested in working towards that, but instead was some much bigger amorphous movement I sort of gave up. Admire what they are doing, don't think they are likely to be successful even though I would like them to be.

The amorphousness wound up being a strength in addition to a weakness. OWS will not directly produce useful legislation, of course. However, it has reframed political discussion among people who would otherwise be disconnected from one another or apathetic in general. OWS itself featured many political fringe types and kooks, but it has produced useful conversations amongst people - even, say, my liberal-ish Rockefeller Republican mom, who liked Bush in 2000, but who grew to hate Republicans eventually, especially when the Tea Party.

When I would stop by OWS, I'd get into conversations here and there, especially with moderate-looking people who were trying to figure out either unclear or extreme sign-holders. It always seemed like it was actually pretty easy to draw out common ground between myself, a 19-year-old with no clear political agenda, a Marxist in his early 40s, and a moderate working guy in his 50s who liked Reagan but feels uneasy about America nowadays. I have OWS to thank for helping start some of the only really productive discussions about how our government keeps repeating the same class of mistakes that it made during, say, the Savings and Loan debacle.

My hope, which may or may not come true, is that people will remember OWS as being a weirdly articulate interruption in the usual conversation. In the back of their minds, some people will always be thinking - is this just more of the usual self-serving 1% bullshit? How does this benefit myself and everyone else? What can we do differently?
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]




Apparently Oakland has some dissent in the ranks of the mayor's office, very interesting.
posted by lpcxa0 at 7:41 AM on November 15, 2011


sa·ni·ta·tion·sub·ju·ga·tion (noun): when a mayor suspends freedom of the press in order to "clean".
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 7:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


I agree with what was said above. in recent weeks Occupy has seemed increasingly fixated on the right to sleep outside in winter, to the exclusion of everything else. But this is not sustainable, especially in the context of increasingly violent confrontations with police. Someone is going to get killed defending what started out as *symbolic* but seems now to be becoming the actual focus.

The movement needs to be bigger than encampments now.


I agree. This problem of survival logistics overwhelming the attention to communication and message and growing the numbers of the movement is a serious one. In the last OWS thread I posted this great observation from an interesting piece by Hendrik Hertzberg:
For O.W.S., though, there is danger ahead. Winter is coming. The strategy of static outdoor encampments is straining the patience even of sympathetic mayors in cities like Oakland, where last week riot police stormed the site and a Marine veteran was left in critical condition. If the weather and the cops pare the numbers in the camps, it’s far from unimaginable that ideologues in the mold of the Old New Left—people for whom the problem is “capitalism” per se, as opposed to a political economy rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of the rest—could end up dominant. As it is, the Occupiers’ brand of romantic participatory democracy can too easily render their decision-making vulnerable to a truculent few. In the most notorious example, Representative John Lewis, the revered civil-rights hero, was prevented from speaking at Occupy Atlanta—not because the crowd didn’t want to hear from him (the great majority did, as they signalled, in the movement’s semaphore language, with raised hands and wiggling fingers) but because one man clenched his fists and crossed his forearms, thereby exercising a consensus-breaking “block.” A vegan filibuster, you might say. The pollsters tell us that Americans like O.W.S.’s essential message. They like the Occupiers, too—not as much as they like the message, but more than they like the Tea Party. But if the pressures of hypothermia, frustration, and correcter-than-thou one-upmanship converge to push them toward more provocative, less mellow forms of civil disobedience—“occupying” a nice warm state capitol building, for example—the messenger
posted by Miko at 7:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


finnb, the citizen camera copter thing has been kinda done recently. Although I've no idea if it's a live stream (rather doubtful).
posted by hat_eater at 7:43 AM on November 15, 2011


arrests happening as people attempt to re-take the square, cops continue to defy court order.
posted by The Whelk at 7:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


straining the patience even of sympathetic mayors in cities like Oakland

That level of ignorance is not going to produce insightful analysis.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 7:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez Arrested, Injured at Occupy Wall Street Raid
posted by The Whelk at 7:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


100 cops inside the park, more and more people surrounding it.
posted by The Whelk at 7:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


A helluva lot more brown people in the streams than have been portrayed in MSM accounts. Lots more non-hippyish, middle-aged, respectable-looking folks, too.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Visual
posted by The Whelk at 7:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Propaganda and lack of media control is a bitch isn't it?

Right, that's exactly what I think I was saying. But yeah! It's a real bitch and a half!
posted by blucevalo at 7:48 AM on November 15, 2011


Is anyone else F5ing to see if The Whelk has new info? Great stuff!
posted by weirdoactor at 7:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I wish I had enough faith in the people of this country to imagine rank-and-file police defying their orders and joining the protesters ala the February Revolution. That would be so cool to see....
posted by cthuljew at 7:49 AM on November 15, 2011


whelk, which stream are you on? i'm not finding one that works...
posted by qnarf at 7:49 AM on November 15, 2011


This one is working now: http://occupystreams.org/item/occupy-nyc-liberty-plaza
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:50 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Seeing that picture that The Whelk just linked made me sort of panicky freak-out laugh to see all of this happening on Liberty Street.
posted by shiu mai baby at 7:50 AM on November 15, 2011


I'm not on any stream, I'm following twitter, Alternet has some reports out in the field
posted by The Whelk at 7:50 AM on November 15, 2011


A helluva lot more brown people in the streams than have been portrayed in MSM accounts. Lots more non-hippyish, middle-aged, respectable-looking folks, too.

Yeah, when I was there, I was really struck by the number of middle-aged to retirement aged people, and the diversity. There were a couple of older ladies sitting together knitting. I really wish I'd taken a picture of them, but I was too shy to ask. The media has badly misrepresented the demographics of the OWS people.
posted by Mavri at 7:50 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution works but it's the group at Canal, not down at the plaza.
posted by The Whelk at 7:51 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


A helluva lot more brown people in the streams than have been portrayed in MSM accounts. Lots more non-hippyish, middle-aged, respectable-looking folks, too.

This seems true overall and is something that makes me really excited about how this movement can be different.
posted by Miko at 7:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


apparently the protestors are reading the court order aloud to the police.

http://twitpic.com/7eii7u
posted by The Whelk at 7:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


thanks whelk and moonpie
posted by qnarf at 7:53 AM on November 15, 2011


A helluva lot more brown people in the streams than have been portrayed in MSM accounts. Lots more non-hippyish, middle-aged, respectable-looking folks, too.

Hippies were a minority at OWS. Most of the people at OWS were pretty damn respectable-looking, especially on the north side. Lots of middle-aged and older people, groomed no differently than anyone else on the streets.

My completely unscientific take on the OWS demo was that the hippies hung out at the drum circle, the gutterpunks hung around the "smokes and phones" kiosk, the knitting grandmas hung out on the west side, and everyone else hung out on the north side. The tall guy with the Chinese flag just sort of roved the circumference - he was like one of those sucker fish you put into aquariums.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:53 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


Thanks for the OWS Library link, Whelk!
posted by Hesychia at 7:53 AM on November 15, 2011


Thanks Whelk, great updates. And MANY thanks for the link to the library site. I have tons of books sitting about, time to put them to good use!
posted by tr33hggr at 7:54 AM on November 15, 2011


Mayor says removed property is in "storage"
posted by The Whelk at 7:54 AM on November 15, 2011


There are now more people marching around the perimeter of Zuccotti than were in it when the NYPD closed it down.

New sign on the barricade
posted by The Whelk at 7:55 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Whelk, what are the best hashtags for this?
posted by Miko at 7:56 AM on November 15, 2011


"#nypd ordering ppl surrounding prk 2 keep moving in circle"

OCCUPY CAUCUS RACE
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:56 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


new sign on the barricade -

Oh that sign "for passive recreation" that is golden.
posted by tempythethird at 7:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


(from twitter) NYPD: Not one of you thought "You know, if this were a comic book, someone in a cape would be kicking our ass for this."

Court hearing is set for 11:30
posted by The Whelk at 7:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


The strategy of static outdoor encampments is straining the patience even of sympathetic mayors in cities like Oakland

Hertzberg is great, but Jean Quan is not a "sympathetic mayor," she's a vacillating bureaucrat who was on the other side of the continent when the Occupy movement started there.
posted by blucevalo at 7:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME.
posted by davelog at 7:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Miko #OWS is good and general but following the @OccupyWallStreet twitter is good too, @elliotjustin is there on the scene and @Alternet has reporters there
posted by The Whelk at 7:58 AM on November 15, 2011


and in pure triva news "And if it matters to you Hollywood fans, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was around #OWS chatting, filming the scene w/a little camera and monopod."
posted by The Whelk at 7:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]




This is getting bad - I'm reading across twitter feeds that people are still being arrested at Zuccotti with the police refusing entry even in light of the new court order.
posted by lpcxa0 at 8:00 AM on November 15, 2011


Are there any streams up?
posted by quodlibet at 8:01 AM on November 15, 2011


Oh that sign "for passive recreation" that is golden.

(cut to a shot of a man sullenly tossing a ball to another man, who simply stands there and lets the ball bounce off of him)
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [35 favorites]


Mayor Bloomberg confirms that he is "the decider" in this morning's #OWS press conference.

Man yells at cop: "you are the occupiers. You're occupying our park"
posted by The Whelk at 8:02 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


If NYPD is held in contempt of court, who would arrest them? The county sheriff? The state police?
posted by weirdoactor at 8:02 AM on November 15, 2011




There is going to be sweet, delicious blowback if NYPD is found in contempt of court.

People who wanted to roust the occupiers will now be on the other side of the law and order argument.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:03 AM on November 15, 2011


Man continues "you're union guys. We're so proud of you and the work you did on 9/11. Look at the position they put you in"

Tweets have split between the people there and the people heading to the courthouse.

Damnit, someone get a livestream up
posted by The Whelk at 8:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Is President Obama AWAKE?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


@TanaGaneva RT @AriBerman Others live-tweeting from zuccotti park: @allisonkilkenny @JoshHarkinson @nancyscola @elliottjustin #ows
posted by The Whelk at 8:05 AM on November 15, 2011


Is President Obama AWAKE?

Skyrim.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [59 favorites]


Is President Obama AWAKE?

Yeah, but Shilling for the Finance Industry is too cozy and doesn't want him to get out of bed yet.
posted by cthuljew at 8:06 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Sticherbeast's was better.
posted by cthuljew at 8:06 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


chuljew's was much more accurate.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Some occupiers making nypd style announcements to cops: nypd, ur in violation of court order, please move out of our way #ows
posted by The Whelk at 8:08 AM on November 15, 2011


There is going to be sweet, delicious blowback if NYPD is found in contempt of court.

Yeah, but you know as well as I do that the NYPD is more-or-less invulnerable. There might be a show trial or some slapped wrists or, at worse, someone important has to fly a desk for the rest of his career (at full pay, of course) but they're not going to suffer.
posted by griphus at 8:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


For those asking this stream is up right now

http://occupystreams.org/item/occupy-nyc-liberty-plaza

Not 100% sure where they are at but many are getting arrested right now.
posted by Phantomx at 8:08 AM on November 15, 2011


Another arrest. Interestingly they're bringing arrested INTO park (to make an example?)
posted by The Whelk at 8:08 AM on November 15, 2011


Ha, I was an intern in an office where Lucy Billings worked as a poverty law advocate. She's fucking brilliant.

Also, I think Bloomberg misread the situation here, and the testiness that is creeping into his voice during the PC is going to certainly bite him in the ass.
posted by angrycat at 8:09 AM on November 15, 2011


"I'M A JOURNALIST"
posted by The Whelk at 8:09 AM on November 15, 2011


BACK ONLINE

http://www.ustream.tv/theother99
posted by The Whelk at 8:10 AM on November 15, 2011


I've been very critical, increasingly critical, of OWS over the past weeks but one thing that makes my blood boil is police violating the law, whether during the clearing of the park or after the court order. NYPD needs to be handed a defeat here.
posted by Anything at 8:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Not to Godwin this for the sake of a Godwin, but his cleanup of NYC is definitely a "at least the trains run on time" sort of affair.

Some of the responses to OWS clearly illustrate the huge benefit to the powers that be of keeping the trains running on time. People will tolerate -- even defend -- an astonishing level of injustice and curtailing of freedoms, so long as they aren't personally inconvenienced.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 8:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Cops with clubs moving into Canal Street Protest
posted by The Whelk at 8:11 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]



SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME.


The sign does not say it's a crime. I'm all for the protestors, and I am sure I will get blasted for this, but it is a privately owned park and the owners have the right to allow or not allow whatever they want. There are signs at the strip mall down the road from my house that have signs posted saying no skateboarding or bicycling allowed. Presumably for the safety of those not doing those things and to protect themselves against potential lawsuits if someone is injured.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:11 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Confirmed 200 arrested in total, more arrests going on, 5 min from the court hearing to review the injuction, every one of the protestors has a copy of the injustion.
posted by The Whelk at 8:12 AM on November 15, 2011


Can't somebody call in some cops to enforce that restraining order?
posted by dazed_one at 8:12 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


er 15
posted by The Whelk at 8:13 AM on November 15, 2011


holdkris99: See this, this, etc.
posted by cthuljew at 8:13 AM on November 15, 2011


everyone waiting for news from the court.

"You can see the NYPD enforcing a private rule and not a public law" Another march has arrived at the plaza singing We Shall Not Be Moved.
posted by The Whelk at 8:14 AM on November 15, 2011


...what the fuck, I turned away and it turned into barely concealed low intensity counter-insurgency.
posted by jaduncan at 8:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


The NYPD's calculus is pretty obvious - they had to basically ignore the show-cause order for 3h 30 - not a long time. I assume they think they'll win the hearing this morning, and it is a much more dangerous operation to remove the protestors from the park when they know its coming.

Probably why they did't get a court order in the first place, and I'm sure they assumed they would get hit with the order they got this AM.

Again, not stupid people. The risk is they get held in contempt, but given either they'll win or lose later today that's actually not a huge threat.
posted by JPD at 8:16 AM on November 15, 2011


Oh man the last thing salvaged from the park was an American flag, which is now being marched around.
posted by The Whelk at 8:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Can't somebody call in some cops to enforce that restraining order?

I'm not sure if you're being ironic, but the NYPD operates as a single unit, like an army. Regardless of the law of the situation, you do what they tell you to do. The higher-ups say bust the protestors, you bust the protestors. The fact that there's a restraining order doesn't matter because a) you're not going to get into shit for breaking the law because there's a whole big, complicated system set up to keep you from getting in trouble like that (unless you're the fall guy) and b) any shit you get into from breaking the law is trumped tenfold by shit you can get into from not doing what the NYPD tells you to do. The NYPD can protect you against your breaking the law because they told you to, the law can't protect you from the NYPD deciding you're a liability.
posted by griphus at 8:17 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


I've been very critical, increasingly critical, of OWS over the past weeks but one thing that makes my blood boil is police violating the law, whether during the clearing of the park or after the court order. NYPD needs to be handed a defeat here.

This is what I meant about blowback. NYPD will face no serious legal consequences to this, but Bloomberg's actions could turn public opinion further towards OWS.

However, the city is showing by its actions that it's all too willing to violate court orders to get the Occupiers out. Compare this response to the response faced by the people who caused, directly or indirectly, the 2008 financial crisis. Compare this response to some of the seemingly nutty things that OWS had been crowing about. It turns out that they've been basically right about a great deal of things.

The government is far more interested in clearing out a tent city than it is in actually upholding the law, let alone than it is interested in improving society.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:17 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


BoingBoing is reporting that the barricades have been torn down?
posted by cthuljew at 8:17 AM on November 15, 2011


more and more media appearing, "sometimes we don't allow media close to police action for their protection" which I read as police officers are a threat to journalists.
posted by The Whelk at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I remain fucking amazed with my jaw on the floor. Deliberately ignoring a fucking court order like it didn't even exist. As if the courts don't even matter. What happens when the NYPD chief gets convicted of contempt of court? Can he just refuse to go to jail? Maybe they'll just arrest the fucking judge, just for fun. Damn.
posted by PercussivePaul at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


If NYPD is held in contempt of court, who would arrest them? The county sheriff? The state police?

The New York City Sheriff is
...the chief enforcement agency for the New York State Court System. The Sheriff and Deputies service a great variety of mandates, orders, warrants and decrees for the Courts. ...

Based on Federal, New York State and City laws, statutes, acts and procedures, designated members of the New York City Office of the Sheriff have the authority and power to:
1. Execute any arrest, warrant, order or judgment, etc., for the New York Supreme, Family, Surrogate’s, County, Criminal, District, City and the Civil Courts.
posted by Jahaza at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yes, I've read all of that, maybe I misspoke. I did not mean that they have any kind of right to enforce what they post on the signs, but certainly, as owners of the park, the have the option to do what they can to keep the park safe for all people using the park
posted by holdkris99 at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011


Barricades look up on the stream - http://www.ustream.tv/theother99
posted by quodlibet at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011


Oh, and if the city thought that the policing was the expensive bit, they might be just about to have an exciting conversation with their lawyers about breaching a a court order using force in a first amendment case.
posted by jaduncan at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


barricades have been torn down?

No, they have not.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011


Legal point of order: since the temporary restraining order was obtained sometime this morning (I think in response to the eviction), and then the hearing was set for today (11:30am), aren't the police within their legal authority to not recognize the order until the hearing happens and issues a result? At the point the hearing date/time was set, doesn't the situation get put on hold until the outcome is available?

I don't know enough about the legal nuances; genuine question. Also, please correct me if I have the timeline wrong.
posted by ceribus peribus at 8:18 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


What happens when the NYPD chief gets convicted of contempt of court?

That's like asking "what happens if the president gets convicted of treason?" circa Iran-Contra. It just doesn't work like that even if the facts are clear as day.
posted by griphus at 8:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yes everyone go watch the stream, I'm just repeating back info

Barricades still up, some batons unholstered
posted by The Whelk at 8:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


ceribus peribus: no, the reason that it was a temporary restraining order was that it was supposed to be in effect only until the hearing could take place. It is specifically supposed to prevent the police from doing anything (like evicting people) before the hearing.
posted by enn at 8:20 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Er, I thought that the City got a stay of the restraining order pending the hearing this morning. Is that wrong?
posted by angrycat at 8:21 AM on November 15, 2011


Bloomberg's actions could turn public opinion further towards OWS.

I totally agree with you, but that's so obvious I really believe they have a bunch of polling that shows people are tired of OWS.

Deliberately ignoring a fucking court order like it didn't even exist.

I'm not a lawyer - is there someone here who can speak to the difference in practice between a show-cause + TRO as compared to more permanent forms of court orders? I suspect that might be at the root of why the NYPD is so willfully ignoring the order.
posted by JPD at 8:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]




Yes everyone go watch the stream, I'm just repeating back info


Yes, and also please donate to the cause for the stream.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


angrycat, that's incorrect.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:22 AM on November 15, 2011


angrycat, I don't think that's accurate.
posted by enn at 8:22 AM on November 15, 2011


I assume they think they'll win the hearing this morning, and it is a much more dangerous operation to remove the protestors from the park when they know its coming.

I agree that the NYPD would probably win a hearing, but you're not supposed to violate the restraining order in the interim.

Legal point of order: since the temporary restraining order was obtained sometime this morning (I think in response to the eviction), and then the hearing was set for today (11:30am), aren't the police within their legal authority to not recognize the order until the hearing happens and issues a result? At the point the hearing date/time was set, doesn't the situation get put on hold until the outcome is available?

Your understanding is wrong. The police do not have the legal authority to ignore the restraining order. The restraining order issued by the court forbids the police evicting the occupiers, from preventing the occupiers from entering, and from enforcing the new rules. Check the bottom of page 2.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:23 AM on November 15, 2011


National Lawyers Guild atty. tells me they're seeking instant contempt finding for NYPD. Unsure what'll happen if cops don't comply

Video of scuffle from a few minutes ago.
posted by The Whelk at 8:24 AM on November 15, 2011


A massive dawn raid, and when told the leave, those fearless intrepid investigative reporters response is "right away sir!"?

Journalists, Newspapers, Media keep whining about going out of business, and that bloggers can't and don't do the kind of investigative reporting that Real News Agencies can.

It's all true. But the whiners overlook that they're not doing their job, and haven't for years. And when you don't do your job, you end up unemployed. Not because the system is rigged (it is), but because you deserve to be.

Like when the Whitehouse was pushing a case for starting a war, and the press investigation of the politics and agendas was to ask hardball questions like "Shit YEAH! Let's go to WAR! Because... YEAH! WOOO!"

Buying news is something I do. Subscriptions, etc. A huge reason newspapers are going out of business is because they offer nothing of value. By choice.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:24 AM on November 15, 2011 [20 favorites]


Jahaza, do you have the number for the NY Sheriff's office? Should we be calling them and voicing our support for their enforcing the court order?
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 8:24 AM on November 15, 2011


I swear that's relevant -- the whole "grown-ups can do this for themselves" attitude is the exact kind of self-centered, "fuck you, I can take care of myself other people should be able to do the same" attitude that is getting us into this mess. It's a short hop from that to "fuck you, I earned my billions, others should be able to as well."

Or 'fuck you, I'm protesting, so I don't have to pick up my trash'?

What happened to "why not do something FOR other people for a change"? Why NOT pick up trash that isn't yours and improve things for everyone? Why NOT let the people getting off the subway get out first? Why NOT go to the smaller local shop and support them rather than going to wal-mart because it's cheaper?

Actually, I do pick trash that isn't mine, I hold doors open for people as a matter of course, I shop local by choice and always have. I think it's very important to walk it like one talks it. I do not respect the people who drop trash in the street. Usually I'll just put the trash in the bin, but occasionally I'll walk right up to them and put their trash back in their hand and tell tehm to that they ought to put it in the trashcan. That usually makes them mad; too fucking bad.

Because "let the people getting off the subway off first" and "pick up trash that isn't yours" is how you build up to "the last shall be first" and "picking up people that aren't you and yours" and it's how the world improves for ALL of us, not just you.

So where does dropping trash fit into this picture?

For fuck's sake, grown-ups can do things themselves, but even grown-ups need HELP with shit now and then, you know?

Is this like day 1 of Occupy when #needsoftheoccupiers included a birthday cake?

Hertzberg is great, but Jean Quan is not a "sympathetic mayor," she's a vacillating bureaucrat who was on the other side of the continent when the Occupy movement started there.

Really.

In July 2010, Quan along with fellow City Council member and mayoral candidate Rebecca Kaplan were investigated by Oakland police for their actions during a protest following the manslaughter verdict of former BART Police officer Johannes Mehserle. Police claimed Quan and Kaplan joined a "human chain" which prevented officers from clearing a street, while the two countered they were acting as "peacekeepers".

Quan had impeccable progressive credentials right up to a few weeks ago.

The government is far more interested in clearing out a tent city than it is in actually upholding the law, let alone than it is interested in improving society.
posted by anigbrowl at 8:26 AM on November 15, 2011


National Lawyers Guild atty. tells me they're seeking instant contempt finding for NYPD. Unsure what'll happen if cops don't comply


as they should, but it seems like that's exactly what the NYPD's cynical ploy was. They knew they real hearing would be underway before the OWS could get any other court orders submitted and signed.

Also would it be a mischaracterization to say the TRO/Show-Cause is basically "Don't change anything until you've explained to the court why you want to make those changes" rather than "They have a legal right to be there"
posted by JPD at 8:27 AM on November 15, 2011


A massive dawn raid, and when told the leave, those fearless intrepid investigative reporters response is "right away sir!"?

A friend-of-a-friend is a journalist for a well-known NYC media org. He's in custody right now. Careful not to paint with too broad a brush.
posted by saturday_morning at 8:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


They didn't get a stay? Shiiiiit. Thanks for the correct.
posted by angrycat at 8:27 AM on November 15, 2011


Given that it's a State court, in an imaginary small-scale facedown I'd suppose it would be the NY State Police that would be in a position to enforce an injunction or TRO against NYPD officers. However, it's entirely impracticable in this situation. I suppose in fantasy-land a governor might attempt to use the state's National Guard, but that's even sillier. (And I'm not sure how that worked under posse comitatus, even when southern governors did it during the civil rights struggle.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:28 AM on November 15, 2011


The salvaged flag is now inside the park...
posted by The Whelk at 8:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


holdkris99: "it is a privately owned park and the owners have the right to allow or not allow whatever they want"

That's the crux of the issue, right there. The assumption that private property magically supersedes the owner's obligation to the larger community is a ruinous fantasy.

You don't own any property but by the consent of those around you. The great "innovation" of our economic and legal system is to make it appear possible to get around that axiom—for a limited time. But the axiom isn't a rule, it's an observation.

You don't legitimately own a park if you deny the public the peaceful use of it.

The larger point is that you don't legitimately own your profits if they are earned by inflicting harm on the commons. MOST of the money on Wall Street harms the commons, and for that reason, the occupation of private Zucotti Park is a superb symbolism.
posted by maniabug at 8:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Thanks for the clarification; I guess I was thinking that granting the hearing (instead of denying a hearing) automatically bestowed a stay on the TRO.
posted by ceribus peribus at 8:29 AM on November 15, 2011


The number provided to us to complain against violation of our court order has been shut down.
posted by The Whelk at 8:29 AM on November 15, 2011


Also would it be a mischaracterization to say the TRO/Show-Cause is basically "Don't change anything until you've explained to the court why you want to make those changes" rather than "They have a legal right to be there"

The latter. On its face, the TRO explicitly forbade the police from evicting the occupiers, preventing the occupiers from entering the park, and enforcing the new park rules.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:29 AM on November 15, 2011


over a dozen media now at park. Better late then never guys.
posted by The Whelk at 8:29 AM on November 15, 2011


at courthouse "Lawyer jokes Bloomberg/Brookfield's lawyers prob sitting in a penthouse sipping champagne before showing"
posted by The Whelk at 8:30 AM on November 15, 2011


You're saying that the mayor that got accused of 35 First Amendment violations during his stint as mayor, and lost 22 Civil Rights violations lawsuits, would have handled a First Amendment issue better?

Yes. Giuilani, what with his fascist personality, would never have tolerated squatters and homeless people literally moving into a park and compromising cleanliness, quality of life and public safety in the vicinity for several months. And he would have been right in my opinion. And by the way the First Amendment forgot to mention the right to be a squatter in a park.
posted by knoyers at 8:31 AM on November 15, 2011


The larger point is that you don't legitimately own your profits if they are earned by inflicting harm on the commons. MOST of the money on Wall Street harms the commons, and for that reason, the occupation of private Zuccotti Park is a superb symbolism.

but,
You don't legitimately own a park if you deny the public the peaceful use of it.


I don't necessarily buy that. That's way to general of a statement. There are plenty of privately owned parts (in Texas anyway) that completely deny access to the public.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:32 AM on November 15, 2011


*owned parks.

Freudian slip there maybe.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:32 AM on November 15, 2011


Police are shoving, ignoring restraining order. "I don't think the officers seem to care that they're breaking the law."
posted by The Whelk at 8:32 AM on November 15, 2011


On its face

yeah - that's kinda what I'm getting at. I can read the actual doc, the question is really about the nature of TRO/Show-causes vs Permanent Injunctions. Ignore what the actual doc says.

Would explain why the NYPD isn't apparently too concerned about the repercussions of ignoring the TRO for a few hours.
posted by JPD at 8:32 AM on November 15, 2011


Look, the media should definitely be covering the fact that *it was barred!!!* from covering this. That. That is a Huge Story. However, anyone who is complaining that the journalists are a bunch of wusses for not finding a way in to the square was not on the ground last night, It was impossible. The entire surrounding area including the #2 subway station was in complete lockdown. There was no way in. Trust me on this.
posted by stagewhisper at 8:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Police are refusing to talk to the cameramen, of course.
posted by The Whelk at 8:33 AM on November 15, 2011


The entire surrounding area including the #2 subway station was in complete lockdown.

Some entrances of the Wall St. 2/3 stop are STILL in lockdown.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:33 AM on November 15, 2011


I would love to see the police physically rip the American flag from a protester's hand, and I would love to see that picture on the front page of every newspaper. It would be the photo of the century.
posted by desjardins at 8:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


yes the media needs to repeat "we were barred" as loudly as possible, now is the time to throw a freaking fit.
posted by The Whelk at 8:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


UStreamer is collecting badge numbers.
posted by The Whelk at 8:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Exclusive prediction: the NYPD may let the protesters in if the hearing is going badly, then turn around and argue in the same hearing that no ongoing harm is occuring and everyone should understand that the confusion prevented them reasonably being expected to tell the police that people were allowed into the park until that moment.

Side note: there is really nothing that Obama won't ignore until it's safe to make noise, eh?
posted by jaduncan at 8:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


And by the way the First Amendment forgot to mention the right to be a squatter in a park.

...and the Second Amendment mentions being part of a militia, and the Fourth Amendment doesn't mention electronic wiretaps.
posted by weirdoactor at 8:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


I don't think the officers seem to care that they're breaking the law.

The law might as well not exist if you can't enforce it.
posted by empath at 8:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


"How many legions does the pope have?" in other words.
posted by empath at 8:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


First Amend does mention right to assemble.
posted by angrycat at 8:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


It's incredibile, banks get 16 TRILLION dollars (google for it) in bailout, banking profits are high, banksters bonus are still high and some people complains that OWSers maybe are "smelly" and "piling up" a lot of trash?

Sanitation problem in a small public park is a problem?

50 million U.S. people without health insurance and 50 million U.S. people living below the poverty line, these are fucking huge problems, nevermind some trash in some park.
posted by elpapacito at 8:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [33 favorites]


there is really nothing that Obama won't ignore until it's safe to make noise, eh?

Due legal process is running it's course. Not quite sure what you expect him to say or do. Send in the national guard?
posted by anastasiav at 8:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yes. Giuilani, what with his fascist personality, would never have tolerated squatters and homeless people literally moving into a park and compromising cleanliness, quality of life and public safety in the vicinity for several months. And he would have been right in my opinion.

You might want to ask what it means when you find yourself siding with somebody you yourself describe as a fascist, because it would mean violating the rights of protesters that you can't comprehend except through epithets.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 8:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Police are shoving, ignoring restraining order. "I don't think the officers seem to care that they're breaking the law."

So if you defend yourself with force against police who are using force against you in violation of a restraining order, well obviously they'll call over a bunch more officers and beat the shit out of you and possibly maim you for life, but would you be be likely to prevail in court?

The idea of prevailing in court in the USA regarding a citizen using force to defend against an officer seems like such a mythical impossible unicorn to me. But this situation is so bizarre...
posted by -harlequin- at 8:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Yeah, this was as close as I could get, and while I was there camera crews from news stations started finding this intersection after being even blocked much further away anywhere else they attempted to get a view from. You could at least see the corner of the camp being dismantled from this vantage point (especially with a zoom lens).
posted by stagewhisper at 8:37 AM on November 15, 2011


yeah - that's kinda what I'm getting at. I can read the actual doc, the question is really about the nature of TRO/Show-causes vs Permanent Injunctions. Ignore what the actual doc says.

Not clear what you're getting at. I'm not a lawyer yet, but from my experience in both the classroom and the real world, the whole point of a TRO/SC is that you are forbidden from doing certain things until you show cause. The reality of prosecuting the NYPD aside, you do not ignore TROs in anticipation of winning the hearing. That would be missing the entire point of why TROs exist.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Side note: there is really nothing that Obama won't ignore until it's safe to make noise, eh?

Oh for fucks sake, leave that axe out of this thread. Obama is on a flight to Australia. Would you like him to address the nation from Air Force One above the Pacific when this situation is about as fluid as can be at the moment? Get a grip, please.
posted by joe lisboa at 8:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


physically rip the American flag from a protester's hand

Is that, in fact, what happened? If so then yes that would be a great picture!! I am a consultant for a Textbook company that is trying it's damndest to revolutionize, not to strong a word I don't think, the high school textbook industry here in Texas to take control of textbook content away from the ultra right wingers that now have a firm grasp on it. That picture would be great for a textbook we are currently working on.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:38 AM on November 15, 2011



So I took a minute to clarify my confusion on posse comitatus and National Guard or State Defense units.For anyone interested, here's the explanation from a military perspective, as published in an Air Force journal in 1999:


Since Posse Comitatus does not directly apply to National Guard units, which are under the control of state governors, National Guard units have been nationalized under particular circumstances to place them under federal control and legal constraints. Civil rights unrest during the 1950’s and ‘60’s, rioting during a Democratic Party National Convention, and riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles were all events that strained the concepts of strict separation of National Guard and federal forces. Recent events have pointed out serious misconceptions of the law.

Contrary to popular thought, the prohibitions against using regular troops or federalized National Guard units in law enforcement are not absolute. The exceptions and enabling structures are written into the language of the statues. The Constitution has always required the President to be the keeper of public order. If the President receives a request from a state governor for assistance to quell public disorder, the President may issue a proclamation to the effect that order has broken down, and that those responsible must disperse. This proclamation is similar to the pre-1947 Riot Act. If order is not restored, the President may direct the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense to apply whatever assets may be necessary to do so. Because of its plenary nature, this presidential authority is not subject to judicial review.

posted by snuffleupagus at 8:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


You don't legitimately own a park if you deny the public the peaceful use of it.
What a bunch of nonsense.
posted by blaneyphoto at 8:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I feel like this is a very inconvenient time in American history for the president to be on his way to Australia.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Actually I think every protester should be holding an American flag (they're fighting for the future of our country, no?) so the police have to rip it out of their hands when they're arrested. No burning, no spitting on flags by protesters - they must show complete respect for the flag so the cops are forced to be the ones that throw it to the ground. Soon there would be flags trampled by police boots.

The symbolism would be awesome.
posted by desjardins at 8:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


complaining that the journalists are a bunch of wusses for not finding a way in to the square was not on the ground last night, It was impossible.

They had helicopters, and went away when told.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


As a crazy thought experiment, let's start from the presumption that the city is acting in relative good faith and see if we can make that work.

I’m glad that someone is stopping to ask this, because all the speculation about trash cleanup and night vs. day seems a bit futile. The fact that other parts of the city are left to rot isn’t inconsistent – it’s a symptom of the very thing being protested. So sure, the park might not be currently kept to standards expected in this neighbourhood. Cleanup at night? I don’t know about NYC, but major city maintenance projects sometimes occur at night in my town. So maybe. But why in the world would you need to remove the press? That’s what casts this well beyond the possibility of reasonable people behaving reasonably. That’s taking the leash off your junk yard dog. You don’t get to pretend you aren’t responsible for what happens next.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 8:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


I wonder if there's footage of the library being destroyed. That, just as much as the flag, would wake a lot of people up.
posted by felix at 8:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


You don't own any property but by the consent of those around you. The great "innovation" of our economic and legal system is to make it appear possible to get around that axiom—for a limited time. But the axiom isn't a rule, it's an observation. You don't legitimately own a park if you deny the public the peaceful use of it.

Yes you do; that's what a garden is. The whole concept of a rule of law is that you can gain title to something by process, instead of being dependent on the whims of your neighbors. That's why covenants designed to exclude people of an unpopular ethnicity don't stand up in court.

The larger point is that you don't legitimately own your profits if they are earned by inflicting harm on the commons. MOST of the money on Wall Street harms the commons, and for that reason, the occupation of private Zucotti Park is a superb symbolism.

That goes both ways. I haven't been to the Zuccotti park encampment since I don't live in NY, but the poor state of the Occupy Oakland encampment (which has now been cleared out) exemplifies the tragedy of the commons problem that you are talking about. Becoming a mirror of what you oppose is not an effective approach, and I'm sorry to say that this is what has happened to some parts of the Occupy movement. How many time do you (generic you) want to have to disavow the black bloc or their ilk before you grasp the nettle and kick them out of your movement because they are poisonous to it?
posted by anigbrowl at 8:41 AM on November 15, 2011


NYCLU twitter feed is saying the lawyers are waiting for a judge to be assigned. That's bad news, because they might not get Billings.
posted by Mavri at 8:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Jahaza, do you have the number for the NY Sheriff's office?

Contact info for the sheriff is here.

Should we be calling them and voicing our support for their enforcing the court order?

I think the court has to tell them to enforce the order, I don't think they do it as a general matter of their own initiative, but I'm not an expert.
posted by Jahaza at 8:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I feel like this is a very inconvenient time in American history for the president to be on his way to Australia.

Well next time be sure to fax him the itinerary you would like him to have in advance, thanks.
posted by joe lisboa at 8:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


First Amend does mention right to assemble.

In Clark, Secretary of the Interior, et al. V. Community Creative Non-Violence et al., 468 U.S. 288 (1984), the Supreme Court held that camping regulations do not violate the First Amendment. I cite the case purely for trivia. NYPD does not have applicable camping regulations to cite, so this case isn't really on point, although it is relevant to other Occupies.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


You don't legitimately own a park if you deny the public the peaceful use of it.
...
What a bunch of nonsense.


Look, these are all overgeneralizations. The classic metaphor for property ownership in our legal system is a "bundle of sticks," those sticks being a collection of rights regarding the control, use, etc of the property.

Depending on how the park was created, transferred, etc., there may or may not be restrictions on it such that its owners wouldn't "legitimately own [the] park" if they "den[ied] the public peaceful use."

I think it was intended more as a statement of principle than law, anyway.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:42 AM on November 15, 2011


So if you defend yourself with force against police who are using force against you in violation of a restraining order

The correct answer is to not defend yourself with force, get it on camera, and collect your payday in the courts later.
posted by empath at 8:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Not clear what you're getting at.

Is ignoring a TRO is generally seen as less greivous than ignoring a more permanent injunction. Are the risks of being held in contempt lower

16 Trillion saying things that are wrong doesn't help your cause. The 16 trillion number exists because of really weird way someone calculated the total sum of money lent out, such that overnight lending was counted for every day it was leant out. It would be like saying someone lending you $100 bucks, but that you have to say "Hey kosher if I not pay you back today" was actually lending you 3000 if you kept it for a month, while if I lent you $200 bucks and said pay me back next month I lent you $200.
posted by JPD at 8:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The symbolism would be awesome.

That seems like a gimmick to me. If a police ripped the flag from someone who was peacefully carrying it that would be a story. But holding a flag and then purposefully breaking some law to be arrested just so the flag would be taken from you by the police? Come on. They would also take a hot dog from you if you were holding it. Gimmicks like that are for FoxNews.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


City just served opposition papers @karenmcveigh1 is following it live.
posted by The Whelk at 8:44 AM on November 15, 2011




snuffleupagus: I was also reading up on Posse Comitatus; that lead me to the very interesting Insurrection Act article.
posted by weirdoactor at 8:44 AM on November 15, 2011


I haven't been to the Zuccotti park encampment since I don't live in NY, but the poor state of the Occupy Oakland encampment (which has now been cleared out) exemplifies the tragedy of the commons problem that you are talking about.

FWIW, my friend visited Occupy Oakland, and she said it was an entirely different beast than OWS. Different attitude, very tense, sort of dirty. OWS may have been shaggy and strange, but it was very clean and peaceful.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:44 AM on November 15, 2011


Lawyer Jeffrey Rothman #OWS says he tried to serve emergency order on police to allow protesters back to park but they refused to accept it
posted by The Whelk at 8:44 AM on November 15, 2011


there is really nothing that Obama won't ignore until it's safe to make noise, eh?

Due legal process is running it's course. Not quite sure what you expect him to say or do. Send in the national guard?


Fuck yes send in the national guard, to protect the protesters and the press from their unlawful treatment by the NYPD.
posted by El Sabor Asiatico at 8:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Immaculately dressed bride in white carrying bouquet tries to squeeze past crowds if #OWS supporters lawyers and press at room 315
posted by The Whelk at 8:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I asked some questions about Right to Assemble here. Might be a good place for you folks to start if you're wondering about your First Amendment rights, including some sites with court cases, limitations, etc...

Some interesting links inside the thread.
posted by rich at 8:46 AM on November 15, 2011


@allisonburtch I was there. The deputy refused to receive it. It is all on tape they were served.

posted by The Whelk at 8:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


holkriss99, Zuccoti park is operated in a public manner, without restricted access. You're splitting hairs, presumably because you hold the concept of private property sacred. What is actually sacred is public property, if it can be called property at all. Mind you, I'm no socialist, but to conceive of private property outside the larger and more fundamental context of global wellness is our civilization's hallmark failure.

blaneyphoto, that is a trenchant analysis and I am forced to concede your point.
posted by maniabug at 8:46 AM on November 15, 2011


But holding a flag and then purposefully breaking some law to be arrested just so the flag would be taken from you by the police?

I made no mention of purposely breaking laws. Plenty of people at OWS protests have been arrested for standing on the sidewalk and other legal acts. Hell, people have been maced in the face for no apparent reason.

Also just to be clear - my photo comment was hypothetical - I have no evidence it actually happened, I was speculating if it were to happen.
posted by desjardins at 8:47 AM on November 15, 2011


H. Roark: fuck these occupy guys. As part of the 99%, it really pisses me off that they think they are speaking for me.

At first, I wanted to laugh along with folks who saw the distinct disconnect in Howard Roark complaining about OWS, with the notion that he was somehow in the 99% (OK, he started out poor, but that's beside the point).

But I'll address you're concern: are you pissed off about what they're saying, or how they're saying it? Do you really think those bank bail-outs have worked out as planned? Do you think that the government has a transparent and ethical relationship with large business interests? Do you really think that the costs of your healthcare are reasonable and realistic? If so, I see how you think OWS doesn't speak for you.

But if you're pissed off because they're camping in a park and banging on drums to say what they think, then try to overlook the method, and work on spreading their message, because it's also your message.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


presumably because you hold the concept of private property sacred

I live in a rental and have never owned property, so, no, I don't hold it sacred.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:48 AM on November 15, 2011


Actually I think every protester should be holding an American flag (they're fighting for the future of our country, no?) so the police have to rip it out of their hands when they're arrested. No burning, no spitting on flags by protesters - they must show complete respect for the flag so the cops are forced to be the ones that throw it to the ground. Soon there would be flags trampled by police boots.

The symbolism would be awesome.


Yeah, because a piece of cloth being abused is so much more important than an American citizen being abused. Just like an US Military veteran being shot in the head by police is more important than the hundreds of American civilians being shot by police.

Symbolism has its place, but this is not one of them.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:50 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Part of the park "cleaning" appears to include posting up nice, fancy new rules signs.
So, will these new park hours on this sign be enforceable?
posted by holdkris99 at 8:50 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think this thread will be derailed by discussion of the purpose of OWS, etc... and is better focused on the main issue here right now, which is the right to peaceably assemble.

On top of that, there is a court order that is being ignored by the police. While I may or may not agree with the methods and lack of clear message/ignorance of the financial systems and the constant use of the 'bailout' talking points, I do believe in people's right to assemble and rule of law.
posted by rich at 8:51 AM on November 15, 2011


...and the Second Amendment mentions being part of a militia, and the Fourth Amendment doesn't mention electronic wiretaps.
posted by weirdoactor at 8:34 AM on November 15


The Second Amendment is just the right to bear arms and condonation of militias (debated whether that means a society of armed men or actual militias). If you consider OWS a militia, which I wouldn't, does the Second Amendment mean that the government's forces would have to ignore any "militia" that is defying them? Of course not. The government may have done various things that are unconstitutional over its history and at present, but that is neither here nor there...

First Amend does mention right to assemble.
posted by angrycat at 8:36 AM on November 15

I doubt that the framers meant that any random group of people can just settle down on any public or private land. That would mean that there is no such thing as private property.

You might want to ask what it means when you find yourself siding with somebody you yourself describe as a fascist, because it would mean violating the rights of protesters that you can't comprehend except through epithets.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 8:36 AM on November 15

a) My siding with Giuliani is hypothetical. b) The city is right to maintain cleanliness and order.
posted by knoyers at 8:51 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The city is right to maintain cleanliness and order.

I'm pretty sure NYPD is the one that disrupted the order last night.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Due legal process is running it's course. Not quite sure what you expect him to say or do. Send in the national guard?

Naw. Let's not get outrageous here.

September, 1957: (Little Rock, Ark.) Formerly all-white Central High School learns that integration is easier said than done. Nine black students are blocked from entering the school on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus. President Eisenhower sends federal troops and the National Guard to intervene on behalf of the students, who become known as the "Little Rock Nine."
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 8:53 AM on November 15, 2011


b) The city is right to maintain cleanliness and order.

Please demonstrate how they have done either.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 8:53 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I doubt that the framers meant that any random group of people can just settle down on any public or private land. That would mean that there is no such thing as private property.

We don't need to get into an argument over constitutional originalism here. This is not unexplored territory. It's well settled that there are some public forums that are limited, in terms of speech access. Parks and city streets are not typically in that category.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:53 AM on November 15, 2011


fuck these occupy guys. As part of the 99%, it really pisses me off that they think they are speaking for me.

fuck that guy standing in the street blocking traffic, it really pisses me off that he thinks he is speaking for me.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]




Rebuilding of #OWS starts tonight at 6pm, Liberty & Broadway. Bring books.
posted by The Whelk at 8:55 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


angribowl: How many time do you (generic you) want to have to disavow the black bloc or their ilk before you grasp the nettle and kick them out of your movement because they are poisonous to it?

You're right, and I agree with your criticism of that element to the extent that it's true to varied degrees in the regional occupations. However, the rule of law is limited by the extent to which the law is sound. Our law tends to favor private over public interest. Obedience to laws is at a lower level than adherence to principle in Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
posted by maniabug at 8:56 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I doubt that the framers meant that any random group of people can just settle down on any public or private land. That would mean that there is no such thing as private property.

The problem with that characterization is that this is not a 'random group of people'. And I would argue the framers did, in fact, mean to allow folks to settle down on any public land in order to assemble and promote their cause. For this is exactly what the British did NOT allow the framers to do, and what the framers saw as necessary to allow any group to voice their issues without being silenced by others.
posted by rich at 8:56 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


desjardins: "Also just to be clear - my photo comment was hypothetical - I have no evidence it actually happened, I was speculating if it were to happen."

I didn't seem to be speculating - you were kinda willing it to happen.
posted by falameufilho at 8:56 AM on November 15, 2011


Is ignoring a TRO is generally seen as less greivous than ignoring a more permanent injunction. Are the risks of being held in contempt lower

Good questions. I can't give you any sort of authoritative answer, but I was not under the impression that violating a TRO is any less legally serious merely by dint of being temporary. It all depends on the circumstances and, especially in the case of something like contempt, the judge.

The de facto immunity of the NYPD has more to do with their cavalier attitude than the fact that they had a TRO against them. Legally, you're not supposed to violate TROs any more than you're supposed to violate permanent injunctions, but as a practical concern, if you know that they're not going to imprison NYPD en masse for clearing out the occupiers, then I can see why they'd just say "fuck it" and ignore the order.

I would LOVE it if the judge went ballistic and sent a relevant higher-up to jail for even a week, but that will never happen.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:56 AM on November 15, 2011


but to conceive of private property outside the larger and more fundamental context of global wellness is our civilization's hallmark failure.

I don't know if it our "hallmark failure" but it is a big one, no doubt. I did a paper once about some clashes between Native Americans and some colonists in the 1680's and, to briefly sum up, after numerous attacks on some native people, they retaliated and attacked, killing several people and burning houses. One of the survivors of the attack sent a letter to a man who lived in the town but was absent during the attack that said something to this affect:

Your house and barn were burned and destroyed. Your livestock was either slaughtered or taken. Your fence, however, is still in good standing. Your wife was killed.
posted by holdkris99 at 8:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Naw. Let's not get outrageous here.

September, 1957: (Little Rock, Ark.)


Eisenhower Federalized the guard to prevent the Governor from misusing them to frustrate the enforcement of the Supreme Court's order. We're nowhere near Brown v. BOE yet.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:57 AM on November 15, 2011


President Eisenhower sends federal troops and the National Guard to intervene on behalf of the students, who become known as the "Little Rock Nine."

1) It took some time to get to that point. Didn't happen overnight.
2) The city in that case was in contempt of a Federal Court order, not a state or county court. Jurisdiction does make a difference here.

Which is not to say that I don't think it will come to that. But one of the virtues of our country is that we let the courts do their thing first, rather than simply having the president send in the army every time a local government does something that might or might not be in violation of the constitution. I like living in a country where the courts have the first say.
posted by anastasiav at 8:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Man that girl on Global revolution has a mouth on her

Protestors shouting "THEY WANT YOUR PENSIONS! THEY WANT YOUR INSURANCE! YOU KNOW THEY ARE TAKING IT AWAY FROM YOU!" to the cops.
posted by The Whelk at 8:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Occupy Wall Street Faces Evictions, from The Atlantic "In Focus" photoblog.
posted by emelenjr at 8:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


How many times do the police want to disavow rogue officers before they grasp the nettle and kick them out of the force? Or does that logic only apply to protesters?
posted by jaduncan at 8:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


knoyers: my point was that the Constitution isn't black and white; its (outdated*) edicts are shaped by court cases and legal precedents. Saying what isn't included in the particular Amendment isn't germane or helpful.

* we need to have a Constitutional Congress to bring the Bill of Rights into a 21st century context
posted by weirdoactor at 8:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


It's well settled that there are some public forums that are limited, in terms of speech access. Parks and city streets are not typically in that category.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:53 AM on November 15


Being allowed to protest in a park doesn't mean that you can live in the park.

"Order" isn't a homeless settlement existing in the middle of a major city without public hygiene. That's unacceptable.
posted by knoyers at 9:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Lot of good information here, lot of hyperbole as well. And yeah, someone should get tossed in the clink for a few days for violating the TRO.
posted by edgeways at 9:00 AM on November 15, 2011


The Whelk: "There are now more people marching around the perimeter of Zuccotti than were in it when the NYPD closed it down.

New sign on the barricade
"

Activities not expressedly forbidden in this notice:
  • Hanging personal belongings from trees, or hanging out in the trees in general
  • Drum circles
  • Pooping on the ground
  • Yelling loudly
  • Going around naked
  • LITTERING
Since when is camping a more realistic threat to the harmony of a park than littering is? Yet it's not mentioned at all in the notice. You'd think this notice was specifically targeted at a group of people intending to sleep or set up camp in the park, and not a general set of rules that they just happened to be put up today.
posted by Deathalicious at 9:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


More arrests, more shouting " Who are you protecting? They don't care about you!"
posted by The Whelk at 9:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Due legal process is running it's course. Not quite sure what you expect him to say or do. Send in the national guard?

The president would have to federalize the national guard to be able to send it in. Even Eisenhower used both the full on army (The 101st Airborne) and the federalized National Guard for the Little Rock 9.
posted by FJT at 9:00 AM on November 15, 2011


What is actually sacred is public property, if it can be called property at all. Mind you, I'm no socialist, but to conceive of private property outside the larger and more fundamental context of global wellness is our civilization's hallmark failure.

Although I agree with your underlying point, you're making an 'end justifies the means' argument. We've established a process for deciding whether property is public or private, and OWS rather cleverly took advantage of that - one of the reasons that the campers were not immediately kicked out under existing laws about camping in public parks was that they were not on city-owned property to begin with, and Brookfield, the actual owners, didn't rush into court demanding their ejection.

But the thing is, making that approach work requires a degree of mutuality. If you take advantage of the public-private distinction to get established but then deny that the property owner has any private rights at all, then you're trying to have your cake and eat it. This thread is full of such reasoning. People are willing to excuse all sorts of things that they roundly and rightly condemned when the Tea Party did it because they happen to agree in this case. Tea party protests and leaves litter somewhere? Those antisocial fucks. Occupy leaves litter? Hey man, you've got to look at the bigger picture. Tea party types stand around with pistols on their belts? Scary intimidatory tactics. Occupy protesters wear masks and combat fatigues and chant 'fuck the police'? Hey, they're just speaking truth to power.

Process and methods are important. So's some basic intellectual consistency. Cops are selfless heroes when the issue is pensions or collective bargaining, pigs when they're lining your protest route. And so on. This is the basic reason that people have been urging OWS to develop some organization and articulate what it stands for since the beginning. If you don't define yourself, then other people are going to do it for you. I agree with Empath that the best thing that can happen to the Occupy movement right now is to go home and have a serious think during winter, then come back in Spring with something more coherent.
posted by anigbrowl at 9:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


Jesus fucking Christ - straight-faced comparisons with Tiananmen Square and the Little Rock Nine three posts apart? Are you guys for real?
posted by falameufilho at 9:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Man that girl on Global revolution has a mouth on her

I was sort of expecting to hear chants along the lines of "YOU! ARE! THE 99!" when it came time to square off against beat cops. I sort of still am. Give it a try, OWS?
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


you do not ignore TROs in anticipation of winning the hearing.

In principle I agree, but it's not surprising to me that the NYPD is doing so. Think about their side of it: They were in the middle of executing a large-scale crowd-control action under volatile circumstances. Their primary goal was to clear the park, but a close second was to prevent the situation from escalating into riots and/or violence. Somebody up the chain probably felt like the decision was, "Disregard this order temporarily and deal with the fallout later, which may include legal consequences," or "Comply with this order temporarily and deal with the fallout later, which may include violence and injuries." Without making any comment whatsoever on whether I agree with defying a court order: I do see the logic.

On a more general point, I find the injunction a bit inconsistent. To my understanding, the Occupy movement has worn its illegality as a badge of honor. I know less about OWS than about Occupy Boston, and maybe this is less true in New York. But my understanding was that the entire Occupy movement has eschewed permits deliberately and as a political statement. As a result, now it looks like: When the occupation was left be, illegal was cool. When the police come knocking, it's off to court for protection. You can't have it both ways—or rather, you can, but it doesn't look very good to your fellow 99%ers. I expected the nonviolent protestors to line up peacefully and quietly for their arrests, pay their fines, and then re-occupy. That's the action that I thought was consistent with their message.
posted by red clover at 9:02 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


we need to have a Constitutional Congress to bring the Bill of Rights into a 21st century context

I kind of agree with this, but suspect in our current climate it would result in a deadlock at best, and at worst it would just serve to enshrine a lot of current culture war topics.

A Constitution Congress that is sequestered for 2 years before they can begin to draft a document... perhaps
posted by edgeways at 9:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Eisenhower Federalized the guard to prevent the Governor from misusing them to frustrate the enforcement of the Supreme Court's order.

Tangent: Eisenhower is the missing link between OWS and the Republican Party. Not the Tea Party. Eisenhower. Dude was all over public works and the common good, while also providing for strong defense tempered with skepticism of the military-industrial complex. Military discipline combined with respect for service and sacrifice.

Since when is camping a more realistic threat to the harmony of a park than littering is? Yet it's not mentioned at all in the notice. You'd think this notice was specifically targeted at a group of people intending to sleep or set up camp in the park, and not a general set of rules that they just happened to be put up today.

To be fair, littering is already against the law in NYC. Banning littering would be sort of like banning murder.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


next question - how do you serve the NYPD? Is just handing the docs to any officer count as legal service? Or was that lawyer grand standing?
posted by JPD at 9:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


How many times do the police want to disavow rogue officers before they grasp the nettle and kick them out of the force? Or does that logic only apply to protesters?

With all due respect, this isn't quite an accurate comparison -- there's a difference between an all-volunteer group of activists dis-inviting one of their number, and an institution removing a paid employee.

Not that I'm excusing either group from failing to do so when necessary. Just pointing out that the situations are both very different, so a one-to-one comparison like this isn't as possible.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:03 AM on November 15, 2011


This scares the shit out of me because it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, because the status quo has a lot more to lose right now than a few thousand books and some tents. Those who want to make a change have to ante up more than those who will resist that change.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


haltingproblemsolved: "Good to see at least one NYPD captain was having fun last night."

The photo caption: "An Occupy Wall Street protestor draws contact from a police officer near Zuccotti Park". Yes, that's one way to right "gets beaten by"..."draws contact from".

Officer: "Help, this guy keeps attracting my baton towards his face!"
posted by Deathalicious at 9:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


right write
posted by Deathalicious at 9:04 AM on November 15, 2011


ON GIULIANI:

I've been a New Yorker for 25 years, and Giuliani was a terrible, terrible mayor in every way - and almost every New Yorker I've met, left or right, agrees with me.

First, if you give him credit for "cleaning up" the city, you have to explain why the crime rate fell more in most other major metropolitan areas than in New York City.

Second, if there's one person responsible for the deaths of all those firefighters in the WTC, it's Giuliani, who scarfed the money that was supposed to be used for radios for the firefighters and put it into security for Gracie Mansion.

Giuliani also took the largest surplus in the city's history and wasted it on crap. He was the one to cut back the pothole fixing budget, saving the city millions in immediate expenses but costing them tens of millions in lawsuits, because lawsuit costs don't appear on the main budget.

He was the one who really destroyed New York City nightlife by shuttering clubs on the slightest pretext (usually that people were dancing without a permit, no really!)

He was an abysmal mayor, and New Yorkers do not remember him fondly at all.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Hanging personal belongings from trees, or hanging out in the trees in general

Zachary Running Wolf is up a tree in Oakland, I believe. (The name is known to be as he spent a not insignificant part of my time as an undergrad up a tree. Otherwise he's just 'some guy up a tree'.)

Of course, we've fallen into some strange alternate universe where @dailycal is worth reading.
posted by hoyland at 9:05 AM on November 15, 2011


Daily News: Our reporter @mblysiak reports he has been arrested at the 6th Avenue park in New York City
posted by The Whelk at 9:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Lawyers for #OWS have just left room 315 St court saying they have been served with "something" from mayors office and need to read it
posted by The Whelk at 9:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


lupus_yonderboy, my husband is a very liberal person, has lived in Manhattan since 1974, and thinks pre-9/11 Guiliani was a spectacular mayor. YMMV.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


With all due respect, this isn't quite an accurate comparison -- there's a difference between an all-volunteer group of activists dis-inviting one of their number, and an institution removing a paid employee.

There is. The police are paid to uphold the law and there specifically to uphold it. They should not just be disinviting their number, they should be arresting them. It is, after all, their actual job that they have taken money to perform.

Whereas disinviting people from open invite meetings is somewhat more tangental.
posted by Francis at 9:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


We've established a process for deciding whether property is public or private

Yeah, it's pretty simple. The government declares that public money belongs to the private bankers, and we give it to them.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 9:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [16 favorites]


if there's one person responsible for the deaths of all those firefighters in the WTC, it's Giuliani, who scarfed the money that was supposed to be used for radios for the firefighters and put it into security for Gracie Mansion

Really? Giuliani more to blame than the terrorists?
posted by holdkris99 at 9:06 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


we need to have a Constitutional Congress to bring the Bill of Rights into a 21st century context

I wouldn't trust the current collection of fuckwits on capitol hill to rewrite the vehicle code.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:07 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


From legal observer: question is over permanent structures in the park, what does "permanent" mean re: tents, etc
posted by The Whelk at 9:07 AM on November 15, 2011


falameufilho: "Jesus fucking Christ - straight-faced comparisons with Tiananmen Square and the Little Rock Nine three posts apart? Are you guys for real?"

Maybe they see the writing on the wall. Right now it's just pinching pennies and hoping you don't get sick; in 10-20 years, if things don't improve, over half of the country will be slaves to permanent crushing debt, without any right to personal time or space. Yes, we "have" the freedom of speech and we're not being discriminated against for the color of our skin, but the threat to our freedom and livelihood is no less in danger.
posted by Deathalicious at 9:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


Tea party types stand around with pistols on their belts? Scary intimidatory tactics. Occupy protesters Police agents provocateurs wear masks and combat fatigues and chant 'fuck the police'? Hey, they're just speaking truth to power.

A speculation...
...informed by track record
posted by -harlequin- at 9:08 AM on November 15, 2011


Legal observer: "We've been preparing for this for weeks. We have the best 1st amendment lawyers in the city." @alternet
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The police are paid to uphold the law and there specifically to uphold it. They should not just be disinviting their number, they should be arresting them. It is, after all, their actual job that they have taken money to perform.

I'll admit that I don't know the specifics, but I imagine that -- as is the case at any workplace -- there are procedures in place that deal with lawbreaking employees, or employees who have been accused of same. These procedures are in place to protect the employees from false arrest, and they take some time.

With an all-volunteer force, though, you can simply tell someone "dude, go away, we don't want you here." Granted, the accused party can just say "fuck you" and keep showing up; my point is that the "go away/fuck you, I'm staying" back-and-forth is different from the investegatory process that would take place in a workplace, is all.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:09 AM on November 15, 2011


b) The city is right to maintain cleanliness and order.

Not at the cost of constitutionally-guaranteed liberties, no, it isn't.

This is a well-worn quote, but "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin

If true for safety how much more true for a little temporary "cleanliness and order"?

We've established a process for deciding whether property is public or private

As far as this goes, as has been mentioned several times previously, Zuccotti Park is not exactly either. I was trying to track down the actual easement or agreement that Brookfield has with the city re: Zuccotti Park by looking it up on ACRIS, as it certainly ought to be a publicly-recorded document, but being not all that familiar with New York City I'm having a tough time figuring out which of a couple possible easements/agreements it is. Does anybody have the exact name of the Brookfield entity that owns the park? (Doesn't seem to be "Brookfield Office Properties" as some news articles erroneously stated -- closest I get is Brookfield Properties Office Partners, Inc..) Or block and lot numbers for the park?
posted by mstokes650 at 9:09 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


This is just one of the first of soon to be many confrontations between the People and their Police State in the next few years. The upcoming ones will be bigger and bloodier until even the corporate owned media will not be able to ignore what is happening. How do I know this? History. The very same things happened in the 1900-1935 period as workers began to demand their basic human rights. It took over 30 years of increasing riots and police confrontations until we got an FDR and a New Deal and the oligarchs released a bit of their grasp on the country's wealth. The same thing is happening today and it's only going to get nastier.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 9:09 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


True EC, it is different. The NYPD could remove any officers from street work and put them on desk work. Unlike an all-volunteer group, they can order said cops to do so. In this way, they are far more responsible for known violent cops being on riot duty than anyvolunteer org anisation could be.
posted by jaduncan at 9:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]




read the court order here
posted by The Whelk at 9:13 AM on November 15, 2011




Good thinking, mstokes. This nyc.gov page on Privately Owned Public Spaces might be of some assistance.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:14 AM on November 15, 2011


Maybe they see the writing on the wall.

Um, but Tiananmen didn't lead to greater democratization in China. If anything, China is more centralized than ever, and the Party much more entrenched and having solid support, because economic gains in China ARE creating a new middle class that exchanges stability for autocratic rule. Yes, this is generalization, and I know there's a lot of people that are not gaining too.
posted by FJT at 9:14 AM on November 15, 2011


"Jesus fucking Christ - straight-faced comparisons with Tiananmen Square and the Little Rock Nine three posts apart? Are you guys for real?"

I'm just responsible for myself, and you won't find me making Tiananmen or Tahrir comparisons. (I was in Egypt during the protests and in Cairo from day 3. Seeing that particular comparison makes me want to punch people in the face, but that's my problem.)

I made the comment about the Little Rock Nine in response to the idea that the President could or would not send the National Guard to protect constitutionally protected interests, but the points made subsequently, particularly about Federal vs. state/county courts, are completely valid, and I appreciate them.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 9:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


(Zuccotti itself is apparently not a POPS, but still...)
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:15 AM on November 15, 2011


They were pointing out what they say is an LRAD across the park.

Use of Sound Weapon Provokes Lawsuit Two Years After Pittsburgh G20
posted by homunculus at 9:15 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


> Really? Giuliani more to blame than the terrorists?

Urg, I intended to write one American. Yes, clearly the terrorists were the prime culprits.

roomthreeseventeen: There are probably a lot of other people who also still like Giuliani - it's a big city - but even amongst the right wing here he has not worn well in memory.

I'm curious as to why your husband supports him? Does he really believe that "Giuliani cleaned up the city" and if so, how does he reconcile that with the fact that most other large cities in the US cleaned up more and faster in the same time period?

Or is it the business with the bullhorn?
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:15 AM on November 15, 2011


Barricades being removed? Maybe?
posted by The Whelk at 9:15 AM on November 15, 2011


This picture from The Atlantic's In Focus is a pretty chilling representative of the two sides of this skirmish, I think.
posted by Phire at 9:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


lawyer says a high court judge signed emergency order at 6.30am within an hour they had served all lawyers involved but police refused
posted by The Whelk at 9:16 AM on November 15, 2011


Actually, the entire series is worth looking at, as always.
posted by Phire at 9:16 AM on November 15, 2011


next question - how do you serve the NYPD? Is just handing the docs to any officer count as legal service? Or was that lawyer grand standing?

Not just any officer, no. Per CPLR 311(2), you'd serve "to the corporation counsel or to any person designated to receive process in a writing filed in the office of the clerk of New York county."

I would bet a very shiny nickel that the TRO was properly served as soon as humanly possible. I don't think we'll see a service issue in the hearing today.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:16 AM on November 15, 2011


lupus_yonderboy, I think it has a lot to do with how dangerous our neighborhood (UWS) was back then.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:17 AM on November 15, 2011


Frankly I am kind of looking to Wisconsin to see how the end game plays out in the Recall Walker movement (which officially just got started collecting signatures), as a bellwether to the OWS movement. Remember Wisconsin? The protests there last year make OWS look like small change.

There is a lot of "fuck yeah the revolution is starting" floating about, but... you know? There was a lot more in the 60s and that kind of petered out into the overindulgence of the 70s and the backlash of the 90s. Just because there is some agitation right now does not guarantee sustainability or longevity. Indeed, sadly, I think it is more likely that we will see sparks of violence that end up killing some high level officials then anything dramatic that changes the system.
posted by edgeways at 9:17 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


lupus_yonderboy: "He was an abysmal mayor, and New Yorkers do not remember him fondly at all."

Let me guess - these are the same people who think Bloomberg is Hitler.
posted by falameufilho at 9:17 AM on November 15, 2011


By what process do we get The Whelk nominated for some sort of award for his coverage here?
posted by holdkris99 at 9:17 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]




anigbrowl: would the difference between a congress and a convention be amending, versus starting from scratch? I believe we need to do the latter, using the current document as a template.
posted by weirdoactor at 9:19 AM on November 15, 2011


As a former (or more accurately a current non-using) addict, picture 8 is rather disturbing.
posted by holdkris99 at 9:19 AM on November 15, 2011


Photos of the early morning raid



Guardian On The Scene liveblog

From Global Revolution stream "Everything is on camera and it looks really bad."
posted by The Whelk at 9:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


> Let me guess - these are the same people who think Bloomberg is Hitler.

Am I supposed to respect the fact that you ignore my factual arguments entirely to emit a statement like that?

I personally feel that Bloomberg is a far more competent mayor in every way - his handling of mundane issues like traffic, the parts and that sort of thing is head and shoulders above Giuliani.

But I live in New York City and actually read the local newspapers and the backpages of the "paper of record".

If Bloomberg weren't entirely lacking in respect for the rule of law, he'd be a decent mayor. Of course, he has no less respect for it than Giuliani...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:21 AM on November 15, 2011


the PARKS...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:21 AM on November 15, 2011


Jesus fucking Christ - straight-faced comparisons with Tiananmen Square and the Little Rock Nine three posts apart? Are you guys for real?

Absolutely dead serious.

Philippines Yellow Revolution 1986
Tienanmen 1989
Czechoslovakia Velvet Revolution 1989
Berlin Wall Falls 1989
Croatia Log Revolution 1990
Iran Kurdish, Shiite Uprising 1991
Zapatista Rebellion 1994
Albanian Revolution 1998
Indonesian Revolution 1998
Serbia Bulldozer Revolution 2000
Georgia Rose Revolution 2003
Ukraine Orange Revolution 2004
Lebanon Cedar Revolution 2005
Kuwait Blue Revolution 2005
Kyrgyzstan Tulip Revolution 2005
Burma Saffron Revolution 2007
Arab Spring 2010
Occupy Wall Street 2011

Are you starting to see a trend here?
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]




I hear that transit workers union and working families party just intervened as plaintiffs in #OWS case in #NYC
posted by The Whelk at 9:24 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


And I'm sorry for the derail - this is really irrelevant, but people should be aware that by all objective measures, Giuliani was a wretched mayor. If you have any factual rebuttals, lay them on us, but I'm going to try to stay on topic myself.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:24 AM on November 15, 2011


Ustream "Other 99%" is reporting Trinity Park has been raided.
posted by rich at 9:24 AM on November 15, 2011


Are you starting to see a trend here?

Are you absolutely dead serious?
posted by holdkris99 at 9:25 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Yeah, it's pretty simple. The government declares that public money belongs to the private bankers, and we give it to them.

How's life on the Ron Paul campaign? Take your agit-prop somewhere else.


hahahaha, what?
posted by furiousxgeorge at 9:26 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Are you starting to see a trend here?


Listing things in chronological order isn't a convincing argument that they are linked or have the same root causes, or the same effects, or whatever. If you've got an argument that OWS is the same as as the Arab Spring or the fall of the Berlin Wall, make it.
posted by modernnomad at 9:26 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


Take your agit-prop somewhere else

How very USSR of you.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 9:27 AM on November 15, 2011


I should clarify: police put away outer ring of barricade. Still two layers around #zuccotti though

(note italics means I'm quoting from twitter. I'm following @samgf @elliottjustin@alternet and @karenmcveigh1 )
posted by The Whelk at 9:27 AM on November 15, 2011


Are you starting to see a trend here?

Are you absolutely dead serious?


History may not determine it to be Occupy Wall Street 2011. Remember, Egypt had protests against Mubarak long before the Arab Spring occurred. But those protests in the past allowed for what happened with the Arab Spring in Egypt.

As one Occupier said in a video: ‎"even if nothing else happens here... it's enough because what started here is going to continue in other ways."
posted by SollosQ at 9:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Are you starting to see a trend here?

Yes, human beings have been revolting for a long time.
posted by FJT at 9:28 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]




Three layers of barricades? That park better fucking sparkle.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:29 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]




Attendant: Your highness, the masses are revolting!
The King: Quite.
posted by joe lisboa at 9:29 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Yes, human beings have been revolting for a long time.

You're tellin me; they stink on ice!
posted by griphus at 9:29 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Plaza quiet, arrests at other squares, canal, trinity.
posted by The Whelk at 9:30 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


There is a lot of "fuck yeah the revolution is starting" floating about, but... you know? There was a lot more in the 60s and that kind of petered out into the overindulgence of the 70s and the backlash of the 90s. Just because there is some agitation right now does not guarantee sustainability or longevity. Indeed, sadly, I think it is more likely that we will see sparks of violence that end up killing some high level officials then anything dramatic that changes the system.

Here's the deal though; the economy was better then. It was much easier to shrug and walk away or get distracted by your job and your personal life in the 70s-90s. Now, we have record numbers of unemployed, many of them young, energetic, and indebted college grads. They don't have many distractions because they can't afford them. They don't have a career to distract them, they can't afford to start a family and have kids, or buy a house, or travel, or start a business, or do much of anything. And many of their elders who used to have those things have lost them. People are hurting in a way they have not been in the lifetimes of most (maybe all) of us here.

Don't think 1970s. Think 1930s. Or even earlier in the 20th century. We are re-fighting those battles because the people at the top want to undo all the good the reforms we won last time have done. They want to be robber barons again. They've very nearly succeeded.

But meanwhile the common rabble like you and me have less and less to lose.
posted by emjaybee at 9:30 AM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Great minds, griphus, great minds ...
posted by joe lisboa at 9:30 AM on November 15, 2011


#OWS lawyer - back from reading papers- say this opposition is unconstitutional - there should be judicial review. Still waiting hearing
posted by The Whelk at 9:32 AM on November 15, 2011


room 410 in the courthouse is the hearing room, apparently
posted by The Whelk at 9:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


20 people arrested at Trinity, they say they never gave permission for protesters to use their property.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:33 AM on November 15, 2011


A bit ...graphic

Teargassing Of the Kitchen at OWS last night

posted by The Whelk at 9:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]




marches moving from Trnity/Canal down to plaza.
posted by The Whelk at 9:33 AM on November 15, 2011


Jesus fucking Christ - straight-faced comparisons with Tiananmen Square and the Little Rock Nine three posts apart? Are you guys for real?

"Miss Parks, would you please just move to the back of the bus? It's not like this is as bad as slavery."
posted by dhartung at 9:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [22 favorites]


20 people arrested at Trinity, they say they never gave permission for protesters to use their property.

Ouch.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:34 AM on November 15, 2011


4 reporters arrested on 6th and Canal (as part of those 20). So, now, does this add in the issue of Freedom of the Press?
posted by rich at 9:34 AM on November 15, 2011


Marching 2 city hall now. Incredibly energetic as news comes in that Supreme Court has backed us!! Is it true?! #ows

What on earth? What does that even mean?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm reminded of what Matt Taibbi said in another recent post:
This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.
posted by homunculus at 9:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [32 favorites]


NYT reporting 4 reporters arrested at Trinity
posted by The Whelk at 9:35 AM on November 15, 2011


Don't think 1970s. Think 1930s. Or even earlier in the 20th century.

Hold the phone, I think we've just gone off the deep end here. If you're seriously discussing revolution as occurring, then we're in trouble. The thing with other countries vs. the US is, the US is HUGE, both population and land area wise. The only time I remember where a country of similar size and population was fundamentally shaken up and had a flat out revolution was when the ruler's changed from Qing China to the Communist Party of China, and that took 100 YEARS!
posted by FJT at 9:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Anyone want some cake to shove up your ass along with our rights, how about a souvenir constitution as well?

I'm sure the police will have a dedicated staff to assist you with that. Because we watch out for your best interests and public service is out #1 goal.
posted by lpcxa0 at 9:37 AM on November 15, 2011


Tea party types stand around with pistols on their belts? Scary intimidatory tactics. Occupy protesters Police agents provocateurs wear masks and combat fatigues and chant 'fuck the police'? Hey, they're just speaking truth to power.

A speculation...
...informed by track record


Sure, everything bad that ever happens is done by provocateurs. This is the left-wing version of 'guns don't kill people, people do.'
posted by anigbrowl at 9:37 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


What on earth? What does that even mean?

In New York the trial courts are called the Supreme Court. The highest state court is the Court of Appeals. It is very weird and confusing.
posted by jedicus at 9:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Quan had impeccable progressive credentials right up to a few weeks ago.

Whatever Quan's "credentials" may have been a few weeks ago, she has handled this episode and others before it miserably, and there's a movement afoot to recall her, so she's not exactly the most well-liked person in Oakland right now.
posted by blucevalo at 9:39 AM on November 15, 2011


In New York the trial courts are called the Supreme Court. The highest state court is the Court of Appeals. It is very weird and confusing.

Ah, so it is! Thanks for the explanation.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:40 AM on November 15, 2011


Marching 2 city hall now. Incredibly energetic as news comes in that Supreme Court has backed us!! Is it true?!

Sort of. Not SCOTUS, but the New York Supreme Court, ordered by Justice Lucy Billings.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:40 AM on November 15, 2011


lupus_yonderboy: "He was an abysmal mayor, and New Yorkers do not remember him fondly at all."

Let me guess - these are the same people who think Bloomberg is Hitler.


Actually, no. Bloomberg is FAR from perfect, but he's not Hitler, and he's even done some things I approve of and think he handled well (this is not one of them, but there are a few things).

And I still think Giuliani was an egotistical fucking tool.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:40 AM on November 15, 2011


dhartung: ""Miss Parks, would you please just move to the back of the bus? It's not like this is as bad as slavery.""

Hm. No.
posted by falameufilho at 9:41 AM on November 15, 2011


What? Since when do masks (actually protection against tear gassing) and combat fatigues (a style of dress I see more of in Hoboken FFS than at the protests) become the equivalent of pistols? If looks could kill...
posted by stagewhisper at 9:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Tea party types stand around with pistols on their belts? Scary intimidatory tactics. Occupy protesters wear masks and combat fatigues and chant 'fuck the police'? Hey, they're just speaking truth to power.
A mask and a particular style of pants is just as intimidating as a gun?
posted by cdward at 9:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


"@nancyscola: Mass confusion over where the #Zuccoti Park hearing is meant to be. Wandering herd of press, #ows folks."

There's some cheering on the Global revolution livestream
posted by The Whelk at 9:43 AM on November 15, 2011


Alternet is reporting that the today is also the day of the Brooklyn Bridge arraignments.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:44 AM on November 15, 2011


Judge Michael Stallman assigned to hear the #OWS restraining order case, says @karenmcveigh1. Here's his biog http://bit.ly/spSbfp
posted by The Whelk at 9:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Current chant "We are the 99%! So Are you!"
posted by The Whelk at 9:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


@MattBinder Judge Stallman will hear over the #OWS case. For those unfamiliar: in 2006 he told the city they couldn't stop the Critical Mass rides.
posted by The Whelk at 9:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


The Whelk, thanks for doing such a super job on this.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Whelk has been guaranteed a place in Internet Valhalla.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:49 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


global revolution went dark...
posted by The Whelk at 9:50 AM on November 15, 2011


and back
posted by The Whelk at 9:51 AM on November 15, 2011


Hold the phone, I think we've just gone off the deep end here. If you're seriously discussing revolution as occurring, then we're in trouble. The thing with other countries vs. the US is, the US is HUGE, both population and land area wise. The only time I remember where a country of similar size and population was fundamentally shaken up and had a flat out revolution was when the ruler's changed from Qing China to the Communist Party of China, and that took 100 YEARS!

I'm not sure what phone you think we should be holding. I didn't say 1770s, I said 1930s. Which were not a revolution, per se, in the US (which is what I was discussing) but were a time of marches, civil unrest, riots, labor movements, increased regulation of business, etc. etc.
posted by emjaybee at 9:51 AM on November 15, 2011


I can just imagine the conversation:

Bloomberg: So what now? They have a TRO!
Kelly: So what? It's Billings? She's some activist ACLU bitch. Fuck them! It'll get overturned at a real hearing!
Bloomberg: We just drew Judge Stallman...
Kelly: Awwww fuck...

posted by Talez at 9:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Seriously, where are some of you anti- OWSers getting your information from? Masks were cause for arrest from very early on at OWS and anyone wearing one was warned to remove it by the OWS group themselves. Have you even been around any of the protesters at all? The misrepresentations about the protesters that a lot of people have been making are just insane and out of line with the reality of what has been happening here in the real, non-virtual world of the occupation. Every time I'm there and then compare my experience with the alternate reality that gets spun online I feel like I've fallen into some uncanny valley.
posted by stagewhisper at 9:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


mobilization being planned for Thursday in NY.
posted by The Whelk at 9:53 AM on November 15, 2011


falameufilho: "dhartung: ""Miss Parks, would you please just move to the back of the bus? It's not like this is as bad as slavery.""

Hm. No.
"

Are you telling me that MLK Jr would be on the side of the state in this? Seriously? Do you even fucking know your history?
posted by symbioid at 9:55 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]






The private-property argument is not as ironclad and simple as some people here think. Zucotti Park is zoned POPS (privately owned public space). That is a specific and legal zoning status in NYC. It is different than a normal private property.

IANAL and am not an expert in NYC zoning laws, but POPS is definitely different than run-of-the-mill private property.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 9:56 AM on November 15, 2011


OWS protestors to march en mass to Plaza with lawyers.
posted by The Whelk at 9:56 AM on November 15, 2011


@macfathom is inside the courthouse room, so follow him for live legal updates
posted by The Whelk at 9:57 AM on November 15, 2011


symbioid, I THINK what falameufilho is trying to say is that OWS is a petty thing compared to the Civil Rights movement, rather than "MLK would be on the side of the state".

Granted, I'm fairly confident that history will prove that cynicism wrong, but we won't know for a few years yet.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


"The new park smells like Clorox and broken constitutional amendments."
posted by ChuraChura at 9:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


About 100 #ows protesters marching south blocking all traffic on Broadway heading toward #zuccotti. No cops. Pic: http://ow.ly/i/llbQ

"Do you like the new park? It smells like Clorox and broken constitutional amendments."
posted by The Whelk at 9:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


If you think OWS is "petty" in compared to the civil rights movement, you need to read more.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


If you think OWS is "petty" in compared to the civil rights movement, you need to read more.

Oh, I agree. I was just clarifying what I saw falameufilho's position was.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Zucotti Park is zoned POPS (privately owned public space).

Ah, so it IS a POPS. The confusion must have to do with the interaction of that status and the zoning variances the owners have obtained.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:00 AM on November 15, 2011


The City Comptroller John C Liu has issued this statement:

Going in and forcibly removing the protestors in the dead of night sends the wrong message. City Hall should have continued to talk with the protestors in the light of day if it wanted them removed, instead of evicting them in the middle of the night. There seems to be no compelling reason for this action at this time. The protestors have a right to be heard.

posted by The Whelk at 10:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


What? Since when do masks (actually protection against tear gassing) and combat fatigues (a style of dress I see more of in Hoboken FFS than at the protests) become the equivalent of pistols? If looks could kill...

Spare me this 'protection against tear gassing' excuse. People were wearing masks and bandanas before there was any tear gassing, and masks enable the agent provocateurs everyone says they are so worried about. If protesters refused to accept masked individuals in their midst then it would be an awful lot harder for bad actors to hijack legitimate protesters, because they would be so easily identifiable on camera. Masks give authoritarians a convenient excuse to crack down, as well as giving vandals a convenient excuse for mayhem.

If you're really worried about tear gas, hold a wet rag up to your face when they start shooting it. Dressing up like a bandit in advance is a losing tactic.
posted by anigbrowl at 10:01 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Are you telling me that MLK Jr would be on the side of the state in this?

I think that "hm, no" comment was in the voice of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of the bus.
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:02 AM on November 15, 2011


also, not mentioned too much, ALL equipment in the media tent was destroyed, thousands of dollars of equipment.
posted by The Whelk at 10:02 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


anigbrowl (sorry for murdering your handle upthread), sometimes the ends do justify the means, and sometimes they do not. Disruptive means are only justified when the end is to improve an even more disruptive status quo. At the present time, the dominant civilization on earth is doing calamitous damage to our only home. Private property is small potatoes by comparison.

Of course the littering is bad on both sides.

That said, I agree that taking up a chunk of real estate is probably not be the best way for OWS to move forward. Now that it has coherently addressed the power center, the movement needs to take up the harder task of addressing the millions of citizens from which that power is derived. It needs to convince regular people that the boom is over, and that the economy needs to be shrunk, localized, and decentralized in as controlled a fashion as possible.

This will be rough going, if OWS tries to tackle it, because much of the OWS constituency is still clamoring for its slice of boom pie.
posted by maniabug at 10:02 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


City Comptroller John C Liu has decided he doesn't want to be City Comptroller come the next election cycle.
posted by griphus at 10:02 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]



"Order" isn't a homeless settlement existing in the middle of a major city without public hygiene. That's unacceptable.


Speak for yourself. I believe that it's not only acceptable, it's necessary. If all other tools for maintaining a basic standard of living have been taken away from a substantial minority of the population, they have every right to inconvenience those that have played a role in taking away those tools.

Re Guiliani: I agree with lupus_wonderboy. I've lived here in NYC since the early 80's. I, along with the vast vast majority of people I have spoken to on the subject of Guiliani, agree that he was a nightmare of a mayor. The few people I've found that liked him seemed to have had a more casual relationship with what was going on in NYC during his reign.
posted by newpotato at 10:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


The only time I remember where a country of similar size and population was fundamentally shaken up and had a flat out revolution

German Revolution took a matter of weeks.

what falameufilho is trying to say is that OWS is a petty thing

No, he's just dismissing their grievances as petty. It's a pretty standard reactionary tactic, so I suggest treating him accordingly. He may even be astroturf.
posted by dhartung at 10:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


If you think OWS is "petty" in compared to the civil rights movement, you need to read more.

That is a distinction that is going to need a few more years to evaluate. It may.. or may not turn out to be a watershed moment, or something lost in the shuffle of time. Everyone thinks their cause is the most-importaint-thing-ever when they are in the midst of it. So now is not the time to assign historic context, now is the time to actually try and make history.
posted by edgeways at 10:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Well, if the hearing ends well, as I guess it's going to, this whole thing will have completely blown up in Bloomberg's face. Which is a good thing.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:05 AM on November 15, 2011


WELL A WHOLE SHITON OF CHEERING JUST BROKE OUT
posted by The Whelk at 10:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


"WE'RE GOING HOME! WE'RE GOING HOME!"
posted by The Whelk at 10:06 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


no confirmation yet, only source is livestream
posted by The Whelk at 10:07 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Does anyone have any actual inside info on what the courts take on this is?
posted by griphus at 10:07 AM on November 15, 2011


Bi-lingual chanting!
posted by The Whelk at 10:07 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Seriously, where are some of you anti- OWSers getting your information from? Masks were cause for arrest from very early on at OWS and anyone wearing one was warned to remove it by the OWS group themselves. Have you even been around any of the protesters at all?

Somehow this code of conduct hasn't made it over to the west coast. Everyone was all fired up on behalf of Occupy Oakland when they were marching into the ports and so forth, so you have to take the rough with the smooth. I don't want to sound patronizing, but when you present an argument of the form 'masks are protection against tear gas and not intimidating at all' then saying they've never been tolerated rings kinda hollow.
posted by anigbrowl at 10:07 AM on November 15, 2011


sounds like they're still arguing in the courthouse
posted by The Whelk at 10:08 AM on November 15, 2011


German Revolution...

Germany's population NOW is about 82 million in a land mass about a bit smaller than California. In addition, both Germany's were members of international organizations and had peace time foreign troops occupying it's borders. The US has a population exceeding 300 million in a land mass that's approximately the same as China.

What I've been saying is that comparing two countries isn't always apples to apples. Obviously China isn't the United States isn't Germany. But to ignore one while relying on the other is missing the bigger picture.
posted by FJT at 10:08 AM on November 15, 2011


City Comptroller John C Liu has decided he doesn't want to be City Comptroller come the next election cycle.


yeah - he's openly running for Mayor despite his own little fun filled ethic scandal.

(also calling posters with long-term track records Astroturf is bullshit)
posted by JPD at 10:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Court rules for OWS.
posted by QIbHom at 10:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Read the letter that Brookfield Properties, the owners of Zuccotti Park, sent Mayor Bloomberg http://nydn.us/v23ufj

Police have met the march down broadway - trying to shove everyone onto the sidewalk, chant "Contempt Of COurt! Contempt Of Court!"
posted by The Whelk at 10:10 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


"watch out for the white shirt, he hurts people - don't touch me!"
posted by The Whelk at 10:11 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Can the personal attacks and accusations go to MetaTalk or just go away, please? It's really okay if someone disagrees with you. It doesn't mean they're evil.
posted by Dojie at 10:12 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


QIbHom, I think that's the old order. Billings isn't the judge anymore.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:12 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


yeah - he's openly running for Mayor despite his own little fun filled ethic scandal.

Wait, really? Who else has thrown their hat in for that?

Court rules for OWS.

Amazing. I have to go to the Middle East to get factual analysis on something happening a 45-minute train ride away from me.
posted by griphus at 10:13 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Can the personal attacks and accusations go to MetaTalk or just go away, please? It's really okay if someone disagrees with you. It doesn't mean they're evil.

For real -- this is clearly a sensitive topic upon which reasonable people can have opposing views. No need to demonize those with different takes than you -- the accusation of one user being "astroturf" a few comments up is absurd.
posted by modernnomad at 10:13 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


unconfirmed reports of court ruling- awaiting confirmation
posted by The Whelk at 10:14 AM on November 15, 2011


As usual, the best coverage of US News comes from Al Jazeera.
posted by ColdChef at 10:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]


I have to go to the Middle East to get factual analysis on something happening a 45-minute train ride away from me.

Only if you want the news of 8 hours ago.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:14 AM on November 15, 2011



What? Since when do masks (actually protection against tear gassing) and combat fatigues (a style of dress I see more of in Hoboken FFS than at the protests) become the equivalent of pistols? If looks could kill...

Spare me this 'protection against tear gassing' excuse. People were wearing masks and bandanas before there was any tear gassing, and masks enable the agent provocateurs everyone says they are so worried about. If protesters refused to accept masked individuals in their midst then it would be an awful lot harder for bad actors to hijack legitimate protesters, because they would be so easily identifiable on camera. Masks give authoritarians a convenient excuse to crack down, as well as giving vandals a convenient excuse for mayhem.

If you're really worried about tear gas, hold a wet rag up to your face when they start shooting it. Dressing up like a bandit in advance is a losing tactic.


Oops. you forgot to answer why they are as bad as pistols.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:15 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


ColdChef, that Al Jazeera article is old.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:15 AM on November 15, 2011


anigbrowl, firstly I am talking about OWS NYC, I have not been to other occupations. Secondly I'd ask you kindly to stop putting words in my mouth. The masks are not tolerated at the encampment. There were not masked groups at the encampment. I'm primarily talking about the Anonymous masks, but people with bandanas were urged to remove them while at the camp. People who were on the front lines last night can't really be faulted for a choosing to protect their nose and mouth with a bandana in anticipation of being gassed. Law of averages, etc. However, I saw *very few* (2-4?) doing so from my vantage point, which was, btw, on the front line.
posted by stagewhisper at 10:15 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


More OWS reported forming on West Broadway
posted by The Whelk at 10:16 AM on November 15, 2011


Amazing. I have to go to the Middle East to get factual analysis on something happening a 45-minute train ride away from me.

"Amazing"? We're talking about American media here. This story is a lower priority than the Michael Jackson's doctor and Kim Kardashian's divorce.
posted by Hoopo at 10:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


ColdChef, that Al Jazeera article is old.

I'm not sure which article you're referring to, but I'm talking about the coverage in general.
posted by ColdChef at 10:17 AM on November 15, 2011


Good work, The WHELK-y.

Carry on.
posted by Skygazer at 10:18 AM on November 15, 2011


construction workers cheering the OWS march from scaffolding!
posted by The Whelk at 10:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


I'm not sure which article you're referring to, but I'm talking about the coverage in general.

That's awfully disingenuous.
posted by to sir with millipedes at 10:19 AM on November 15, 2011


#OWS lawyer to court: "This was a deliberate response to one of the most profoundspeech-activities in this country since the 1960s.

Livestream down
posted by The Whelk at 10:19 AM on November 15, 2011


(and back)
posted by The Whelk at 10:20 AM on November 15, 2011


"WE'RE GOING HOME! WE'RE GOING HOME!"

Isn't that what the police wanted in the first place?
posted by ceribus peribus at 10:20 AM on November 15, 2011


Brookfield lawyer to court: We're not limiting free speech, just tents. This is private property. #ows
posted by The Whelk at 10:20 AM on November 15, 2011


anigbrowl (sorry for murdering your handle upthread), sometimes the ends do justify the means, and sometimes they do not. Disruptive means are only justified when the end is to improve an even more disruptive status quo. At the present time, the dominant civilization on earth is doing calamitous damage to our only home. Private property is small potatoes by comparison.

I understand why you feel that way. But my view of history is that undirected populism almost invariably leads to a worse result, and I have a great deal more faith in institutions than I do in crowds. So while I'm a big believer in government by the people for the people, I think people often overlook the government of the people - whether they're up in the penthouse suite or protesting out on the sidewalk. Zero-sum, lowest-common-denominator arguments are, to my mind, a large part of the problem.

That said, I agree that taking up a chunk of real estate is probably not be the best way for OWS to move forward. Now that it has coherently addressed the power center, the movement needs to take up the harder task of addressing the millions of citizens from which that power is derived. It needs to convince regular people that the boom is over, and that the economy needs to be shrunk, localized, and decentralized in as controlled a fashion as possible.

I can't help thinking that the massive deleveraging that's been taking place in markets over the last few years (not just the stock market, but the economy as a whole) is the very thing so many people are protesting against. Upthread someone linked to a poster for a day of action scheduled later this week. Demand #1 on that poster was a rejection of austerity. Likewise, I think the existing public pension system is unsustainable, and that this is at least as big a problem as the lack of universal healthcare or widening income gaps. But nobody on the left likes talking about that, because it's one of our sacred cows.

Now, I'm absolutely for ending Bush tax cuts, raising capital gains taxes, and cutting corporate welfare and subsidies to defense contractors, among various other left-wing desiderata. But that's only one half of the problem. What I'm objecting to at bottom is the facile and self-defeating notion that it's all someone else's fault. The right thinks that, and claims that cutting spending is the answer. The left thinks taxing the rich is. The reality is that there is going to have to be some of both, and neither side wants to give up anything.
posted by anigbrowl at 10:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


It's going to be interesting when the NYPD Union is left as the only union not supporting the movement. Given the ranks of most unions are drawn from the same demographic, I'm curious to see how my friends who are in the NYPD and consistently speak of OWS as a bunch of whiny, asshole, drug-fucks are going to react when their brothers and sisters in the Teacher's Union, etc start showing up en force in the OWS protests.
posted by spicynuts at 10:22 AM on November 15, 2011


March has reached Plaza chanting This Is Our Park!
posted by The Whelk at 10:23 AM on November 15, 2011


The right thinks that, and claims that cutting spending is the answer. The left thinks taxing the rich is. The reality is that there is going to have to be some of both, and neither side wants to give up anything.

No, the right thinks that and the left just sort of capitulates while claiming they're trying their best to reach a consensus. They've given up everything, and not in the "fought for it and lost" way. That's the problem.
posted by griphus at 10:23 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


NYPD - 200 in custody, chant of "Where's My Books?"
posted by The Whelk at 10:24 AM on November 15, 2011


"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. "--Harry S. Truman

" In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis. " Jim Douglas
http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/MLKactOstate.html
posted by eggtooth at 10:24 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


hundreds of protestors surrounding the still barricaded park
posted by The Whelk at 10:26 AM on November 15, 2011


The left thinks taxing the rich is. The reality is that there is going to have to be some of both, and neither side wants to give up anything.

That is just an entirely untrue statement. The leftist institutions you trust so much are begging for a balanced deal and being rebuffed.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


standoff
posted by The Whelk at 10:29 AM on November 15, 2011


Huh. So news of the eviction at Zuccotti park was front-page Yahoo news, as was the court order (albeit presented in rather biased form with plenty of quotes regarding "public safety" and "hazardous sanitary conditions"). For about two hours. Now all of a sudden there is absolutely no mention of OWS anywhere on the Yahoo site. The story has completely vanished. I'm generally not the biggest conspiracy booster, but the media's overall treatment of this story has certainly made me wonder.
posted by Go Banana at 10:29 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

No one has said so here, but this is also part of the appeal to me of OWS remaining "leaderless" or at the very least refusing to make one person the figurehead. Because one person can be taken out. A mass movement that works on consensus as opposed to the will of one person or a small group is a much more difficult and amorphous opponent.
posted by emjaybee at 10:30 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


"The Media" has also been arrested here so...not everyone is in on the conspiracy
posted by spicynuts at 10:31 AM on November 15, 2011


anigbrowl, firstly I am talking about OWS NYC, I have not been to other occupations. Secondly I'd ask you kindly to stop putting words in my mouth. The masks are not tolerated at the encampment. There were not masked groups at the encampment. I'm primarily talking about the Anonymous masks, but people with bandanas were urged to remove them while at the camp.

And I'm telling you that it's a problem her on the west coast. go back and have a look at the thread about Occupy Oakland and the ongoing problem of vandalism and property damage there, which has badly undermined the protests and thus the movement as a whole. It's a fact that people like to shift blame to the police as provocateurs, while at the same time expressing tolerance of or even approval for black bloc type anarchists. It seems to me that part of why OWS got cleared out last night is because Occupy Oakland turned a corner when someone got shut just outside the encampment the other evening. Insofar as OWS has been providing some financing to OO, folks need to be mindful of the fact that the actions of one group reflect on the other.
posted by anigbrowl at 10:31 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


protestors spilling into surrounding area.
posted by The Whelk at 10:31 AM on November 15, 2011


was that a flash of lighting?
posted by The Whelk at 10:32 AM on November 15, 2011


Go Banana: It's the top story for me on Yahoo News.
posted by demiurge at 10:32 AM on November 15, 2011


A mass movement that works on consensus as opposed to the will of one person or a small group is a much more difficult and amorphous opponent.

Also, it is much more difficult to defame a faceless group than an individual. If there were a single leader, that leader could be painted with any number of defamatory brushes that are specific. In this case, defamers are left with using pronouns like 'they'.
posted by spicynuts at 10:32 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


and now there is an accordion-led polka-chant - we've hit peak surrealism here.
posted by The Whelk at 10:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [17 favorites]


Judge: Are you saying use of generators and semi-permanent structures is protected as speech?

Levine answers judge: power of this symbolic speech is that it is a 24-hour occupation.

posted by The Whelk at 10:34 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The Whelk, I just thought the same thing upon seeing that!
posted by mothershock at 10:34 AM on November 15, 2011


And I'm telling you that it's a problem her on the west coast. Okay, well that's an opinion you've formed about about #OO and I'll add that to the others I've heard about that particular occupation. There's no need to misrepresent anyone else's statements and actual experiences in order to get that opinion across though.
posted by stagewhisper at 10:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


"Insofar as OWS has been providing some financing to OO, folks need to be mindful of the fact that the actions of one group reflect on the other."

Nothing personal, but when folks talk about "concern trolling", this is what they mean.
posted by facetious at 10:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


and now there is an accordion-led polka-chant - we've hit peak surrealism here.

It isn't led by a dude in a Boba Fett helmet, is it?

Every time something accordion-related happens in this city...
posted by griphus at 10:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Huh. Somehow it just became Paris, May, 1968. Situtationism has broken out.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


I went back to look at the occupy Oakland thread and I saw an Iraq war vet had his skull fractured by the police so you can see the police actions are wrong here in New York.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Also, it is much more difficult to defame a faceless group than an individual.

Yeah, but it's pretty easy to dehumanize a faceless group, since they have no face.
posted by FJT at 10:35 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The Whelk: "Judge: Are you saying use of generators and semi-permanent structures is protected as speech?

Levine answers judge: power of this symbolic speech is that it is a 24-hour occupation.
"

Just as much speech as those little green pieces of paper that we're not allowed to censor, no way no how!
posted by symbioid at 10:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Non, Je ne regrette rien, Bunny Ultramod
posted by The Whelk at 10:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Eyes without a face was a pretty fucking sweet song, if I do say so myself.
posted by symbioid at 10:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Mod note: some comments deleted: you know where to go if you can't stop with the personal attacks here.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:37 AM on November 15, 2011


I'm curious to see how my friends [in NYPD] are going to react when their brothers and sisters in the Teacher's Union, etc start showing up en force in the OWS protests.
posted by spicynuts


The way NYPD always reacts, with corruption, volence, disrespect for citizens' civil rights, and absofuckinglute impunity.

The PD by definition cannot join the sodality of labor. They're the turncoats. They sold out their brothers for silver and a chance to exercise their general sociopathy.

Seen too much in this town. There are good cops, but they are committed to a corrupt institution.
posted by spitbull at 10:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


It's going to be interesting when the NYPD Union is left as the only union not supporting the movement.

The NYPD has more than one union.

Given the ranks of most unions are drawn from the same demographic, I'm curious to see how my friends who are in the NYPD and consistently speak of OWS as a bunch of whiny, asshole, drug-fucks are going to react when their brothers and sisters in the Teacher's Union, etc start showing up en force in the OWS protests.

That would be how they're reacting right now. The UFT has been a major backer of the Occupy Wall Street Protest for weeks, including providing office/warehouse space.
posted by Jahaza at 10:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Pas de replâtrage, la structure est pourrie.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Likewise, I think the existing public pension system is unsustainable, and that this is at least as big a problem as the lack of universal healthcare or widening income gaps. But nobody on the left likes talking about that, because it's one of our sacred cows.

This is pretty straightforward, I think: if you think America's pathetic public pensions are "at least as big a problem as the lack of universal healthcare", you are not on the Left and can't give comradely advice or talk about what "we" should do. This isn't an insult, it's a plain statement of fact: although you may be a liberal in the classical sense, you need to be substantially to the right of center to hold such an opinion, by any realistic and generally accepted definition of the left-right divide.

The right thinks that, and claims that cutting spending is the answer. The left thinks taxing the rich is. The reality is that there is going to have to be some of both, and neither side wants to give up anything.

I cannot conceive of any interpretation of the last few years of American politics that would give the result that the left has been too stubborn and uncompromising.
posted by wwwwwhatt at 10:40 AM on November 15, 2011 [17 favorites]


The way NYPD always reacts, with corruption, volence, disrespect for citizens' civil rights, and absofuckinglute impunity.

I didn't meant the NYPD as an institution. I mean my actual friends - individuals who post shit on facebook like "Good job by Team Blue last night" who have wives who are teachers, relatives who are construction workers, etc. I did not mean what will they do while on the job, I meant will they turn against their relatives and continue to spout the same derogatory ad hominem bullshit when their wives are on the other side of the street.
posted by spicynuts at 10:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]




FJT: "
Hold the phone, I think we've just gone off the deep end here. If you're seriously discussing revolution as occurring, then we're in trouble.
"

Nah, I got into an argument about this with some knucklehead conservative the other day. Basically, what we're looking at is a return to the sentiments of the 20s and 30s when people thought socialism looked a hell of a lot better than what they were getting.

As hated as the New Deal is by conservatives, there's no question it was a panacea designed to forestall an actual socialist revolution in the United States. I think the desires are the same now: make things fair, put people to work, give us a real safety net, don't siphon off all the wealth of this country to the people who don't even need it.

Other countries manage to allow corporations to do things like write up contracts without treating them as people with the same rights as (and, let's be honest, often more rights than) actual human beings.
posted by Deathalicious at 10:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


"the most important thing we need here in Zuccotti: we need people"
posted by The Whelk at 10:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The protest movements that worked (Civil rights, Vietnam, Ghandi) all faced violent reactions...in fact, it was those reactions tn the face of non-violence that made those protests so effective, galvanized public opinion, ect.. 1. Violence towards the protesters is inevitable. 2. Maintaining non-violence in the face of violence is the key.
posted by eggtooth at 10:44 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Basically, what we're looking at is a return to the sentiments of the 20s and 30s when people thought socialism looked a hell of a lot better than what they were getting.

I think we are going to see a surge of radicalism. Nothing fills the ranks of the American left like disappointed liberalism.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Levine answers judge: power of this symbolic speech is that it is a 24-hour occupation.

It's not without precedent either come to think of it. In the US, do you have those Falun Gong booths set up outside Chinese embassies?
posted by Hoopo at 10:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Judge: Are you saying use of generators and semi-permanent structures is protected as speech?

Levine answers judge: power of this symbolic speech is that it is a 24-hour occupation.
posted by The Whelk



Wow. And damn right a tent is free speech. This is street theatre. We need our sets.

Fuck, they call pornography and cross burning free speech too.
posted by spitbull at 10:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


BTW FJT I'm not calling you a knucklehead conservative. My point is that a return to 30s sentiment doesn't mean revolution, just serious economic reform. The knucklehead conservative thought that FDR was an idiot socialist when in fact he pretty much single-handedly saved American capitalism.
posted by Deathalicious at 10:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Coordinated crackdown?
posted by symbioid at 10:47 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]




I cannot conceive of any interpretation of the last few years of American politics that would give the result that the left has been too stubborn and uncompromising.

You've never read MetaFilter, I see.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


2. Maintaining non-violence in the face of violence is the key.

Well, to be sure, there was always tension even in the CRM on this point. King on one end of the curve, Malcolm X toward the other, the Black Panthers somewhere down the asymptote.

As hated as the New Deal is by conservatives, there's no question it was a panacea designed to forestall an actual socialist revolution in the United States.

I'm putting these points in deliberate proximity. An argument could be made that without the threat of an actual revolution, little will change.
posted by dhartung at 10:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


NYC lawyer to judge: tents aren't the message; tents are to keep protesters from getting cold.

#OWS Lawyer: 1st amendment isn't just freedom of speech; also assembly.

posted by The Whelk at 10:49 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Also, it is much more difficult to defame a faceless group than an individual.

I find it trivially easy to make fun of the tea party, and I'm not the only one. I think the linked article is worth reading, as is this one. A movement that can't agree on its own aims enough to nominate anyone as a spokesperson is a movement that's going to end up being defined by whoever passes by. Frankly, I think Occupy has been outstandingly lucky so far by having semi-decent legal representation in New York, at least. It's the same with the 90% consensus threshold at the general assembly, that's why Occupy Oakland was unable to agree to exclude the black bloc crowd despite some ~75% of attendees being in favor of doing so.
posted by anigbrowl at 10:49 AM on November 15, 2011


yikes - from the morning raid.
posted by The Whelk at 10:50 AM on November 15, 2011


When Obama returns, I'm sure we can expect a swift and decisive response to this attack on American values.

Sorry. Couldn't even keep a straight face typing that.

When he returns, I'm sure his campaign staff will find a way to co-opt the movement and get him re-elected so he can return to business as usual.
posted by eyeballkid at 10:51 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


This wasn't only about the 1% shutting down the 99% and their right to protest. This was also about the top quintile not wanting to be confronted with the true state of their society. Homeless people, the unemployed, and the rest of the "undesirables" are fine as long as they are hidden away from sight. They're not allowed near Wall St. They are not allowed to voice their opinion or present the slightest inconvenience to the powerful, or to the immediate minions of the powerful.

The punishment of trying to have a voice when you have no power is harassment from a police force that is sworn to protect the public, but we all know who they really answer to. No officer gets fired for failing to help a regular citizen. In fact, they kill people every day and are surprised if they get anything more than a paid vacation. On the other hand, if they piss off their superiors, or the boss' boss' boss, they know their career is over.

In singles the undesirables are silenced immediately. The police show up, ask them to move along, threaten them with arrest for "disturbing the peace." Failure to comply to their arrest for this crime could constitute resisting arrest. Struggle during your arrest, and now you're guilty of assaulting an officer. In groups this enforcement becomes more challenging, but as we've witnessed over the past couple of months, there is no expense too large to eventually silence everyone. The public has the right to say whatever they want, at a time and place that the rich and powerful deem appropriate. So much for Freedom with a capital F.

The sad, sinking truth about the structures of power in America is that they are not built to uphold principles, or to protect people. Our society is now solely concerned with keeping up appearances, hoping for another economic upturn while we pretend that everything is alright.

Personally, I hope that the lies and deceit do work. I hope everyone gets out and votes in people who place fair tax measures, for the rich and the corporations, so we can balance the budget and get people back in school, and back to work at their government jobs, and god forbid even have public works projects to save our fracturing infrastructure by putting more people to work. I hope the downward cycle gets reversed by real investment in domestic manufacturing and technology as we gather ourselves to face the impending twin disasters of overpopulation and environmental chaos. But every time I hear someone complain about being inconvenienced by the poor, or by protestors, as if they had committed the ultimate sin by speaking up when they should have been quiet, I lose some of that hope.

Freedom: use it, or lose it.
posted by deanklear at 10:51 AM on November 15, 2011 [34 favorites]


#OWS Lawyer: 1st amendment isn't just freedom of speech; also assembly.

Does anyone know who is appearing for OWS? They've said "a top 1st amendment" attorney - do they have someone in the courtroom now who will be able to argue this through to SCOTUS?
posted by anastasiav at 10:51 AM on November 15, 2011


This is pretty straightforward, I think: if you think America's pathetic public pensions are "at least as big a problem as the lack of universal healthcare", you are not on the Left and can't give comradely advice or talk about what "we" should do. This isn't an insult, it's a plain statement of fact: although you may be a liberal in the classical sense, you need to be substantially to the right of center to hold such an opinion, by any realistic and generally accepted definition of the left-right divide.

No, it's a plain statement of your personal opinion. You are not the arbiter of fact any more than I am.
posted by anigbrowl at 10:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Ustream is donating HD cameras with modems and extra batteries to OWS, the video will never go down
posted by The Whelk at 10:53 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Judge: I'll consider. Hope to have decision by 3.
posted by The Whelk at 10:53 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


TENSION
posted by The Whelk at 10:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


UGH hurry up Judge
posted by wheelieman at 10:54 AM on November 15, 2011


@ anastasiav

@macfathom is tweeting from the courtroom, and has mentioned the name Al Levine as a (the?) lawyer for OWS
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 10:54 AM on November 15, 2011


Cops four deep
posted by The Whelk at 10:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


About 100 #ows protesters marching south blocking all traffic on Broadway heading toward #zuccotti. No cops. Pic: http://ow.ly/i/llbQ

I joined this group as they passed my office on Broadway and Duane. Group very peaceful, chanting. We got several blocks in the street before a police line of scooters formed in front of and behind us. After a few minutes standing still in the street, the march moved to the sidewalks. I was very impressed by how thoughtful the protesters were. After the cops blocked us, people around me were saying, "Is this what we want to get arrested for?" The consensus was that they needed to focus on getting to the park.

There was a tense standoff for a minute while it wasn't clear if we'd move off the street when a scooter drove close to a marcher, leading to calls of reckless endangerment. Protesters and cops faced each other, and one scooter cop pulled out his baton. Chilling to see in real life. After a couple of minutes the protesters backed away and continued marching peacefully.

The driver of one of those enormouse cranes honked as we went by, which was awesome. I made to ZP, but then I turned around. It was very crowded, I'm claustrophobic, and I am too much of a weenie to risk arrest.

As I was walking back up Broadway I see a long line of NYPD vans heading south. My thoughts are with the brave people at the park. After a long, peaceful day, I think the NYPD is going to push things into ugly.
posted by Mavri at 10:56 AM on November 15, 2011 [16 favorites]


Does anyone know who is appearing for OWS? They've said "a top 1st amendment" attorney - do they have someone in the courtroom now who will be able to argue this through to SCOTUS?

SCOTUS is quite some distance in the future, and there doesn't need to be that kind of continuity of representation.

This article suggests they have considerable depth on their team.
posted by dhartung at 10:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I want to kiss that judge. Seriously. That is what an American patriot sounds like.

spicynuts, I see the distinction but I don't think cops in general (or NYPD in particular) observe it so nicely. I have heard countless episodes of overt trash talking, racism, and "go team blue" crap from cops at many protests and in other random other on-the-job contexts, having lived in NYC for 15 years (and grown up nearby). The other unions have already been a significant presence at OWS. They cannot live in a bubble hitherto isolated from sharing the experience of disempowerment with their brothers and sisters for any reason other than a conscious choice and a significant capacity for rationalization. Cops are their own class. For hire.
posted by spitbull at 10:57 AM on November 15, 2011


anigbrowl - it's a statement of fact about how the political spectrum is aligned.

Your particular frame about unsustainable pensions is a right-of-center frame. That's not really open to dispute.

For example, no major left-of-center economic think tank agrees with you. The Center for Economic Policy Research, Economic Policy Institute, ThinkProgress, etc. all disagree with your statements in the strongest terms possible.
posted by airing nerdy laundry at 10:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


No, it's a plain statement of your personal opinion. You are not the arbiter of fact any more than I am.

It goes without saying that anything anyone writes is their personal opinion.

Let me restate the problem in a perhaps more conciliatory way. The Left doesn't mean being a liberal, opposed to prejudice, in favour of good pragmatic ideas, or any of that. The term refers to a movement in history that has used public assembly, mass organisation, street politics, and collective action to diminish the power of the market and increase public wealth. Expansion of the public sector and bolstering of wages and pensions are among its great historical achievements. That's what the term has meant pretty much forever. If you think the Left should stop using street politics and adopt a platform of cutting public pensions, that's a totally respectable position, but it's not a position that exists within the spectrum of left politics; it's a criticism from outside that tradition's premises.
posted by wwwwwhatt at 10:58 AM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Homeless people, the unemployed, and the rest of the "undesirables" are fine as long as they are hidden away from sight.

I've thought it quite telling how their presence is used as a double-edged sword. First, in that OWS cannot possibly represent the 99% because, you know, they're in a first world country and all and have it so damned good. Second, in that the very presence of those who obviously don't have it so damned good is itself a discredit to the movement.
posted by dhartung at 10:59 AM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]


I'd be surprised if the court regards the overnight use of tents as being protected speech. I would think that Clark would control, although perhaps it could be distinguishable by dint of Zuccotti being a POPS and there not being any relevant camping restrictions. I guess we'll see.

My expectations are low, sorry to say.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Squadron and Nadler just weighed in:

"We agree that Zuccotti Park must be open and accessible to everyone – OWS, the public, law enforcement and first responders – and that it is critical to protect the health and safety of protesters and the community.

We have also been urging the City to have a zero tolerance policy on noise and sanitation violations, and to make the results of its enforcement public.

But we must balance the core First Amendment rights of protesters and the other legitimate issues that have been raised.

The City's actions to shut down OWS last night raise a number of serious civil liberties questions that must be answered. Moving forward, how will the City respect the protesters' rights to speech and assembly? Why was press access limited, and why were some reporters' credentials confiscated? How will reported incidents of excessive force used by the police be addressed?

On the issue of Brookfield's rules, we are very concerned that they were promulgated after the protesters arrived; the specific legal questions on this topic are being addressed where it is appropriate – in the courts.

Whatever the courts rule, the City's actions here must not be a backdoor means of ending the free exercise of protesters' rights.

Irrespective of this incident, OWS is now bigger than Zuccotti Park, and no one has the power to silence this national movement."
posted by jaduncan at 11:00 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Democracy Now reporter Ryan Devereaux, who is also filing for the Guardian today, is with the hundreds of protesters who have returned to Zuccotti Park, birthplace of the movement.

Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters have returned to the financial district plaza they've used as a base of operations for the last two months. Citing a court order issued this morning establishing their right to enter Zuccotti Park – which they describe as Liberty Square – the demonstrators marched on the plaza late this morning.

As they approached the square, police officers directed the marchers into a chute of barricades that led to a dead-end. With the pen full, protesters demanded the police let them free. Individuals steadily began to create spaces between barricades and within a short amount of time took the sidewalk surrounding the perimeter of the plaza.

"We want our park now!" the protesters chanted, as the police directed them to keep moving along the sidewalk. Many carried this morning's court order in their hands and often challenged police officers to respond to it. Protesters repeatedly told the NYPD they were breaking the law by barring them from the park.

The arrival of a substantial march to Zuccotti Park has increased the number of Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered in Lower Manhattan. The demonstrators have spilled out in areas surrounding the now-cleared park.

The protesters are waiting to hear if the New York state supreme court will side with the owners of the plaza and enforce rules that prohibit tents, tarps and other materials in the park, or let them back in. The crowd, mostly made up of younger people, is passing time cracking jokes via the Peoples' Mic call-and-response system. Meanwhile, in one of the towering office buildings that overlooks the plaza, workers have collected at their windows to watch the demonstrators in the streets below.

posted by The Whelk at 11:02 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


wwwwwhatt, i have plenty of friends on the left who think street politics are an ineffective way of securing the meaningful change we seek. you may be right that historically those tactics have been the first resort, but it's unfair of you to dismiss anyone who believes in non-traditional tactics as somehow not part of a very broadly defined political grouping ("the left"). adapt or die.
posted by modernnomad at 11:03 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


My god....how dare you people try to have an opinion that can't be labeled! BURN IT WITH FIRE!
posted by spicynuts at 11:04 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Not at the cost of constitutionally-guaranteed liberties, no, it isn't.

This is a well-worn quote, but "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin

If true for safety how much more true for a little temporary "cleanliness and order"?


If the private owners of Zuccoti park want OWS gone at least temporarily so that they can clean their property, and don't want people sleeping there, then I don't even see ambiguity in this situation. Their right to enjoy and run their property is also constitutionally guaranteed. They may also have the right to change their minds about the use of their own property.

While I am hardly an expert on "POPS," it can hardly be meant as carte blanche to have a permanent shanty town there.

Speak for yourself. I believe that it's not only acceptable, it's necessary. If all other tools for maintaining a basic standard of living have been taken away from a substantial minority of the population, they have every right to inconvenience those that have played a role in taking away those tools.

Re Guiliani: I agree with lupus_wonderboy. I've lived here in NYC since the early 80's. I, along with the vast vast majority of people I have spoken to on the subject of Guiliani, agree that he was a nightmare of a mayor. The few people I've found that liked him seemed to have had a more casual relationship with what was going on in NYC during his reign.
posted by newpotato at 10:03 AM on November 15


The fact that poverty exists obviously does not mean that the poor can ignore private property or violate laws and ordinances (and OWS is hardly synonymous with people who couldn't maintain a basic standard of living anyway).

I hated Giuliani as mayor too, but I think he would likely have done a better job than Bloomberg on OWS in that he might have acted more decisively.
posted by knoyers at 11:05 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Senator Daniel Squadron, just for context.
posted by jaduncan at 11:06 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


If money = speech (c.f. Citizens United), and if one can purchase a tent or some tarps with money...
posted by andreaazure at 11:08 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]



Homeless people, the unemployed, and the rest of the "undesirables" are fine as long as they are hidden away from sight.

I've thought it quite telling how their presence is used as a double-edged sword. First, in that OWS cannot possibly represent the 99% because, you know, they're in a first world country and all and have it so damned good. Second, in that the very presence of those who obviously don't have it so damned good is itself a discredit to the movement.


dhartung, can you explain this comment a little more? I don't completely understand it (serious question).
posted by sweetkid at 11:09 AM on November 15, 2011


I find it amusing that I am relying on media outlets in Britain and Qatar for reasonable and prompt reporting about a major American protest.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 11:09 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


might be starting to rain....
posted by The Whelk at 11:11 AM on November 15, 2011


I find it amusing that I am relying on media outlets in Britain and Qatar for reasonable and prompt reporting about a major American protest.

Yeah, well, Britain and Qatar have to rely on America for reasonable and prompt reporting of celebrity gossip, so I guess it all evens out.
posted by griphus at 11:11 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


flash of lighting.... damn you dramatic nature.
posted by The Whelk at 11:11 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


anigbrowl, we're pretty much on the same page. Interesting thing, financially the top 1% has a longer way to fall in the inevitable austerity phase, but I think the unwillingness of the 99% to countenance their part in the austerity is an obstacle to a meaningful public dialog and threatens to derail the OWS movement more than any police action.

You're also right about the fallibility of mass populist movements based on the tearing down of the bad—they routinely drop the ball when it comes to building the good to replace it. That building needs to be done on the kind of localized personal level that doesn't tend to vulcanize movements. Notably, it doesn't need to wait for movements either, and it doesn't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater by devolving into anarchy. My original point was that the sacred cow of private property should not be erected as an obstacle to this movement many of whose concerns are healthy.

An interesting point of view about revitalization movements here.
posted by maniabug at 11:11 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yes, raining and temperature is dropping.
posted by rich at 11:11 AM on November 15, 2011


Media outlets in Britain and Qatar don't really care if America comes out looking bad.
posted by Foam Pants at 11:12 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


anigbrowl - it's a statement of fact about how the political spectrum is aligned. Your particular frame about unsustainable pensions is a right-of-center frame. That's not really open to dispute. For example, no major left-of-center economic think tank agrees with you. The Center for Economic Policy Research, Economic Policy Institute, ThinkProgress, etc. all disagree with your statements in the strongest terms possible.

I'm not into political frames, and I don't look to think tanks to form my opinions. The San Francisco Civil Grand Jury is not a right wing think tank. Neither is San Jose's Office of the City Auditor. Neither is the Little Hoover Commission. I'm sorry to be the boring math-and-accounting type guy, but this is an actual honest-to-god problem.
posted by anigbrowl at 11:12 AM on November 15, 2011


THE ACCORDION ANNOUNCES THE RAIN
posted by The Whelk at 11:13 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


They may also have the right to change their minds about the use of their own property.

I don't think they have complete freedom to decide how the space is used:

[Spaces like Zuccotti Park] owe their existence to zoning laws, passed in 1961 and amended numerous times since, that allowed developers to build taller structures in exchange for creating and maintaining plazas, atriums, passageways, and other spaces, all supposedly open to the public.

source

Exactly what obligations and restrictions this places on the property owner I can't say.
posted by Serf at 11:13 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


WHERE TO MAIL BOOKS TO THE PEOPLE'S LIBRARY
I'd like to donate some books, but it's not clear to me what I should be sending: Is this library supposed to be full of books on populist causes and such as educational/inspirational material, or a general purpose library to give people something interesting to do to occupy their time, or what? Thanks.
posted by Flunkie at 11:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


THE ACCORDION ANNOUNCES THE RAIN

band name.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:14 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Regarding the people complaining about the noise caused by the drum circles:
"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security comfort will not have, nor do they deserve, either one"
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:15 AM on November 15, 2011


At presser on courthouse steps, #OWS lawyer Gideon Olivef asked what if judge doesn't rule for them. A: we'll consider options

Flunkie, both. I donated both Zinn and Pratchett.
posted by The Whelk at 11:15 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The fact that poverty exists obviously does not mean that the poor can ignore private property or violate laws and ordinances

It does mean that if the population of the poor grows to the point where they start occupying private space, the social contract is in serious trouble. As a society, you can either address these issues or pretend they aren't happening and hope there's not a country-wide revolution.

I believe in a mix of capitalist, socialist, and libertarian policies. All philosophies can make sense in different situations. But a large scale revolution could land us in a fascist totalitarian state, or a socialist totalitarian state, or a state without a functioning government. None of which are going to be good for anyone.

Right now the people still demanding to keep their tax cuts and still demanding free government money to prop up the financial system think that the police can keep a lid on things while the rest of Americans get zero — and I mean zero — relief during this economic crisis. How many more times can the protestors and police clash before there's an incident? It's a stupid gamble, but knowing the arrogance of the people in power, it's not that surprising.
posted by deanklear at 11:15 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


band name.

...for a Colin Meloy solo project.
posted by griphus at 11:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Interesting thing, financially the top 1% has a longer way to fall in the inevitable austerity phase

Everything that has happened in the past three years completely contradicts this. The austerity phase has been happening, and the rich are getting richer.
posted by one_bean at 11:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


can you explain this comment a little more? I don't completely understand it (serious question).

Not my comment, and not speaking for dhartung, but this is how I read it:

At the beginning, there was a lot of noise around how OWS was just a bunch of privileged kids with iPhones and college degrees complaining that the world wasn't quite as much their oyster as they wanted it to be. There was this very real sense that OWS was much more, say, the 33rd through 98th percent than it was the 99%.

Now, they are saying, there's homeless people in there! It's dirty and uncouth and crime-y and they've got to clean it out so that it can be safe for ordinary people (read: 33rd through 98th percenters) to use again!

And this seems like a double standard, a little, even if it's not necessarily being imposed by the same people in both instances.
posted by gauche at 11:16 AM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]


Cop occupying the tree. Hah.
posted by klue at 11:16 AM on November 15, 2011


Interesting thing, financially the top 1% has a longer way to fall in the inevitable austerity phase..

The thin starve before the fat lose weight.
--Stanislaw Lem
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:18 AM on November 15, 2011 [24 favorites]


"The Media" has also been arrested here so...not everyone is in on the conspiracy

I'm almost surprised that there are no pre-approved, embedded reporters that the authorities can separate from the rabble (ie: independents). Maybe if there's an outcry about lack of coverage that's what will happen next.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 11:18 AM on November 15, 2011


the new OCCUPY newspaper has hit the crowd. Handing it out to people singing "this land is your land, this land is my land."
posted by The Whelk at 11:18 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Lady at CNN asked why they're not covering OWS "Not enough interest"
posted by The Whelk at 11:19 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


okay things are now loud and confusing
posted by The Whelk at 11:20 AM on November 15, 2011


Good points, gauche.

I don't see how protestors having iPhones is of any more interest than an East German having a Trabant. Likewise, when the homeless start folding into the mass protest...I mean, what did you think would happen? That the homeless would start counter-protesting?

If you ask me, and no one did, I think it's part of that whole "crackpot realist" mindset. To many people, there can't possibly be any fundamental economic problems in the US. Fundamental economic problems are for other places and other times, but never here and now. Anything which suggests that there are such problems is obviously not real.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:20 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Lady at CNN asked why they're not covering OWS "Not enough interest"

Never forget that corporate media outlets don't give a damn about audiences. Their job is to sell advertising to other corporations, not to inform the public.
posted by deanklear at 11:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


And this seems like a double standard, a little, even if it's not necessarily being imposed by the same people in both instances.

And depending on how the homeless/undesireables were treated/provided for by the OWSers in the camp (one assumes relatively well), the double-edged sword is also an indictment of the institutions outside the camp and their failure to provide same.
posted by notyou at 11:21 AM on November 15, 2011


Does anyone know if there's video at all of the library getting destroyed? That would be an iconic figure for the movement. Watching the police destroy books says something, and might help convince a lot of people who are on the fence about the entire thing. Might make a lot of people ask, "are we the baddies?"

A well designed website which includes pictures/videos of the book destroying along with calls to donate books to the movement would be a great move at this point. Something clean, professional, maybe a white background.
posted by formless at 11:21 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


It seems to me that part of why OWS got cleared out last night is because Occupy Oakland turned a corner when someone got shut just outside the encampment the other evening.

This story seems to have disappeared from the media, beyond being used as a justification for the police action in Oakland, but I haven't seen anything establishing that the shooting had anything to do with the encampment. That someone would be shot for unrelated reasons in downtown Oakland seems entirely plausible to me.
posted by hoyland at 11:22 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Is this library supposed to be full of books on populist causes and such as educational/inspirational material, or a general purpose library to give people something interesting to do to occupy their time, or what? Thanks.

I was there Sunday and it had plenty of books on populist causes and education/inspirational material—as well as cookbooks, novels, and a hodgepodge of all sorts of other interesting books. Donate whatever!
posted by good day merlock at 11:24 AM on November 15, 2011


That someone would be shot for unrelated reasons in downtown Oakland seems entirely plausible to me.

The saddest part is that if they couldn't connect it to discrediting the protestors, it wouldn't be news.
posted by deanklear at 11:24 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


On the "the park is private property" note, something I don't often hear anybody mentioning is the original, actual Boston Tea Party. A bunch of aristocrats dressed up like street people (actually, Native Americans, but bear with me here), trespassed upon a sailing vessel, confiscated valuable commercial inventory that was owned (here I'm guessing) by a private individual or a corporation, and destroyed that property for the sole purpose of making a political point.

That is vandalism and destruction of private property as political speech.

That was the original Tea Party.
posted by gauche at 11:27 AM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


OWS news is on top of drudge now. Wasn't a couple hours ago. The lead photo is of 3 cops holding down / cuffing a dude face down in the gravel. A little surprising.
posted by Perplexity at 11:31 AM on November 15, 2011


Sticherbeast: I was merely expanding on dhartung's point, but thanks!
posted by gauche at 11:31 AM on November 15, 2011


news of the eviction at Zuccotti park was front-page Yahoo news, as was the court order (albeit presented in rather biased form with plenty of quotes regarding "public safety" and "hazardous sanitary conditions"). For about two hours. Now all of a sudden there is absolutely no mention of OWS anywhere on the Yahoo site. The story has completely vanished.

It's back as the top story, Go Banana. FWIW.


If the private owners of Zuccoti park want OWS gone at least temporarily so that they can clean their property, and don't want people sleeping there, then I don't even see ambiguity in this situation.

Then you are simply mouthing off, knoyers, ignorant of the most basic legal distinctions concerning that special property that have been discussed several times, in this thread, on Metafilter, and in the mainstream press.

Zuccotti Park is not simple "private property". Nor is it spelled "Zuccoti", since you clearly need help googling.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:31 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]




Perplexity, the average Drudge Report viewer won't be rooting for the same person you are.
posted by emelenjr at 11:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


OccupyToronto just got their eviction notices.
posted by saucysault at 11:33 AM on November 15, 2011


This story seems to have disappeared from the media, beyond being used as a justification for the police action in Oakland, but I haven't seen anything establishing that the shooting had anything to do with the encampment.

The shooting victim had been sleeping in the Occupy camp, but other than proximity there's no reason to think the camp was the cause of the shooting. Could have been a drug thing, could have been a personal grudge, could have been that he said the wrong thing to a passing hoodlum. The significance of it is that because of the ongoing confrontation between black bloc anarchists and the OPD, there were no police in the vicinity at the time, and the escalation of public danger provided an excuse for the shutdown.

That someone would be shot for unrelated reasons in downtown Oakland seems entirely plausible to me.

It's plausible, but still unusual. It's disingenuous (of a small minority at OO, not you) to accpet or even endorse the smashing up of downtown the previous week and then say 'Oakland is violent, what can you do' when someone is shot in the same place a few days later. It was a highly foreseeable outcome of the anarchists' attempt to establish a police-free zone.
posted by anigbrowl at 11:33 AM on November 15, 2011


all this mention of "white shirts" is giving me Windup Girl shivers.
posted by The Whelk at 11:33 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]




It was a highly foreseeable outcome of the anarchists' attempt to establish a police-free zone.

Nearly a hundred people died of homicide in Oakland last year. I guess it's a police free zone year round.
posted by deanklear at 11:36 AM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]




It was a highly foreseeable outcome of the anarchists' attempt to establish a police-free zone.


Interesting. What are other murders the highly foreseeable outcomes of?
posted by facetious at 11:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


sweetkid, gauche was close enough. Or try:

Got a job? Got a home? Whaddaya protestin' fer, then?
Got no job? Got no home? Whyncha out lookin' fer one, then?
posted by dhartung at 11:38 AM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


That was the original Tea Party.

Not really sure what you're getting at. Lots of stuff that happened during the Revolution (during revolutions generally) becomes instantly impermissible once a new government is put into place.

I'm sure that people involved in the Whiskey Rebellion thought they were following in the best traditions and methods of the American Revolution -- and arguably, they were -- but that didn't stop the Federal government from sending in the army to quash it.

If the American Revolution had failed, it would probably be viewed with about the same level of contempt that the Whiskey Rebellion is today (just a violent tax protest).

You can get away with all sorts of violence in retrospect, but only if you win.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:39 AM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


On the "the park is private property" note, something I don't often hear anybody mentioning is the original, actual Boston Tea Party. A bunch of aristocrats dressed up like street people (actually, Native Americans, but bear with me here), trespassed upon a sailing vessel, confiscated valuable commercial inventory that was owned (here I'm guessing) by a private individual or a corporation, and destroyed that property for the sole purpose of making a political point.

The tea partiers were smugglers whose business was being disrupted by the East India Tea company, which was able to import tea at lower cost than they could following the Tea act of 1773. Of course, part of the problem was that the EIC was paying tax on the tea, and thus any buyers of said tea were indirectly being taxed to support the hated British government. Funnily enough, all the tax from the tea was held locally and used to pay the salaries of public officials. A modern analogy to this would be an occupation of Goldman Sachs' offices by the managers of small independent hedge funds. It would be funny if Zuccotti park turned out to be full of closet MBAs, I must admit.
posted by anigbrowl at 11:41 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


While I realize that this is tangential to the larger issue of the raid going on in here and the 1st Amendment implications, Anigbrowl, I think your point about public pensions is exactly why we need the conversations OWS sparks. I like institutions too, and almost bordering on technocratic views of public policy issues.

Public pensions are only an issue directly because of, in OWS parlance, the vulturous and corrupt actions of the 1%. I don't want to retype this post, but all the CBO reports and TT numbers are cited. In summary though: Social Security is solvent through mid-century, with the exact years fluctuating by 3-6 because of the indeterminate length of the recession and debt structure. And even codifying the Bush Tax cuts for those making under $250,000 would extend SS through to the next century. Adding to that post, the Social Security fund actually used to pay out more than it brought in as far away ago as 1983, with that issue fixed until now. But, with interest accrued, even though Social Security paid out more than it brought in this year, their amount of money still GREW, and will continue to grow through 2022.

Also conveniently left out of the SS debate is the fact that it is legally prohibited from adding a single cent to the Federal debt, and has never done so and will never do so. And the whole demographic age crisis is manufactured as well. Again, apologies for the lack of linkage but you can check out Dr. Munnel's work at the Boston College Center for Retirement Studies. 65 is pulled out of thin air; an ideal not a reality. In today's labor market, the age for reduced benefits is 62, for normal benefits currently 66 (and will increase to 67 without specific Congressional Intervention before I'm even 40) and right now, full benefits are only achieved at age 70. Raising the retirement age to a nominal 67 would raise the effective retirement age for low-income Americans ("the 50%"), defined as when one can leave work with over $600 to live on per month, to 84(!) years old.

But pivoting to the issue of generalized public pensions beyond Social Security, yes, nationwide state and local public pension companies are facing a $1 trillion dollar shortfall, which would be the case if their stock returns continued at a 2.4% rate. But, at least in RI's case, assuming an 8.25% rate of return will eliminate that shortfall, which is actually below the historical average of 10% RoR, and is a number that is more than reasonable as explained in this Journal of Policy Reform article.

Additionally, there is this flawed argument that the pension issue originates in the fact that people are getting older now. I'll try to find a link, but a Buck Consultants study established that each year added to post-65 life expectancy only adds .2 to .3 percent to the typical pension plan annually. Life expectancy once you've reached the age of 65 is only 5 years higher now than in 1940 (78 to 83) and is optimistically projected to increase by a mere 10 months by 2021. Therefore, in the last 70 years, pension obligation costs have only risen by about 1% per person, whereas GDP has increased by about 600%. But public pension plans have consistently been attacked and private pensions have been weakened, leading to this perception that pensions are bad. But in reality, private pensions are wildly profitable because of regulatory reform in the 70s, adding 14 cents to each share of a company like GE. As Forbes magazine reported, in 2000, the average pension plan for every company in America was fully funded to cover all past, current and projected future employees benefits in perpetuity without a single extra cent of contribution. But utilizing deregulated accounting rules, large corporations "converted trillion dollars in pensions and retiree benefits into immediate dollar-for-dollar benefit for the company" through restructuring and downsizing deals and used loopholes to actually cut benefits, while using pension law to balloon executive pension plans into the range of, say, 4.4 billion in obligations at GE, with $573 million pilfered from employee pensions directly to executives since 2008.

Pensions are an Occupy issue, and need to be fixed, and this is the only narrative that can reclaim the debate from its currently false bearings.
posted by Chipmazing at 11:42 AM on November 15, 2011 [45 favorites]


I'm still trying to get caught up with all the coverage in this tread, but let me reiterate the point that it is absolutely police state tactics 101 to force the press out of the area before a raid. They don't want their actions documented, because they know full well that there won't be any flattering photos or footage of their actions; anything taken is going to show them to be bullies using way too much force on people nonviolently engaging in their civil rights.

I want the cops to be the good guys here, I want them to recognize how much in common that they have with the protesters, and that they can help to maintain a safe and clean environment without resorting to armor, clubs, tear gas, and sound attacks.

But more and more, I'm seeing that the police have decided to continue their role as a militarized occupying army without the best interests of the people at heart.

I hope that the cell phone cameras non-press photographers and videographers were able to document as much of this as possible and get it out there. Because nowadays, it's a lot harder to not be caught on film, no matter how hard you might try.
posted by quin at 11:43 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


The Boston Tea Party now fits neatly into a narrative involving opposition to taxation without representation. The OWS message does not seem to have been as clearly articulated or understood, which is probably why it's not getting mentioned.
posted by Hoopo at 11:45 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


NYC filing opposing TRO.
posted by Jahaza at 11:45 AM on November 15, 2011


Not really sure what you're getting at. Lots of stuff that happened during the Revolution (during revolutions generally) becomes instantly impermissible once a new government is put into place.

My point was more that there are at least two (arguably) popular movements going on: the "tea party" and the OWS. The former seems to have a lot invested in the protection of private property against interference in the form of taxes or regulations. The former also seem to see the latter as a bunch of lawless anarchists and hippies.

The contemporary "tea party" are named after an event that is far more violent and disrepctful of private property than anything that has happened at OWS. And that's funny to me.
posted by gauche at 11:46 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]




After 230 years, the Boston Tea Party has been misunderstood and coopted by other movements to fit neatly into a narrative involving opposition to taxation without representation. Give us 200 years and we'll see what narrative OWS fits into.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:48 AM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]




To many people, there can't possibly be any fundamental economic problems in the US.

Indeed. This is the basis of the term "American exceptionalism", of course.
posted by dhartung at 11:49 AM on November 15, 2011


Retired Philadelphia Police Chief among protestors at Plaza.
posted by The Whelk at 11:49 AM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


wait the verdict may be out?
posted by The Whelk at 11:49 AM on November 15, 2011


....false alarm.
posted by The Whelk at 11:50 AM on November 15, 2011


the complete list of books lost during the raid on the library

NYPD confiscated and destroyed the Bible. Let's make that a meme, ladies and gentlemen.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:51 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


The Welk thank you so much for all you do
posted by wheelieman at 11:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Something tells me the library is going to have a billion copies of A People's History of the United States, but they're going to get one more just in case.
posted by Flunkie at 11:52 AM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


LOTS OF SHOUTING
posted by The Whelk at 11:53 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


oh wait this is video from last night.
posted by The Whelk at 11:53 AM on November 15, 2011


They destroyed the poetry of ee cummings? Those bastards! This is NowWar
posted by Chipmazing at 11:54 AM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


I TAKE IT BACK!
posted by wheelieman at 11:55 AM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


in minutes now.....
posted by The Whelk at 11:56 AM on November 15, 2011


They destroyed TekWar by William Shatner? THIS IS TEKWAR!
posted by furiousxgeorge at 11:57 AM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Well, the judge did say 'try to get it out before 3p' right? He might take a little longer, there's going to be a lot of heat over this either way.
posted by Slackermagee at 11:57 AM on November 15, 2011


After 230 years, the Boston Tea Party has been misunderstood and coopted by other movements to fit neatly into a narrative involving opposition to taxation without representation.

Yes, that's why I used the word "now."
posted by Hoopo at 11:58 AM on November 15, 2011


I like how "the protesters may have had a significant number of items that could potentially be used as weapons."

Unlike, say, the NYPD, which were packing actual, honest-to-god weapons and wearing body armor.
posted by gauche at 12:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Got a job? Got a home? Whaddaya protestin' fer, then?
Got no job? Got no home? Whyncha out lookin' fer one, then?


They're protesting living in a country where people's ability to have a home, a job, health insurance, social services, etc., are at the behest of the 1% of the population who destroyed the economy to make a short-term flood of cash.

@joeycomeau put it well this morning: Every time someone says that the protestors just need to get jobs, I just hear, "know your place."
posted by kagredon at 12:02 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Chipmazing, that link of yours is worthy of an FPP in my opinion.
Since accounting rules rewarded employers for cutting benefits, retiree benefits plans soon morphed into profit centers. Retiree plans became handy earnings-management centers at the expense of the retirees. Yet as workers’ retirement benefits were cut, “supplemental executive pensions” ballooned along with escalating deferred compensation. “Today,” reports Schultz, “it’s common for a large company to owe its executives several billion dollars in pensions and deferred compensation.”

It’s these growing “executive legacy liabilities” that account for much of the “growing pension costs”. Executive liabilities are often large, growing, underfunded or unfunded, and hidden, buried within the figures for regular pensions.

“With no punitive damages under pension law, employers face little risk when they unilaterally slash benefits, even when promised in writing, since they can pay their lawyers with pension assets and drag out the cases until the retirees give up or die.”
If I were the Incredible Hulk, about half of my building would now be in pieces.
posted by deanklear at 12:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]




no less than 3 helicopters above the square.

OWS had a TRAINED WEATHERMAN who had access to radar to give them accurate predictions
posted by The Whelk at 12:07 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


"I'd like to occupy an umbrella right now."
posted by The Whelk at 12:07 PM on November 15, 2011


apparently, according to eyewitnesses, the police tried an LRAD attack but it fired on them instead.

Tee Hee.
posted by The Whelk at 12:08 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


You dont need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
posted by wheelieman at 12:09 PM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


Nearly a hundred people died of homicide in Oakland last year. I guess it's a police free zone year round.

People getting murdered on Broadway in the middle of the afternoon is unusual, I'm happy to say. I do not understand a few people's compulsion to justify the mass vandalism that followed the march to the port, and fail to see how smashing the windows of local businesses like Oaksterdam advances the cause of political reform. To their credit, the legitimate Occupy protestors were out early the following day helping to clean up.

chipmazing, you make many good points about pensions, but citing abuses at companies like GE has little to do with the public pension issue and things like spiking and overtime abuse. It's beyond the scope of this discussion, but I'm not really really a fan of public unions for the same reason that FDR wasn't; to me there's a fundamental incompatibility going on there because the government is quite different from a private employer. I think EO 10988 was a bad idea, and open the door for Barry Goldwater's extremely toxic brand of republicanism. I come from long lines of (European) public servants on both sides of my family and simply can't sign on with public sector collective bargaining. To me bargaining is an activity that should be confined to the marketplace, which is to say the private sector.
posted by anigbrowl at 12:09 PM on November 15, 2011


THE ACCORDION ANNOUNCES THE RAIN

band name.

...for a Colin Meloy solo project.


So colour me disconsolate
But I'm bound now for the Prussian Consulate
For to find a home that isn't quite so mean, dear

I left my love at the occupation
I found myself short of remuneration
Your fascist pomposity couldn't keep the park too clean, dear

(hurdy-gurdy solo)

(ritual chanting)

(fade to 9.5/10 Pitchfork review)
posted by gompa at 12:10 PM on November 15, 2011 [22 favorites]


A modern analogy to this would be an occupation the destruction of Goldman Sachs' offices by the managers of small independent hedge funds.

The original Tea Party didn't occupy. They destroyed private property. That's part of the point I keep trying to make. There is precedent in this country for political actions that are a lot worse, a lot more disrespectful of the market, than breaking rules-that-might-not-even-apply about staying in a park overnight or putting up tents or even -- heavens save us -- being dirty and smelly and hungry.

I'm not saying that OWS should destroy private property. I think that would be a terrible idea. I'm saying, some of the complaints about how radical and alienating OWS is being could maybe use a little perspective.
posted by gauche at 12:10 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


I burned through my entire daily allowance of favorites in this thread alone, but All Tomorrow's Favorites for you, The Whelk.
posted by kagredon at 12:12 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


@joeycomeau put it well this morning: Every time someone says that the protestors just need to get jobs, I just hear, "know your place."

Bless the squire and his relations
And keep us in our proper stations.
posted by emjaybee at 12:13 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Are there alternative streams to theother99 (globalrevolution)?
posted by klue at 12:13 PM on November 15, 2011


Cops now clearing the sidewalk
posted by wheelieman at 12:16 PM on November 15, 2011


more confirmations of sound weapon used last night
posted by The Whelk at 12:16 PM on November 15, 2011


police are moving...
posted by The Whelk at 12:17 PM on November 15, 2011


AND OF COURSE THE FEED GOES DOWN NOW
posted by The Whelk at 12:17 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


What costumes shall Thee Whelk wear
To All Tomorrow's Favorites?
A double-y link from who-knows where
To All Tomorrow's Favorites.
And where will he go and what shall he do
When cortex comes around?
He'll turn once more to Meta Talk
And snark behind the fold.
posted by griphus at 12:17 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Livestream back
posted by The Whelk at 12:19 PM on November 15, 2011


Only 1,000 people every heard the Velvet Underground, but every one of them made a Whelk-based, OWS-themed parody.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:19 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


PEPPER SPRAYED A PUPPY
posted by The Whelk at 12:20 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I'm not saying that OWS should destroy private property. I think that would be a terrible idea. I'm saying, some of the complaints about how radical and alienating OWS is being could maybe use a little perspective.

And I'm getting tired of pointing out that we actually had quite a bit of property damage here in Oakland last week, of both small local businesses as well as evil horrible corporate chains. I have a negative view of violence as a medium of political discourse because I'm Irish and have seen where that goes in an up close and personal way, and I don't like it at all. YMMV.
posted by anigbrowl at 12:20 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Three or four #OWS tagged tweets reportin that the City, the same city involved in the case, has asked the Judge to recuse himself. Also reported that the judge agreed and stepped aside.
posted by Slackermagee at 12:21 PM on November 15, 2011


It's back as the top story, Go Banana. FWIW.

Top story listed for me on Yahoo is still "Worst Car Flops of 2011". Top news story is "Navy Seal's Bin Laden book called a Lie". No OWS coverage anywhere. WTF? Anyways, glad it seems to be getting news play. I'm tiring of arguing with outrageously misinformed people on Facebook. Though why I'm optimistic enough to think that the people who really need to pay attention to these events will suddenly start doing so is beyond me....
posted by Go Banana at 12:21 PM on November 15, 2011


WAIT WHUT
posted by The Whelk at 12:22 PM on November 15, 2011


rumors spreading, waiting for confirmation
posted by The Whelk at 12:24 PM on November 15, 2011


I wonder what will happen if the judge rules against the occupiers. I can't imagine it'll be good.

Three or four #OWS tagged tweets reportin that the City, the same city involved in the case, has asked the Judge to recuse himself. Also reported that the judge agreed and stepped aside.

The hell? I'm seeing the same (unsourced, never-sourced) tweets. Also, people are specifically claiming that the judge who signed the TRS must so recuse herself. Why?
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:24 PM on November 15, 2011


Wait can someone explain what happens if she recuses herself?
posted by griphus at 12:25 PM on November 15, 2011


Can a protester protect him or herself from LRAD or other acoustic devices with earplugs or protective wear?
posted by HabeasCorpus at 12:26 PM on November 15, 2011


NYCLU hasn't tweeted anything about a recusal. I'd rely on them for now. Their earlier updates about the case were accurate.
posted by Mavri at 12:26 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Note that the first unsourced #ows #recuse hit for that story is from some PR firm.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:26 PM on November 15, 2011


It's incredibile, banks get 16 TRILLION dollars (google for it) in bailout, banking profits are high, banksters bonus are still high and some people complains that OWSers maybe are "smelly" and "piling up" a lot of trash?

Sanitation problem in a small public park is a problem?

50 million U.S. people without health insurance and 50 million U.S. people living below the poverty line, these are fucking huge problems, nevermind some trash in some park.


This is the issue, isn't it. No one has the balls, or maybe even the ability, to deal with the real issues that need to be deal with. But we have police, and police are good at clearing parks, so let's just do that instead.
posted by auto-correct at 12:27 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Note that the first unsourced #ows #recuse hit for that story is from some PR firm.


Phew.
posted by Slackermagee at 12:27 PM on November 15, 2011


The part of this story that most people are going to care about is that the park is now clear and people can start using it as a park again (an open space and a refuge from the city that nobody monopolizes for their exclusive use). And from that perspective, it's a local NYC story and not a national one.
That's how it's playing out with our tiny local protest, anyway. Local news: we are clearing out Olympic Plaza because protesters are hogging the space, and the rest of us just want a place to sit on our lunch breaks.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 12:28 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Report from lone reporter who was able to sneak back into the camp
posted by stagewhisper at 12:28 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]




Nobody uses Zuccotti Park as a real park.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:29 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I was sort of expecting to hear chants along the lines of "YOU! ARE! THE 99!" when it came time to square off against beat cops. I sort of still am. Give it a try, OWS?

I've seen and heard it personally. I like it but it doesn't seem to be very effective.

I witnessed one Seattle PD officer respond to a direct, personal appeal with (and I quote) "No, I'm not like you. I'm proud to be a house nigger."

The officer who said this was African-American. I wanted to throw up.

I don't know how to say this without it sounding like hyperbole but we have a very serious and dangerous problem with law enforcement in this country. The job attracts violent, sadistic thugs who get off on violence. That's what they signed up for. The expression on some of their faces as they swing their batons is one of sexual pleasure and gratification.

I used to see the same expression on my severely abusive/sadistic step-dad's face when he'd beat me, and it's fucking terrifying to see it employed under the color of law and order. It makes me physically sick.

I briefly had a job as a data entry technician at a police station. I manually keyed in parking tickets, as they were in the process of computerizing their ticketing system. The things I overheard most/all of the police in the station when they thought I was listening to my headphones and doing my data entry were sickening.

There was a protest scheduled somewhere in the city (which shall remain nameless) one day and the cops were excited about it, making jokes about how many hippy skulls they were going to crack. They were making jokes about anally raping protesters with their batons - while stroking their batons suggestively and commenting that they wished they could use bigger batons. Several officers were talking about what they liked best about protest duty - kneeling on someone's throat or their face - and comparing tactics about how to best hurt people without getting into trouble for police brutality. They were literally discussing how to "accidentally" drop people on their faces after hog-tying them.

This isn't some officers "letting off steam" and joking under stress. This was a small, quiet police department. They weren't under stress - this was the very overt and direct enjoyment of violence.

This is what a police state looks like. The fetishism of brutality and violence. The militarization of municipal police departments. The complete disregard for the will of the citizens they're supposed to be serving and protecting.


Unsurprisingly, people don't want to hear or acknowledge these things. People want to respond "But that's just a few bad cops!" without knowing if it is actually true or not, because if it's not true, well, the alternatives are too terrifying for most to admit to themselves.

Yeah, it's terrifying to think that these people - the people that are supposed to be there to protect you, your family and your home - are actually mostly just thugs. That they don't really have any real function beyond brutality and violence.

That the same officer that you call to your house to take a (mostly useless) police report about a burglary or the same officer you would call if you were sexually assaulted is the same exact officer that would get off on beating you down with a club if you dared to exercise your First Amendment rights, and then laugh about it back in the locker rooms.


If you're realizing and accepting this, you now know why people of color don't call the police when shit goes down in the inner cities. It's because calling the police often made things worse in very real ways. You also now know why the Rodney King riots happened.

That boot that Orwell talks about? The one stamping on a human face, forever? It's not a military boot. It's a police boot.

And increasingly there's no difference between the two boots except the foot inside of it.


Please, please stand up. Our collective future and well being depends on it. Hell, my very life depends on it. I need access to health care. It doesn't have to be free, it just has to be affordable. If you're not angry enough to do it for yourself, feel free to do it for me. Do it for the adult life I lost and wasted being marginalized. Do it for the books I wasn't able to write because I still haven't found long term care for my severe PTSD and depression. Do it for the children I chose not to have.

Do it for your children.

We may not get another chance at this, ever. It may even already be too late.
posted by loquacious at 12:29 PM on November 15, 2011 [102 favorites]


THE VERDICT IS GOING TO BE READ
posted by The Whelk at 12:29 PM on November 15, 2011


AND HERE...WE...GO.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:30 PM on November 15, 2011


YOU DONT HAVE TO YELL
posted by wheelieman at 12:30 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


The part of this story that most people are going to care about is that the park is now clear and people can start using it as a park again

Funny, because almost everybody seems to be commenting on the police arresting journalists, destroying a library, and refusing to obey the law. I am not sure who these "most people" are, but it doesn't really matter what most people think, as most people don't turn their thoughts into activism.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:30 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


LIVE AERIAL VIEW
posted by The Whelk at 12:31 PM on November 15, 2011


That's what they're saying on the livestream, but NYCLU says no decision yet.
posted by Mavri at 12:31 PM on November 15, 2011


OH GOD THE WAITING
posted by The Whelk at 12:32 PM on November 15, 2011


YES
posted by The Whelk at 12:33 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Judgement in favor of OWS
posted by yertledaturtle at 12:33 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think I can hear the internet holding its breath.
posted by Slackermagee at 12:33 PM on November 15, 2011


LET US IN
posted by The Whelk at 12:33 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


F5F5F5F5
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:34 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Aargh, I hope they don't get all excited by a possibly fake verdict and overrun the barricades. They need to sit tight for now.
posted by Mavri at 12:34 PM on November 15, 2011


Huzzah! But what about the camping restrictions, etc.?
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:34 PM on November 15, 2011


I'm not talking about Metafilter, I'm talking about the legions of ignorant Facebook friends people are mentioning upthread. I'm talking about people like my parents and my co-workers. Protests are a non-event to them, but a permanent tent city in a city park crosses a line for them, and they'd like to have their public park back.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 12:35 PM on November 15, 2011


EVERYONE WAIT IN A STATE OF CAT LIKE REDINESS
posted by The Whelk at 12:35 PM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


I CAN'T CLENCH ANY HARDER
posted by griphus at 12:36 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


AH BAD SOURCE THIS IS LIKE TORTURE
posted by The Whelk at 12:36 PM on November 15, 2011


Oh, so no real verdict yet?
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:36 PM on November 15, 2011


False alarm, damn!
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 12:36 PM on November 15, 2011


I JUST WANT TO BE ABLE TO PEE DAMNIT
posted by The Whelk at 12:36 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Protests are a non-event to them, but a permanent tent city in a city park crosses a line for them, and they'd like to have their public park back.

And I am saying that history is made by those who act. Every change inconveniences somebody. If they don't take to the streets about it, they're just an upset person with an opinion.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:37 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Am I the only one who feels almost the way they did on the morning of September 11, 2001? I'm so frigging tempted to buy a ticket to New York it's not funny.
posted by Mooski at 12:37 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


OOZBARK? AARDVARK!
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:38 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


I'm not talking about Metafilter, I'm talking about the legions of ignorant Facebook friends people are mentioning upthread. I'm talking about people like my parents and my co-workers. Protests are a non-event to them, but a permanent tent city in a city park crosses a line for them, and they'd like to have their public park back.

Maybe, and this will depend on how OWS handles its outreach and reporting of this event, but I bet there are a lot of people who might be meh on OWS, but would have some pretty strong reactions to how the city of New York handled things. Sure, people want their park back; but do they want it back at the cost of the police being allowed to forcibly evict them at any time in defiance of the courts? I don't think so, and if that's what people hear about, you are going to see a lot of people sit up and take interest.
posted by kagredon at 12:38 PM on November 15, 2011


LET THE WHELK PEE
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:38 PM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Am I the only one who feels almost the way they did on the morning of September 11, 2001?

Possibly.
posted by holdkris99 at 12:38 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


LET THE WHELK PEE
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:38 PM on November 15 [+] [!]


It's not the catchiest slogan I've ever heard...
posted by orrnyereg at 12:39 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Isn't the term for arguing that people shouldn't do such and such a thing because certain other people potentially wouldn't like that thing referred to as "concern trolling?"
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:40 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


I'm talking about the legions of ignorant Facebook friends people are mentioning upthread. I'm talking about people like my parents and my co-workers. Protests are a non-event to them, but a permanent tent city in a city park crosses a line for them, and they'd like to have their public park back.

Yeah well thankfully those people have absolutely no power, at all. Which is ironically sort of the point
posted by crayz at 12:40 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


LET THE WHELK WHEE?
posted by holdkris99 at 12:40 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]




Am I the only one who feels almost the way they did on the morning of September 11, 2001?


7:30 am or 9:30am?
posted by spicynuts at 12:40 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Attorney Alan Levine JUST said there's no decision but "my assumption is we're gonna win"

NO JINXY
posted by The Whelk at 12:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


another group marching from Foley sq to the Plaza
posted by The Whelk at 12:41 PM on November 15, 2011


orrnyereg: "LET THE WHELK PEE
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:38 PM on November 15 [+] [!]


It's not the catchiest slogan I've ever heard...
"

But it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.
posted by workerant at 12:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


#OCCUPYWHELKSBLADDER
posted by griphus at 12:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


FREE THE WHELK PEE!
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think the 9/11 hero-worship of the NYPD has come to an end. EMS and firefighters are still beloved.
posted by Renoroc at 12:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


7:30 am or 9:30am?

7:30: oh shit gotta go to class
9:30: class got cancelled lol
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


#Ows Lawyers leave clerk's office, but say no decision yet.
posted by The Whelk at 12:42 PM on November 15, 2011


It sounded there, momentarily, like they're yelling "Let Whelk Pee." I think it's really Let Us In.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:42 PM on November 15, 2011


Is being a news conduit a good excuse to not go my publisher's party?
posted by The Whelk at 12:43 PM on November 15, 2011


I don't see how we could possibly allow The Whelk to urinate considering the violence that occurred in Oakland.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 12:43 PM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


Really? You were lol'ing at 9:30?
posted by spicynuts at 12:43 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Once you've gone, The Whelk, I will gladly refill your bladder with the finest liquors.
posted by whuppy at 12:43 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Is being a news conduit a good excuse to not go my publisher's party?

Do you need a good excuse?
posted by holdkris99 at 12:44 PM on November 15, 2011


If The Whelk didn't want NYPD storming his bathroom, maybe he shouldn't have peed in it.
posted by kagredon at 12:44 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


And I am saying that history is made by those who act. Every change inconveniences somebody. If they don't take to the streets about it, they're just an upset person with an opinion.

I agree. I'm just offering an explanation of the indifference or outright support of the police you may be hearing from people you know. And from the media. It's not that they disagree with the protester's message, they're just thinking about the occupation from a different angle than you are.

Yeah well thankfully those people have absolutely no power, at all. Which is ironically sort of the point

I'm not clear who you're talking about here. The people who want the parks cleared have the support of the government, media and police.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 12:44 PM on November 15, 2011


But it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

I assume it's only available as a torrent.
posted by argonauta at 12:44 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


The people who want the parks cleared have the support of the government, media and police.

I think their media support dried up, and they may not have the support of the courts.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:45 PM on November 15, 2011


Woman showing court order to cop gets decked in the face.

Really? You were lol'ing at 9:30?

No, all jokes aside. However, I do remember being at Washington Square Park. Someone was asking where the towers were. A nasal woman then replied, very loudly, "YOU CAN KEEP LOOKIN' FOR THE TOWERS...BUT I DON'T THINK YOU'RE GONNA FIIIIIND THEM!" That was sort of funny, amidst the chaos.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:45 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Current Guardian Liveblog
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:46 PM on November 15, 2011


It does mean that if the population of the poor grows to the point where they start occupying private space, the social contract is in serious trouble. As a society, you can either address these issues or pretend they aren't happening and hope there's not a country-wide revolution.

The US isn't remotely on the brink of revolution or even major social unrest as was last seen in the chain of riots of the late '60s. "The population of the poor" is not challenging the government or its authority at all. Right now anyway, OWS is a small movement and has not posed a significant threat to the status quo. I doubt it will.

Then you are simply mouthing off, knoyers, ignorant of the most basic legal distinctions concerning that special property that have been discussed several times, in this thread, on Metafilter, and in the mainstream press.

Zuccotti Park is not simple "private property". Nor is it spelled "Zuccoti", since you clearly need help googling.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:31 AM on November 15


Thanks for the helpful spelling lesson.

Because a park is open 24 hours, I wouldn't infer either that a) multitudes of people are allowed to squat there; b) open 24 hours means that the owners relinquish all rights to exercise control of their property.
posted by knoyers at 12:46 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Ha..that is actually funny.
posted by spicynuts at 12:46 PM on November 15, 2011


Mayor's office going out of their way to dispel rumors of the library's destruction: Property from #Zuccotti, incl #OWS library, safely stored @ 57th St Sanit Garage; can be picked up Weds.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:47 PM on November 15, 2011


^Securely held by the ample cargo capacity of garbage trucks.
posted by entropone at 12:48 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Right now anyway, OWS is a small movement and has not posed a significant threat to the status quo. I doubt it will.

Well, we'll see. I hope you are wrong but I suspect you are right. Let's find out by letting them exercise their rights under the constitution.
posted by josher71 at 12:49 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


yeah, but the OWS folks first have to claim their stuff, and then they have to wait to see if anybody else claims it.
posted by angrycat at 12:51 PM on November 15, 2011


Property from #Zuccotti, incl #OWS library, safely stored @ 57th St Sanit Garage; can be picked up Weds.

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posted by Faint of Butt at 12:51 PM on November 15, 2011 [36 favorites]


The police chose to overcommit themselves.

Indeed. Let's review Madison, again, shall we?

The number one direction that was provided by Chief Tubbs of the Capitol Police Department, Chief Wray of the Madison Police and myself was that we were going to ensure that it was a safe gathering, and that we were not going to be protecting marble; we were going to be protecting people's rights to assemble and their right to free speech, because we knew this was a highly charged gathering. -- Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney, one of the supporting departments
posted by dhartung at 12:52 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Property from #Zuccotti, incl #OWS library, safely stored @ 57th St Sanit Garage; can be picked up Weds.

Amy Goodman: "... we were there watching as the sanitation workers trashed almost every physical item in the park, dumping them into dump trucks. And when we asked them where they were taking the property that had been completely trashed and was put into garbage trucks, they said, 'To the dump.'"
posted by ryanshepard at 12:52 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Nonsensical cop on the Livestream: "You can't stay here! You can't leave! But you gotta move! You can't stay here! You gotta move!"
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:53 PM on November 15, 2011


they seem to be pushing people into already cramped areas.
posted by The Whelk at 12:53 PM on November 15, 2011


knoyers : Because a park is open 24 hours, I wouldn't infer either that a) multitudes of people are allowed to squat there; b) open 24 hours means that the owners relinquish all rights to exercise control of their property.

You need to start paying more attention. There are fixed rules for how the 'owner' of a privately owned public space in NYC can set and change rules, and they include requiring the owner to publicize suggested rule-changes 50 days before those changes go into effect, and also require that a public hearing be held to discuss the proposed rule-changes.

So get your FACTS straight and quit blowing hot air about a subject that you're obviously completely misinformed on.
posted by syzygy at 12:53 PM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


it is getting very shouty
posted by The Whelk at 12:53 PM on November 15, 2011


The Occupy Wall Street encampment was cleaner, safer, friendlier, and (much) quieter than my neighborhood (Washington Heights, uptown) on any given warm night. Less public urination, too, despite the city's remarkably mean-spirited refusal to allow the installation of porta-potties until just 10 days ago. The "quality of life issues" cited in the city's brief are orders of magnitude worse every weekend night in the East Village. Mayor Bloomberg's decision to bring in riot cops and clear out Liberty Park in the middle of the night is only and exactly a capitulation to the demands of his plutocrat cronies.
posted by jcrcarter at 12:54 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


The coverage I saw on CNN a few moments ago lasted about a minute.
posted by XMLicious at 12:54 PM on November 15, 2011


looks like the camera man is getting kinda manhandled, tense but not danger zone
posted by The Whelk at 12:55 PM on November 15, 2011


Amy Goodman: "... we were there watching as the sanitation workers trashed almost every physical item in the park, dumping them into dump trucks. And when we asked them where they were taking the property that had been completely trashed and was put into garbage trucks, they said, 'To the dump.'"

So was Goodman inaccurate/exaggerating or is the mayor's office lying and they don't actually have OWS property and/or they have taken photographs of other books that are not in fact part of the OWS library?
posted by modernnomad at 12:55 PM on November 15, 2011


Yeah, they pulled that "Oh, your stuff is safe" bullshit here in Seattle, to.

By "safe" they mean "destroyed and crushed in a sodden pile".

Tents and camping gear and books are fragile. So are cameras and laptops and phones. If you just scoop them up and then throw them in a truck (compacting trash truck or not) without properly packing and stowing them, they tend to tear and have broken poles and be effectively useless.

The destruction is intentional. The seized belongings aren't actually "safe" unless you consider "landfill ready" to be "safe".
posted by loquacious at 12:55 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


knoyers: With the new barricades comes new rules, including posted signs that state that the park is closed from 10p to 6a.
posted by andreaazure at 12:55 PM on November 15, 2011


More than likely, some got sent to the dump, some got sent to 57th St. and there's basically no way to figure out what went where.
posted by griphus at 12:55 PM on November 15, 2011


camera is geting good cop bad copped
posted by The Whelk at 12:56 PM on November 15, 2011


griphus we have a list of the books at least
posted by The Whelk at 12:57 PM on November 15, 2011


With the new barricades comes new rules, including posted signs that state that the park is closed from 10p to 6a.

The problem is that this isn't legal or enforceable.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:57 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


The Whelk: "it is getting very shouty"

Getting? Oh, you mean there, not here.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:57 PM on November 15, 2011


Yeah, I can't really imagine that the city willingly undertook overseeing the chaos of having a bunch of jumbled-up belongings and asking people to prove their the owners. I think it was all trashed.
posted by Mavri at 12:58 PM on November 15, 2011


cameraman needs a snack, a nap, and a buddy
posted by ZeusHumms at 12:58 PM on November 15, 2011


I'm not thrilled with my source - but OWS on FB just posted this: Occupy Wall St.
UPDATE: Judge has ruled in favor of OWS returning to our park. Reclaim our home now!
posted by cdalight at 12:59 PM on November 15, 2011


Heh.

"Sorry, some water got in your laptop. And several bootprints. No clue what happened there, that's how it was when we picked it up."
posted by jaduncan at 12:59 PM on November 15, 2011


Officer Garcia is sad about the puppets
posted by The Whelk at 12:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


PUPPIES
posted by The Whelk at 12:59 PM on November 15, 2011


No word on puppet puppies
posted by The Whelk at 12:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


griphus we have a list of the books at least

True. But but the city has basically an iron-clad defense in that "we just gave the books to whoever showed up," assuming that's what they are going to do. OWS isn't nearly an organized party enough to be able to defend themselves against the city's claim that the books not on the list just walked away.
posted by griphus at 1:00 PM on November 15, 2011


More than likely, some got sent to the dump, some got sent to 57th St. and there's basically no way to figure out what went where.

"Democracy Now" also reported sanitation workers stealing drums from the park this morning ("they're trash and we're taking them from the trash" was the quote, I think.) My guess is that a lot of cameras and laptops became "trash", too.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:01 PM on November 15, 2011


(i would like to formally apologize to the metafilter server right now)
posted by The Whelk at 1:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


And it's already being questioned - back to lurk (appreciatively - you people are phenomenal, even when you get a bit snippy with each other :)
posted by cdalight at 1:01 PM on November 15, 2011


(not that I approve of that, to be clear. I just know people it's happened to.)
posted by jaduncan at 1:01 PM on November 15, 2011


"The new park smells like Clorox and broken constitutional amendments."

Sorry about that, guys. Sometimes a guy just wants to rub himself on things, ya know?
posted by clorox at 1:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [29 favorites]


Ejavelation?
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 1:03 PM on November 15, 2011


Thank goodness the Other99 livestream guy took a break. I was getting worried about him.
posted by Mavri at 1:04 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The Whelk: "it is getting very shouty"

Getting? Oh, you mean there, not here.


That was my first thought, too, but actually I think people have been pretty civil in this thread--a bit of snippiness here and there, but decent for what's about to become a 1000+ comment post.
posted by kagredon at 1:06 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


odinsdream: "I will buy you a year's worth of halal chicken if you'll drop this bullshit excuse for violating people's constitutional rights."

I'll take you up on that. I love me some halal chicken.
posted by falameufilho at 1:06 PM on November 15, 2011


Hey, it's a handoff. Cool.
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:08 PM on November 15, 2011


would-be mayor, @ChrisCQuinn, weighs in: If reports of excessive force, restrictions on press are true, "these actions are unacceptable"

Gonna have to a little better then that but I like your union background so .....
posted by The Whelk at 1:09 PM on November 15, 2011


Ustream seems to be back up.
posted by tr33hggr at 1:09 PM on November 15, 2011


Dammit I have gotten NO work done today.
posted by tr33hggr at 1:10 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Over a thousand comments and only half of them are from The Whelk! (Just kidding, thanks for keeping us informed.)
posted by Navelgazer at 1:10 PM on November 15, 2011


@adrian_parsons: #OWS protester: "the cops have occupied Zucotti Park, we're just trying to figure out what their demands are.
posted by The Whelk at 1:12 PM on November 15, 2011 [19 favorites]


Whelk: where would you like donations sent in your name?
posted by felix at 1:13 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


The Bladder and Bowel Foundation.
posted by Kattullus at 1:14 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think the Whelk has exceeded the recommended 10% comment limit.
Just kidding! Thanks for the updates - I can't watch the streams at work.
posted by charred husk at 1:15 PM on November 15, 2011


Cause it came up (SELF LINK) I am in this, every cent will go to OWS, donations for the library can be found ...upthread and they are going to need so much more support after this - I'd wait for a decision then see what everyone needs.
posted by The Whelk at 1:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Looking at the photos that The Atlantic posted, those tents may be "available for pickup" at some point by their original owners, but they will be in small, damp bundles and unsuitable for use ever again…which is pretty much what I imagine the cops had in mind.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Mayors office photo shows OWS Library books not trashed. (via NY Times).
posted by Jahaza at 1:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Navelgazer: "Over a thousand comments and only half of them are from The Whelk..."

Very tempted to make a "just like old times" or "so it's Tuesday then?" joke but only if everybody -- especially him -- promises to take it in the spirit intended, which is very much one of love and appreciation for allowing me follow along with events since I've woken up this morning from a trusted source.

The same thing with my comments on 'shoutiness' here -- it has been fairly civil, and, to be honest, a completely lack of shouty in a thread like this would be not only impossible but maybe even a little disappointing. Some things are worth getting riled up over.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 1:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Whelk: where would you like donations sent in your name?

Here
, asked him on MeFi Mail earlier
posted by holdkris99 at 1:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


A) I want to move to New York*
B) I want America to be a better place
C) I want to high-five everyone who contributed to this vast, exciting thread


*WRAL Headline News: Members of the so-called "Occupy Raleigh" movement on Tuesday turned down an offer to set up a base in a downtown parking lot, saying it didn't meet their needs. I think it is the "so-called" that gets my goat. Well that and the comments dripping with contempt for the Occupiers.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 1:17 PM on November 15, 2011


we've just switched to the courthouse? cam
posted by The Whelk at 1:18 PM on November 15, 2011


Still no decision? This is outrageous.
posted by tr33hggr at 1:19 PM on November 15, 2011


they are being way nicer to that shouty guy then they need to be
posted by The Whelk at 1:19 PM on November 15, 2011


back to courthouse? cam
posted by The Whelk at 1:20 PM on November 15, 2011


Still no decision? This is outrageous.

GIVE US US PEE
posted by Hoopo at 1:21 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


In an effort to lower my blood pressure, I am now reading all of Whelk's comments in the voice of the announcer from SuperFriends.
posted by griphus at 1:21 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


they are being way nicer to that shouty guy then they need to be

These are the kinds of dialogues that need to happen though.
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:22 PM on November 15, 2011


Meanwhile...
posted by burnmp3s at 1:22 PM on November 15, 2011


We will bring Lexcorp down.
posted by The Whelk at 1:22 PM on November 15, 2011


CNBC camera is pointing at the wrong courthouse.
posted by Mavri at 1:22 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


In an effort to lower my blood pressure, I am now reading all of Whelk's comments in the voice of the announcer from SuperFriends.

I tried, but I wound up with George Takei, which is all right, I guess.

"waaaay NICER to that shouty guy than they neeeed to beeee."
posted by kagredon at 1:22 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Simply, if this doesn't register as an evil thing, you need to recalibrate your sense of what's evil.

On my sense of what's evil, this would be very low on the list. On the list sure, but very very low
posted by holdkris99 at 1:24 PM on November 15, 2011


I'm going to get another cup of coffee which will make the verdict come instantly as soon as my back is turned.
posted by The Whelk at 1:25 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Stream in courthouse now, everyone waiting, looking at the door...
posted by The Whelk at 1:26 PM on November 15, 2011


A watched courtroom never boils.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:27 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Griphus if you don't put those up on soundcloud I will be super disappointed.
posted by murphy slaw at 1:27 PM on November 15, 2011


Stream in courthouse now, everyone waiting, looking at the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur...
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:27 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


OCCUPY JURASSIC PARK
posted by The Whelk at 1:28 PM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]


These are basic civil liberties. I know these!
posted by griphus at 1:29 PM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


Well I think the NYPD (and all of us) learned a valuable lesson today:

1) Wait until twilight
2) Evict media
3) *Remember to disable cell phone and wireless access points in the area*
4) Forcibly remove protestors
5) Bring in cleaning crew and generate footage of cleaning operation to give to press
6) Erect barricades

Those BART officials didn't have to put up with any TRO nonsense, did they?
They didn't get narrated by the Whelk either
posted by ceribus peribus at 1:29 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


THE WHELK HAS TO PISS LIKE A PACHYCEPHALOSAURUS!
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:29 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


headdeskheaddeskheaddeskheaddeskheaddesk RT @whitehouse: Today is America Recycles Day. Find out what you can do:
posted by The Whelk at 1:29 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Forgive me if this has been answered, but what are the option for the City of the judge rules in favor of OWS? Does a favorable judgement mean that the barricades must immediately be moved, or will we just be looking at a legal counter action?
posted by holdkris99 at 1:30 PM on November 15, 2011


If the cops illegally evicted people from the park and confiscated their belongings and those items get lost/damaged, can the police or city be held culpable? Will there be any repercussion for the cops/city due to the illegal police action?
posted by dazed_one at 1:31 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


*if the judge
posted by holdkris99 at 1:31 PM on November 15, 2011


Dear White House, what is the correct way to recycle a ruined tent?
posted by murphy slaw at 1:31 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Quote from an e.e.cummings poem: "I will not kiss your fucking flag/there is some shit I will not eat."
posted by eggtooth at 1:31 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Today is America Recycles Day. Find out what you can do:

See, this is why I don't do drugs.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:31 PM on November 15, 2011


dazed_one: class action, most likely.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:32 PM on November 15, 2011


THE WHELK HAS TO PISS LIKE A PACHYCEPHALOSAURUS!
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 13:29 on November 15 [+] [!]
Better than a micropachycephalosaurus, knowwhatimean?
posted by wintermind at 1:32 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Will there be any repercussion for the cops/city due to the illegal police action?

Yes. The City will pay its lawyers handsomly to argue that it is immune from suit for acting in the public good. This argument will persuade a judge.

That's not a researched legal opinion, mind you.
posted by gauche at 1:33 PM on November 15, 2011


If the cops illegally evicted people from the park and confiscated their belongings and those items get lost/damaged, can the police or city be held culpable? Will there be any repercussion for the cops/city due to the illegal police action?

Yeah, NYC has been here before. They'll be lawsuits and they'll be settlements and it's all going to cost a TON of money. Good thing I pay my NYC income tax!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 1:33 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Once you've gone, The Whelk. . .

You don't go back?
 
posted by Herodios at 1:34 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Will there be any repercussion for the cops...

Is there ever?.
posted by Hoopo at 1:34 PM on November 15, 2011


Karen McVeigh, says matters are not much clearer inside the supreme court building, where there are reports that the judge may not issue his ruling until 5pm.

on that note the coffee now has bourbon in it
posted by The Whelk at 1:34 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


Also, for all the cops who disobeyed a restraining order, what are the penalties for someone who breaks a restraining order in the US?
posted by dazed_one at 1:35 PM on November 15, 2011


Forgive me if this has been answered, but what are the option for the City of the judge rules in favor of OWS?

Further legal action as the cops continue to do what the City tells them to regardless of what is going on in the courts.

If the cops illegally evicted people from the park and confiscated their belongings and those items get lost/damaged, can the police or city be held culpable?

The city/NYPD will claim those objects were in that condition when they were picked up.

Will there be any repercussion for the cops/city due to the illegal police action?

They might be able to eke out an "I'm sorry you're an asshole"-style apology from the NYPD but that's about it. At the worst, some shmuck who drew the short straw is going to be flying a desk for the rest of their career.
posted by griphus at 1:35 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


To be fair, the cummings poem is:

"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
posted by holdkris99 at 1:35 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


All this concern for lost & stolen items - weren't several people arrested? What happens to them? They're still in jail, right?
posted by ceribus peribus at 1:36 PM on November 15, 2011


on that note the coffee now has bourbon in it

you liar, it had bourbon this whole time.
posted by Think_Long at 1:36 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Will there be any repercussion for the cops/city due to the illegal police action?

This is the NYPD, the same organization that stops and frisks 600,000 people per year with no probable cause; people who are just coincidentally black or latino.

They are not too concerned about what is legal, or what is right.
posted by deanklear at 1:36 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


By the way, I'm not naive and I understand that the cops will get off lightly. Just wondering what the law is.
posted by dazed_one at 1:36 PM on November 15, 2011


#Teamsters' General Executive Board unanimously passes resolution in support of #OWS protesters bit.ly/rURjsZ
posted by The Whelk at 1:38 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


The Whelk: on that note the coffee now has bourbon in it

On the one hand, two diuretics in one cup. On the other hand, you won't care.
posted by Kattullus at 1:38 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


wait, there was a LITERAL tug of war with an American flag between a protestor and cop? Sometimes life resembles editorial cartoons
posted by The Whelk at 1:39 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


All this concern for lost & stolen items - weren't several people arrested? What happens to them? They're still in jail, right?

My understanding is there are active efforts to identify them and get them out, but since there's no absolutely sure way to take a complete headcount of who was in the park/who is accounted for now, it depends on friends/relatives/the arrested folks being able to get in contact with the people in charge of the legal efforts.
posted by kagredon at 1:39 PM on November 15, 2011


While we all wait in anguish, why not distract yourself with this Rorschach test: NYT "Public Opinion and the Occupy Movement".
posted by hat_eater at 1:39 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


electricity has been restored to the park, with the lit walkways
posted by The Whelk at 1:40 PM on November 15, 2011


Hey, got any plans Thursday? Maybe we can meet for coffee or a socio-political revolution? http://november17.org/

posted by The Whelk at 1:42 PM on November 15, 2011


I know this question might make me sound like a dum-dum, but why do the protesters want/need anyone's permission to protest? Shouldn't they just be peacefully marching to Zucotti Park regardless of what any judge says, then letting the cops beat and arrest them when they get there? Isn't that how civil disobedience works?

(Please know that I'm asking out of actual curiosity. It just seems like when you're protesting against the oligarchy, asking that same oligarchy for permission might be missing the point.)
posted by weinbot at 1:43 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


#OWS lawyer Yetta Kurland days they're making copies of decision, will be released shortly.
posted by The Whelk at 1:43 PM on November 15, 2011


From Nick Pinto: #OWS lawyer Yetta Kurland days they're making copies of decision, will be released shortly.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 1:43 PM on November 15, 2011


macfathom Nick Pinto
#OWS lawyer Yetta Kurland days they're making copies of decision, will be released shortly.
posted by CancerStick at 1:43 PM on November 15, 2011


JINX YOU OWE ME A COKE
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 1:43 PM on November 15, 2011


WOAH
posted by CancerStick at 1:44 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


it's a glitch in the Matrix.
posted by Foosnark at 1:44 PM on November 15, 2011


Wow.
posted by TheMidnightHobo at 1:45 PM on November 15, 2011


A fairly simple version to heft a live streaming iPhone should be pretty cheap.

I think these remote helis just aren't cheap enough considering the very high probability you lose them behind "enemy lines".
posted by smackfu at 1:45 PM on November 15, 2011


OWS lost
posted by CancerStick at 1:45 PM on November 15, 2011


OWS lost.
posted by omnikron at 1:47 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


HOLY SHITBALL FUCK
posted by The Whelk at 1:47 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]




Who's next?
posted by zomg at 1:47 PM on November 15, 2011


OWS lost

APPEAL THAT SHIT.

This isn't over.
posted by kagredon at 1:48 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


This is complete bullshit, but I have a feeling things are only going to come back stronger.

I just lost my job. There's no doubt in my mind that I will be using my free time to help the movement.
posted by defenestration at 1:48 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


PREDICT MASS CITY SIDE FREAK OUT IN 3 2 1
posted by The Whelk at 1:48 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


The Occupiers will be able to come back into ZP, just not with any equipment which could facilitate camping, such as tents or sleeping bags.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:49 PM on November 15, 2011


Well, it's been a while since we've had a old-fashioned riot in the city.
posted by griphus at 1:49 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Oh god.

was going to go to the gym after work tonight but something tells me that heading straight for home may be a wee bit safer.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:50 PM on November 15, 2011


NYCLU
Our lawyers looking into decision now

posted by The Whelk at 1:50 PM on November 15, 2011


And the man in the black said everyone attack and it turned into Zuccotti Park blitz...
posted by Slackermagee at 1:50 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]



Well, it's been a while since we've had a old-fashioned riot in the city.
posted by griphus at 4:49 PM on November 15 [+] [!]


Been a while since you guys have had a good old fashioned revolution too...
posted by dazed_one at 1:51 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


The legal apparatus behind OWS will appeal. The more interesting question to me is what the protesters will do. Overtake the park? Go elsewhere to camp?
posted by Mavri at 1:51 PM on November 15, 2011


I just lost my job. There's no doubt in my mind that I will be using my free time to help the movement

I am so sorry.

OWS lost


I am so sorry.

More bourbon all around.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 1:51 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


No riots would be best. For the cause, for the people involved, for public opinion, for everything. So please let's not hope for riots.
posted by lydhre at 1:52 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


"get out of my face"

"is this out of your face"

"if he does it again arrest him"
posted by The Whelk at 1:52 PM on November 15, 2011


Yeah, no riots please.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:52 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


THE % OF COFFEE AS FLUIDS IN THIS CUP IS GETTING DANGEROUSLY LOW
posted by The Whelk at 1:53 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


No riots would be best. For the cause, for the people involved, for public opinion, for everything. So please let's not hope for riots.

Yes, this. Stay peaceful and safe.
posted by kagredon at 1:54 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


wait, there was a LITERAL tug of war with an American flag between a protestor and cop? Sometimes life resembles editorial cartoons

Possibly not more than this one. /sidetrack

why do the protesters want/need anyone's permission to protest?

One would think not, but despite vaunted principles of free speech, there exists a delicate legal framework for such things in the US. As a practical matter, it may or may not prevent people from getting arrested.

So please let's not hope for riots.

The more the legitimate routes of protest are marginalized and cut off, the more likely the illegitimate routes become. Don't think this isn't a strategy.
posted by dhartung at 1:54 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


The Whelk, I'm at work on Wall St. Can I bring you some more coffee?
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 1:54 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm at home uptown, but thanks.
posted by The Whelk at 1:55 PM on November 15, 2011


AND AGAIN LO THE ACCORDION
posted by The Whelk at 1:55 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


presser now: they will continue to occupy wall street, disappointed in the ruling tonight: no sleeping bags, tents.

New site already picked according to stream
posted by The Whelk at 1:56 PM on November 15, 2011


So is anyone up for camping on the Mall in tents for a few months to protest the shoddy treatment of the poor and the shoddy treatment of protesters who would like to camp? Case law suggests that were tents and sleeping therein integral to the protest, they could not be disallowed. They can if they just make protesting more convenient, apparently.
posted by wierdo at 1:56 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


The decision.
posted by Mavri at 1:57 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Anyone in Chicago want to bring me bourbon?
posted by shakespeherian at 1:57 PM on November 15, 2011


Damn, I was going to bring my famous guacamole tomorrow.
posted by Cerulean at 1:57 PM on November 15, 2011


The ruling does not say sleeping bags, the issue permanent tents, permanent structures. City said in court that they would let ppl in
posted by The Whelk at 1:57 PM on November 15, 2011


Yeah, no rioting please. The fact that this whole episode happened without anyone getting shot or hospitalized is a feature, not a bug. (And a little surprising, actually).
posted by ceribus peribus at 1:58 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


For the last three years I've been sitting around waiting for people to wake up to the fact that we were losing this crisis as a way to roll back decades of terribly de-regulation, and I thought OWS was going to be people finally figuring that out. Once they made it clear they weren't interested in working towards that, but instead was some much bigger amorphous movement I sort of gave up. Admire what they are doing, don't think they are likely to be successful even though I would like them to be.

Also the early days student loans thing really really struck me as politically deaf. Not something you can build a mass movement off of.
Yeah you're definitely accomplishing a lot more nit-picking the people who are actually doing something on the internet.

Really this kind of attitude is just ridiculous, essentially that if a protest can't somehow 'appeal' to some mythical demographic who judges these things it shouldn't happen. And of course what the mythical demographic really cares about is appearance and image. They don't care about the actual issues, but they'll side with anyone in a suit. Or whatever. Frankly people never even bother to define or even name this silent group they just assume it exists and just go from there, as if it was obvious that the important thing here is they see the right image out of all of this. And anything that detracts from that, even if it's something that could easily be made up or planted by the other side makes the protest worthless.

So it's a metric that's guaranteed to fail. On the other hand, the status quo has no standards imposed on it whatsoever.

I mean, do you people think that the general public is going to start loving wall street and Bank of America because they heard Zuccotti park smelled bad? What is the actual thing that happens as a result of all this negative image reinforcement.
Is President Obama AWAKE?
Why would Obama even care about this? Whatever happens it's up to the city and state governments, not the federal. If the city/state is violating the constitution it's up to the courts to correct that. It would take years for something like this to wind it's way up to the supreme court, and the Roberts court would probably just side with NYPD anyway
posted by delmoi at 1:58 PM on November 15, 2011 [15 favorites]


permanent tents

Maybe I need to step away and get some coffee and actually grade a bit, but how does "permanent tents" make any goddamn sense as a phrase?
posted by kagredon at 1:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


So is anyone up for camping on the Mall in tents for a few months to protest the shoddy treatment of the poor and the shoddy treatment of protesters who would like to camp?

I like the way you think
posted by crayz at 1:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


guys i'm tapping out.

good luck

stay safe

we're all counting on you
posted by The Whelk at 1:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [38 favorites]


occupy in shifts.
posted by yertledaturtle at 2:01 PM on November 15, 2011


Some people get sooo sentimental
posted by Cerulean at 2:01 PM on November 15, 2011


Major round of thanks for The Whelk.
posted by genehack at 2:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [20 favorites]


Judge who denied the extension to the injunction: Stallman.

Judge who ordered injunction: Billings.

OMGWTFBBQQ.
posted by Slackermagee at 2:01 PM on November 15, 2011


Thank you The Whelk!
posted by erisfree at 2:04 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Three cheers for the Whelk!

Hip-hip-hoor... 5-0!
posted by griphus at 2:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


So is anyone up for camping on the Mall in tents for a few months to protest the shoddy treatment of the poor and the shoddy treatment of protesters who would like to camp?

Hey, guess who had that very idea? In 1968? He'd be glad to see it finally happen, I am sure.
posted by Miko at 2:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I'm no good at guessing, who?
posted by omnikron at 2:06 PM on November 15, 2011


Hitler.
posted by griphus at 2:07 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


About those dump trucks- one small victory we had was forcing one of the trucks to back up rather than try to pass through the intersection. I took a short video of the action (also as you can see things were a little tense last night, hence my short temper today. Apologies to anigbrowl.)
posted by stagewhisper at 2:07 PM on November 15, 2011


Hey, guess who had that very idea? In 1968? He'd be glad to see it finally happen, I am sure.

Is that like the reverse of Godwin's Law?
posted by Foosnark at 2:07 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Thank you so much The Whelk!
posted by TheMidnightHobo at 2:07 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Zombie Gerrard Winstanley.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 2:07 PM on November 15, 2011


Eroops, I can not make link. Here's another try. Poor People's Campaign - A Dream Unfulfilled. Also, This Weekend in 1968: The Legacy of Resurrection City (great multimedia slideshow, looks so eerily contemporary).
posted by Miko at 2:08 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


God damn, that slideshow is good. I think I might make a Resurrection City FPP.
posted by Miko at 2:10 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


OWS will fail, if only because things aren't quite bad enough yet for it to have a broad popular appeal. My fear is that by the time things are really that bad, it won't matter that people are dissatisfied because democracy, as we understand it, will have already been swept away by the elites.

Make no mistake: since the founding of this nation, we have only retained the barest minimum of democratic process by the permission and behest of our economic and political elites (who have often been the same people since roughly 1615). If democracy ever becomes terribly inconvenient for these two groups -- regardless of what "party" they belong to -- then democracy will be set aside.

Here's what I envision. Over the next decade or two, the Democratic and Republican parties will grow increasingly concerned over domestic unrest and both will advocate increasingly authoritarian security measures. Homeland Security spending will triple while social security and healthcare are slashed.

Eventually, real efforts will be made to curtail the media and the internet. We may see a Chinese-style internet system, where all computers (and their users) must be licensed in some way. Laws may be enacted which, while not blatantly denying freedom of speech, will Make Life Very Hard for anyone who speaks up too loudly, or in unapproved ways.

In the long term, I see the Democrats and the Republicans colluding to form some kind of Unified National Front or something. Not quite combining the two parties, per se, but maybe agreeing to a certain number of "set principles" (Defense spending Good, Homeland Security Good, Big Business Good, Tax Cuts Good, Unions Bad, Socialism Bad, Civil Unrest Bad) and running under a unified ticket. We may even see a Dem-Repub President/Vice President duo in our lifetimes. They'll run under a "America United for Liberty" ticket or something. Something that sounds super patriotic. There won't be any real opposition.

And then we'll be a one-party state. It won't be a socialist state. It won't be a wholly fascist state either. It will, for all intents and purposes, simply be the legitimate, public face of the economic power structures that dominate our country. It will be the "stamp" of approval for everything that the banks and hedge funds and defense contractors want done.

It will, in essence, be a business-ocracy. A government who's job is simply to facilitate money-making and the acquisition of wealth. The closest historical precedent I can think of is perhaps the Barbary Pirate state -- except instead of raiding the Italian coast, our government will just make it easy for business to raid our livelihoods (and receive financial compensation from the businesses in return).

And to be completely honest, I'm sort of beyond caring now. Empires come and empires go. Ours is going. And that is, in the long run, probably a good thing. We murdered countless people and cultures to build this nation that we are now mourning over. Do the Souix mourn our passing? No. And neither do I. Nations built on blood will drown in blood.

Life goes on, and all good and bad things must come to an end. In the end, I'm okay with that. You should be too.
posted by Avenger at 2:10 PM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Thanks Whelk!
posted by Navelgazer at 2:11 PM on November 15, 2011


THE % OF COFFEE AS FLUIDS IN THIS CUP IS GETTING DANGEROUSLY LOW
posted by The Whelk at 13:53 on November 15 [+] [!]
Oh my god -- you're creating insanely powerful homeopathic coffee! More bourbon, quickly!
posted by wintermind at 2:12 PM on November 15, 2011 [14 favorites]


Life goes on, and all good and bad things must come to an end. In the end, I'm okay with that. You should be too.

Our forefathers were the ones who slaved, murdered, raped, pillaged, and stole. Like HELL am I going to sit down and not fight to fix things where I grew up.
posted by Slackermagee at 2:12 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


And then we'll be a one-party state. It won't be a socialist state. It won't be a wholly fascist state either. It will, for all intents and purposes, simply be the legitimate, public face of the economic power structures that dominate our country. It will be the "stamp" of approval for everything that the banks and hedge funds and defense contractors want done.

The Rise of Illiberal Democracy [pdf]. More recent home edition.
posted by dhartung at 2:16 PM on November 15, 2011


It will, in essence, be a business-ocracy.

Corporatocracy is the word you're looking for.

I mean, corporations are already people. Maybe we should just have election to decide which corporate mascot we want to pretend is our leader for a couple of years.

Pillsbury Doughboy/Hamburger Helper Hand in '12!
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Pillsbury Doughboy/Hamburger Helper Hand in '12!

I'm voting for the Google tribute to Les Paul!
posted by zomg at 2:18 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Isn't '12 the year of the Depends Adult Undergarments? Maybe I'm muddled.
posted by feloniousmonk at 2:19 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


@avenger i could just deal with it

yeah, but nahh though
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 2:20 PM on November 15, 2011


And then we'll be a one-party state....It won't be a wholly fascist state either.

Sez you.
posted by emjaybee at 2:21 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think even better, Oligarchy is the word you're looking for. The moment corporations start working, the elite can move on to something else. Corporations aren't all that old a strategy, maybe 500 years; it'll have a lifespan too, and something else will come after. But the elite will always do their level best to remain an elite.
posted by Miko at 2:21 PM on November 15, 2011


Life goes on, and all good and bad things must come to an end. In the end, I'm okay with that. You should be too.

Thanks, but no thanks. The thing that I find most promising about OWS is that it's throwing off this kind of fatalism, which was depressingly prevalent during the Bush years, got better a bit during Obama's campaign, and then spiked back up when it became apparent that voting for hope and change did not guarantee hope and change.

Yeah, it's easy to say "fuck it, the corporations run everything and always will." But wouldn't you rather fight it?
posted by kagredon at 2:21 PM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


since the founding of this nation, we have only retained the barest minimum of democratic process by the permission and behest of our economic and political elites (who have often been the same people since roughly 1615)

ZOMBIES!! I knew it.
posted by ob at 2:22 PM on November 15, 2011


nah
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 2:23 PM on November 15, 2011


It will, in essence, be a business-ocracy.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
posted by IAmUnaware at 2:24 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


er STOP working. When corporations STOP working. Like my brain, apparently.
posted by Miko at 2:25 PM on November 15, 2011




This has been a great thread, and a much needed distraction for my day. Civil (mostly) and well informed. Thanks to The Whelk. Thanks for carrying us into battle.
posted by deezil at 2:27 PM on November 15, 2011


My political science professor in college always used the term "Elite Plurality" to describe how America is governed .There are several factions, but aint none of them the common man.
posted by Ad hominem at 2:30 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Avenger: Good use of the world-weary-grad-student-taking-the-long-view-and-pitying-the-deluded-chumps-who-still-care voice! When I catch myself sounding like that it usually means low blood sugar. Here's what I envision: a whole bunch of citizens getting together peacefully on November 17 to call foul on the plutocracy (rule of the rich). Come on out if you can be bothered; it might be fun.
posted by jcrcarter at 2:30 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Spare me this 'protection against tear gassing' excuse. People were wearing masks and bandanas before there was any tear gassing, and masks enable the agent provocateurs everyone says they are so worried about. If protesters refused to accept masked individuals in their midst then it would be an awful lot harder for bad actors to hijack legitimate protesters, because they would be so easily identifiable on camera. Masks give authoritarians a convenient excuse to crack down, as well as giving vandals a convenient excuse for mayhem.

If you're really worried about tear gas, hold a wet rag up to your face when they start shooting it. Dressing up like a bandit in advance is a losing tactic.
What are you talking about? Seriously, the stone throwing, etc, didn't seem to prevent the Egyptian uprising from being successful, why will it prevent OWS from being successful? What's the actual causal result that leads from 'dressing up as a bandit' to 'losing'? Like how does it cause you to lose? What, specifically, do you lose?

Are people going to start supporting the big banks because OWS protesters wear bandanas? I don't really understand how that could happen.

Anyway, it sounds like you're just making things up anyway, I don't see too many people with masks in the photos and live streams I've been looking at. Except for the cops, of course.
posted by delmoi at 2:30 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


OWS lost

Mother fucker.
posted by quin at 2:31 PM on November 15, 2011


IAmUnaware: "It will, in essence, be a business-ocracy.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
"

GODDAMNIT CAN WE STOP WITH THAT QUOTE? Corporations are NOT the same thing in Fascism as they are in the modern or even historical concept. That doesn't mean that Fascism ended up not being controlled by business interests, but "corporations" in the fascist conception was conceived as different social bodies. There would be a "corporation" of workers (in the US sense it might be considered the AFL-CIO), for example.
posted by symbioid at 2:34 PM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


.
posted by schyler523 at 2:36 PM on November 15, 2011


I think I'm coining Symbioid's Law for that quote. It's like the hitler thing, but for modern american corporatist politics. Thanks!
posted by symbioid at 2:36 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Also, thanks Whelk.
posted by schyler523 at 2:36 PM on November 15, 2011


Some protesters back in the park!
posted by uniq at 2:36 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


And people are trickling back into the park.
posted by ZeusHumms at 2:37 PM on November 15, 2011


Really this kind of attitude is just ridiculous, essentially that if a protest can't somehow 'appeal' to some mythical demographic who judges these things it shouldn't happen.

I don't think it's a mythical demographic OWS doesn't appeal to; it seems more like they're preaching to the choir and frankly pissing off people who aren't inclined to agree with them. Here in Vancouver, according to the local news morning, the Occupy people enjoy the support of 29% of the City, while 60-something% want them to pack up and leave. Personally I don't get the big deal; they're not really obstructing much from what I can tell, so what's the problem?

In terms of the tactics of OWS, they don't appeal to me so it's possible I'm in the mythical demographic. I don't understand what purpose it serves to be camped out indefinitely in a park, sorry. I've been to a fair few protests over the years, although they've been in response to the Iraq War or Bush visits or similar things. It was something concrete, and we wanted to shut things down and make people hear us, so we shut things down and marched through downtown. It didn't accomplish what we wanted, but we also got the police baton treatment and the tear gas treatment, and more recently this stupid "kettling" business. It got on the news a little bit, but so were the black bloc kids and the idiot white dreadlock guy the newspeople seem to find at every single rally they go to, and it did little to bring people to our side. Some people even cheer on the police.

Maybe you're right and things will be different this time, but I don't see it and I don't get what's so different about this protest. I'm not even convinced of why this is a good way to protest inequality. That said, I don't think the battle is lost if you lose the right to camp in a park. This isn't about the right to camp in a park.
posted by Hoopo at 2:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Don't give up yet. To counter-act some of that fatalism:

Since accounting rules rewarded employers for cutting benefits, retiree benefits plans soon morphed into profit centers. Retiree plans became handy earnings-management centers at the expense of the retirees.

My dad grew up during the time when you dedicated your life to a corporation. He's been with GM for 30+ years. Through the split-off of his division into Delphi, then the purchase by a Chinese firm.

Throughout that entire time he was a loyal employee, moving up to middle-management and voting Republican the entire way.

A few years ago, the company decided to cut their promised benefits and pension plan by something like 30%, with the help of a bankruptcy filing.

In 2008, for the first time in decades, my dad voted for a Democrat: Obama.

A few weeks ago my parents came out to visit me in Seattle. We walked by Westlake Center, where the occupation was at the time. My dad was thrilled, talking about the revival of the energy of the 60s and how they were in the right. Later that evening, after hanging out all day, I dropped them off at the hotel. He promptly went back out and walked around the encampment, talking with some of the participants about why there were there.

Earlier today, I heard on the radio a discussion about the NBA lockout. Stupid entertainment news, right? But what was interesting was what they were talking about. "How can normal people really get upset or relate to these negotiations about million dollar salaries?" The conversation was framed in the context of a 1% vs 99% discussion.

It may be a dirty and dangerous path, but people are waking up.
posted by formless at 2:42 PM on November 15, 2011 [11 favorites]


Did the cops let them in or did they jump the barricades?
posted by Mavri at 2:43 PM on November 15, 2011


And I'm preparing for a solidarity rally here in Seattle. Stay safe, NYC!
posted by loquacious at 2:43 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Just read the decision.
To the extent that City law prohibits the erection of structures, the use of gas or other combustible materials, and the accumulation of garbage and human waste in public places, enforcement of the law and the owner's rules appears reasonable to permitthe owner to maintain its space in a hygienic, safe, and lawful condition, and to prevent it from being liable by the City or others for violations of law, or in tort. It also permits public access by those who live and work in the area who are the intended beneficiaries of this zoning bonus.
So simple. Sorry friends, but this is what democracy looks like. It's not a thing where we all get together (WE ALL GET TOGETHER) and scream at each other (AND SCREAM AT EACH OTHER) in very digestible soundbites (IN VERY DIGESTIBLE SOUNDBITES). Or where we make decisions by wiggling our fingers. That model a name, and it's not "consensus" - it's called mob rule.

If I were a dreamer, I would hope the OWS learned a valuable lesson today. But that's asking too much. Now we have to cower in fear because the harbingers of doom are already forecasting a riot. THE MOB DID NOT GET WHAT THE MOB WANTED SO THE MOB WILL BURN PILLAGE AND RAPE. And all will be excused of course because (1) it will be nothing compared to what the bankers have already done to us and (2) those guys burning pillaging and raping were agent provocateurs, of course. No true scotsman burns, pillages or rapes.

And despite the events of today - a somewhat civil disbanding of the protesters from private property, the protesters getting their day in court and the opportunity of arguing their case and in the end still retaining the right to protest in the very place they were before, there will still be those around here who say THIS IS WHAT A POLICE STATE LOOKS LIKE.

You know what, no, fuck you, this is not a what a police state looks like, because actually a police state looks like this. If you can't see the distinction, there's something wrong with you.

We don't have a perfect system. There is no perfect system. There's a lot of shit that's wrong and that needs fixing. But the scorched earth approach, the let's start society anew undertones I'm picking up from the OWS rhetoric gives me the fucking creeps. So yes - go sell that utopia somewhere else. Honestly, I don't care much for the status quo, but I prefer that to world ruled by the mob of Zuccotti Park.
posted by falameufilho at 2:44 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Aww, man, sounds like NYPD destroyed Zuccotti's human-powered bike electricity generators.

So much bullshit.
posted by loquacious at 2:46 PM on November 15, 2011


NYPD is letting people back into into Zuccotti Park. I'm watching the ustream, I just saw someone set down 5 books and tape up a sign "Library." And immediately, someone else set down a 6th book next to them.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:46 PM on November 15, 2011 [24 favorites]


GODDAMNIT CAN WE STOP WITH THAT QUOTE? Corporations are NOT the same thing in Fascism as they are in the modern or even historical concept. That doesn't mean that Fascism ended up not being controlled by business interests, but "corporations" in the fascist conception was conceived as different social bodies. There would be a "corporation" of workers (in the US sense it might be considered the AFL-CIO), for example.

The AFL-CIO is a body (or group of bodies, that categorization depending on exactly how you view its leadership) that absolutely influences political policy in ways that the common man might consider underhanded (lobbying). Like any political body, decisions are frequently beneficial for the common man only when the gain for those in control of the body is greater than the inconvenience. It's a great example of the way that the brokenness of the system has crept thoroughly into even something that ought to be one of the strongest advocates for the rights and privileges of the workers.

But please, throw your temper tantrum and bring out the poorly thought-out pedantry. Always good for the cause.
posted by IAmUnaware at 2:48 PM on November 15, 2011


I still want someone to go to jail for blacking out the media.

The more this goes on, the more it becomes about unacceptable actions by the government with respect to the protests. Like many of you, I have some misgivings about the protests themselves and what they can possibly accomplish economically.

But when it comes to police violence and information suppression... those are two things that cannot stand. We cannot show the government that these are tactics that WORK. There must be unacceptable blowback.

That does not mean I endorse violence or riots. But whatever the reaction is, it must teach the government that these are things that are not done.
posted by flaterik at 2:48 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


Earlier today, I heard on the radio a discussion about the NBA lockout. Stupid entertainment news, right? But what was interesting was what they were talking about. "How can normal people really get upset or relate to these negotiations about million dollar salaries?" The conversation was framed in the context of a 1% vs 99% discussion.

Eh, that's not really anything new though - people have been pissing and moaning about the "undeserved" and "exorbitant" NBA salaries for years, usually under the guise of thinly veiled prejudice (somehow they never seem to have any problem with the exorbitant incomes, greed, and luxury of the super-rich, mostly white owners).
posted by dialetheia at 2:49 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


So about an hour and a half or so ago, I was looking here and I thought to myself, "This is a decent source of information. Good for them."

Then about five minutes later, as I was taking a smoke break, I realized "Wait, so I'm happy that a major newspaper has limited coverage of a major event in its own city in the fucking city blog. How low have I set the bar?"

I know it's a weird thing, given everything else that should have flipped a switch that's happened in the past 24 hours, but if anybody is keeping a tally, add +1. It's just too damn much to keep second guessing what I know is right based on what I think might be the different course of action. I've been broken. And actually it feels kind of good.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 2:49 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


THE MOB DID NOT GET WHAT THE MOB WANTED SO THE MOB WILL BURN PILLAGE AND RAPE

What are you watching? I saw polite, educated people patiently waiting for the police to remove barricades so they could legally re-enter the park. Nobody is suggesting that the OWS method of communication is a viable model of government, but it is a viable model of protest and doesn't really gel with anything you just wrote.
posted by omnikron at 2:51 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


falameufilho - What I'm afraid of is that if the government continues to perceive the tactics it's been using as acceptable, we just get closer and closer to syria.

Just because other police states are worse does not mean we are not living in a society that is rapidly becoming one.
posted by flaterik at 2:52 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Eh, that's not really anything new though - people have been pissing and moaning about the "undeserved" and "exorbitant" NBA salaries for years, usually under the guise of thinly veiled prejudice (somehow they never seem to have any problem with the exorbitant incomes, greed, and luxury of the super-rich, mostly white owners).

You're right, the pissing and moaning about the NBA salaries isn't necessarily a new thing, but this sounded like something more then that. Unemployment and the economy were brought up. And they were discussing both the players million dollar salaries and the owner's billion dollar income/profits.
posted by formless at 2:56 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


So -- they're letting them back in so they can kick them out again?
That does not sound like a good plan for a peaceful city.
posted by angrycat at 2:56 PM on November 15, 2011


Forcibly removing the press to be able to forcibly remove a peaceful protest out of the glare of public view and destroy large amounts of their property? I'd say it's a difference of degree rather than kind, falameufilho.
posted by jaduncan at 2:58 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Eh, that's not really anything new though - people have been pissing and moaning about the "undeserved" and "exorbitant" NBA salaries for years, usually under the guise of thinly veiled prejudice (somehow they never seem to have any problem with the exorbitant incomes, greed, and luxury of the super-rich, mostly white owners).

"Thinly veiled prejudice" doesn't explain (most) NHL hockey fans (mostly white) contempt for NHL hockey players (mostly white) back when the NHL owners (mostly white) locked the players out.

Neither does it explain most Americans' contempt for labor* anytime there's a dispute between management and labor. Heck, class doesn't even explain that. At least with pro sports it's "billionaires versus millionaires". But when it's billionaires versus grocery clerks? Same contempt.

Discouraging.



----------------
*It's different here at MeFi. Visit the Jalopnik or Autoblog comment threads, say, whenever the UAW is mentioned. Hoo boy.
posted by notyou at 2:58 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


omnikron: "What are you watching? I saw polite, educated people patiently waiting for the police to remove barricades so they could legally re-enter the park."

I am not talking about the actual protesters - I am talking about people in this thread that started predicting a riot IMMEDIATELY after the verdict was made public.

flaterik: "Just because other police states are worse does not mean we are not living in a society that is rapidly becoming one."

Please. Do you listen to yourself saying these things?
posted by falameufilho at 2:59 PM on November 15, 2011


I just saw someone set down 5 books and tape up a sign "Library." And immediately, someone else set down a 6th book next to them.

THE MOB WILL SELF-ORGANIZE A LIBRARY
posted by dhartung at 2:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [31 favorites]


falameufilho: Now we have to cower in fear because the harbingers of doom are already forecasting a riot. THE MOB DID NOT GET WHAT THE MOB WANTED SO THE MOB WILL BURN PILLAGE AND RAPE.
Huh? Mob? No! Jeez - get a grip. What's so creepy about the observation that health care is a human right? Or pointing out that the military/industrial complex has gotten way too greedy and way too powerful? Is it scary and weird and illegitimate to call for a more just society? Or is your argument that one shouldn't complain about the increasing militarization of civil space until the tanks actually start firing?
P.S: Bush II suspended Habeus Corpus in 2006.
posted by jcrcarter at 2:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


You know what, no, fuck you, this is not a what a police state looks like, because actually a police state looks like this. If you can't see the distinction, there's something wrong with you.

You're confusing police state for Stalinist Purge.

A purge would be when you simply have your political opponents killed off.

A police state would be when you have your political opponents isolated, blocked off from the media, arrested, tarred their employment prospects (via the arrest and public shaming) and harassed them until the end of their days for their momentary involvement in a social movement.

Take a look at the Tea Party rallies, very much for what the oligarchs in the US want: no taxes, no guvmint. They walked around with bloody rifles and no one bothered them.

Take a look at the OWS rallies, very much against what the oligarchs profit from. They are unarmed, non-violent in rhetoric, and are met with gas, batons, cavalry charges, LRADs, stun rounds, flash bangs, and all the rest. It kinda looks like a minor Chinese dissent rally.

We might not be as bad of a police state as China, but that doesn't mean we aren't going down the same road.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:00 PM on November 15, 2011 [19 favorites]


To be honest, I have mixed feelings about the decision.

The point of the protest was not "we demand the right to live in Zucotti Park." It was, and still should be, that people are fed up with income inequality and not being properly represented by their government because said government is too busy representing moneyed interests.

I've seen this with Occupy STL too -- protests specifically targetted toward curfew laws rather than addressing the real problem.

On the other hand, the fact that the police are responding with media blackouts, pepper spraying puppies, destroying books, and shooting Iraq veterans in the head does rather point to another problem that has to be addressed.

I know a New York cop. I used to think he was quite a decent upstanding liberal reasonable guy. I had to block him off my Facebook feed because of all the anti-"hippie" stuff he'd been posting in the past few weeks. I suspect the cops have been learning, one way or another, to think of OWS protestors as "the enemy" and that frightens me.
posted by Foosnark at 3:02 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


You know what, no, fuck you, this is not a what a police state looks like, because actually a police state looks like this.

Frog, I know that pot feels perfectly comfy, but you really might want to keep an eye on the temperature.
posted by small_ruminant at 3:02 PM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


Jesus, falameufilho, calm down. The "overtones" you're worried about are few and far between and mostly expressed in moments of anger or frustration.

What did OWS ever do to you, seriously? It's just a bunch of people protesting in an unconventional manner. They're not clubbing puppies in the streets. And if they were to actually burn and pillage and rape, I'd be right there with you condemning it, but so far, OWS at least has a strong bias towards peaceful protest.

If you are so concerned that OWS is doin' it wrong, maybe you should participate and try to change it.

And here's the thing about police states; they don't always happen overnight. We may not live in one now in your opinion, but if our rights to assemble and speak and have privacy continue to be eroded, then we may get there sooner than you think. Better to protest now then wait till it gets worse.
posted by emjaybee at 3:03 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


flaterik: "Just because other police states are worse does not mean we are not living in a society that is rapidly becoming one."

falameufiho: Please. Do you listen to yourself saying these things?


yes. do you? I happen to believe the more people that think it's OK that hippies get bashed, the more likely we are to soon have people believe that shooting them will be ok.

Care to make an actual argument, or just be jerky? Because telling me I don't know what I'm saying isn't arguing.

If you're not upset about the violence and media blackout, I don't understand you at all.
posted by flaterik at 3:03 PM on November 15, 2011


...the let's start society anew undertones I'm picking up from the OWS rhetoric gives me the fucking creeps.

The fucking creeps, eh? Heh. Those same undertones, unlike anything on the American social/political landscape in many a year, have been filling me with a hope and optimism
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Among other things, I continue to be enraged by the idea that because other countries are worse, I'm not allowed to be upset about how mine is being run.
posted by flaterik at 3:06 PM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


But why would they just hand the cops such a good excuse?

Because it's people being people. I remember (during the first Gulf War) people on our college radio station complaining that the station might be shut down by the FCC for their war protest activities. I would always respond that, if they were so concerned about being shut down by the FCC, they probably shouldn't swear on the air so much. Fell on deaf ears.
posted by davejay at 3:07 PM on November 15, 2011


Slackermagee: "Take a look at the Tea Party rallies, very much for what the oligarchs in the US want: no taxes, no guvmint. They walked around with bloody rifles and no one bothered them."

They walked with bloody rifles yes - in places where walking with bloody rifles is legal.

Did any Tea Party rally converted into a tent city that became an endless nuisance to the city and the community? Did any Tea Party rally announce in advance that in the following couple of days they would shut down the New York Stock Exchange and march on the Brooklyn Bridge (where they marched one month ago, prompting 700 arrests)?

Can't you see the difference? Really? I fucking hate the Tea Party, I think they're a herd of ignorant fucks who never stop to think about the consequences of the shit they want to push forward, as long as the shit is ideologically pure. Guess who's also like that? You guessed it - OWS.
posted by falameufilho at 3:07 PM on November 15, 2011


Yeah, it's apologists for the police state who join metafilter who give me the creeps.

Them and NYPD.
posted by spitbull at 3:07 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Please. Do you listen to yourself saying these things?

Please. Do you listen to yourself saying these things?
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:08 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


I'mma be heading down to Occupy Toronto... Link is to a song my housemate wrote about OT.

we struggle together you call it letting off steam
cause they don't believe in the impossible dream
of a world redesigned and rethought and redreamed
of the french revolution brought into being

oh we'll try not to fight to yell or offend
but sometimes the future one has to defend
cause they're thte utopians
they believe it's enough
just to bring to the people more and more stuff.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:08 PM on November 15, 2011


Again, falmeufilho, don't you thnk that intentional barring of the independent media in order to violently disperse a peaceful protest and destroy a large percentage of their property is at best democratically problematic?
posted by jaduncan at 3:11 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


We imprison more people than China or Russia. Not per capita, in pure numbers. We run the world's largest prison system, with an incarceration rate which has quadrupled since 1975. And as this and other recent events demonstrate, we have a government which is more than willing to deploy overwhelming police force to stop peaceful people from doing legal things which the powers that be see as politically inexpedient, up to and including journalism.

The whole are-we-a-police-state discussion seems on par with asking whether we should leave the NYPD's barn door open now that the mounted patrol is in Zuccotti Park.
posted by vorfeed at 3:13 PM on November 15, 2011 [17 favorites]


So police violence, media suppression, and destruction of property aren't enough for people to start worrying about living in a police state? We have to actually have a few bodies on the ground before we can call a spade a spade?

Considering the weapons assembled, all it would take is one bottle thrown in anger at the wrong time, and I bet the resultant escalation of violence against the protesters would yield a few deaths.

Thankfully, that hasn't happened yet, because if the videos I've seen of cops punching people for just waving papers and shouting are any indication, the police are looking for a fight.
posted by quin at 3:14 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think they're a herd of ignorant fucks who never stop to think about the consequences of the shit they want to push forward

Remind me, what is that consequential shit OWS is pushing?
posted by omnikron at 3:15 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Quotes from guy on the stream on Ustream.
"everyone is smiling"
"Everything was lost but this is what we needed"
"Time to rebuild"
" More unified then ever"
"police are smiling"
"people handing out flowers"

Juxtapose that with falameufilho's : " THE MOB DID NOT GET WHAT THE MOB WANTED SO THE MOB WILL BURN PILLAGE AND RAPE.
posted by yertledaturtle at 3:15 PM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


'Occupy' crackdowns coordinated with federal law enforcement officials

...according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.... while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.

....in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.


"On background" quotes to an Examiner.com reporter, for what that's worth.
posted by dhartung at 3:15 PM on November 15, 2011 [9 favorites]


Did any Tea Party rally converted into a tent city that became an endless nuisance to the city and the community? Did any Tea Party rally announce in advance that in the following couple of days they would shut down the New York Stock Exchange and march on the Brooklyn Bridge (where they marched one month ago, prompting 700 arrests)?

Can't you see the difference?


That you have to go to greater lengths to get your message out when a national cable news network isn't acting as a dedicated megaphone for your views?
posted by furiousxgeorge at 3:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [23 favorites]


omnikron: "Remind me, what is that consequential shit OWS is pushing?"

That's a good fucking question, let me tell you.
posted by falameufilho at 3:18 PM on November 15, 2011




I don't agree with what spitbull said, but you ought to get your glass house bricked over before you start picking up rocks.

You're the one that started with "fuck you" and insulting my intelligence in THIS thread.
posted by flaterik at 3:18 PM on November 15, 2011


Thought experiment: a waterproof sleeping bag is probably not a structure. How about a bivvy bag? I guess there's always the vagrancy laws to consider at that point.
posted by jaduncan at 3:18 PM on November 15, 2011


"So police violence, media suppression, and destruction of property aren't enough for people to start worrying about living in a police state? We have to actually have a few bodies on the ground before we can call a spade a spade? "

probably...
posted by eggtooth at 3:20 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Mod note: Couple comments removed, spitbull and falameufilho please cut it out.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:20 PM on November 15, 2011


Wow, that stepped down from "a mob who will burn, pillage, and rape" to an "endless nuisance to the city" really fast.
posted by XMLicious at 3:21 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Can't you see the difference? Really?

Marching around in fraped in faux flags and patriotism vs freezing my ass off showing solidarity for the working poor? Yeah, I see a huge difference between the two movements. Why can't you?

As for annoying the community: I was under the impression that the people living a couple blocks around Zuccotti park are, by and large, rich NIBMYs that are part of the "lets take a dump on the working class to balance the budget" crowd.

Its what's happening in Vancouver, we're close to the West End CondoLanders who get a ton of editorial space in the local papers. The guys that commute into the DT core from Surrey to make their coffee? No space in the paper, no voice in the opinion polls, but hey, they're who were protesting for.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:22 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


THE MOB DID NOT GET WHAT THE MOB WANTED SO THE MOB WILL BURN PILLAGE AND RAPE.

Are you trying to sound ridiculous? Because you sound ridiculous.

You know what, no, fuck you, this is not a what a police state looks like, because actually a police state looks like this. If you can't see the distinction, there's something wrong with you.

As soon as the protests reach a critical mass, the only thing that will protect the protestors from overreaction by the state is the media. There were media blackouts all over Syria, and last night, over Zuccotti Park. That is a dangerous similarity, among other dangerous similarities, to the way American authorities are responding to the Occupy movement nationwide.

In the past, American authorities have killed American citizens to maintain order. It may have not happened last night, but the stage is being set. There are millions of people who are out of work, out of insurance, and out of options. There are people like you perpetuating the idea that they don't deserve a future, and that any response other than bland apathy is a crime. And there are people in positions of power who rather like keeping all of the money, even if it means that Americans don't have equal access to schools and jobs. It doesn't matter to them.

You can pretend that these people don't exist, and you can also pretend that a country full of police dressed in full riot gear rounding people up for daring to speak up isn't a threat to your freedom. If you care about keeping it for very long, I'd recommend you take better care of it.
posted by deanklear at 3:22 PM on November 15, 2011 [24 favorites]


Attempting to step up as a citizen or other journalist at a protest or police action has been dangerous for a long time.

I've been at a number of protests (or non-protest police activities like arrests or shutting down raves or nightclubs) and very often the act of attempting to record or photograph police action or violence is extremely dangerous and invites violence, threats or arrest. I've seen people targeted and attacked where the officer will attack the camera with batons, pepper spray/mace or projectiles, attempting to destroy it.

A photographer friend of mine had his arm shattered in about 30 places during one of the numerous and infamous police-instigated riots in Huntington Beach, California. The so called riot? It was a Huntington Beach 4th of July block party. Without warning HBPD stormed a peaceful street of neighbors and friends in riot gear and started a riot.

He had his 35mm SLR with him as he always does, and he started taking pictures. Two officers started screaming at him "get out of here with that!" and started swinging batons at the camera. They chased him into an alley, and when he tried to protect the camera with his arm they smashed his arm. Then they destroyed the camera and exposed the film and left him in the alley without medical aid or charging him with anything.

When he tried to file the complaint report they laughed at him and mocked him.


So why did the professional media withdraw?

A registered press pass is barely protection from this same violence. As far as I know - in NYC they're issued by multiple agencies including NYPD. They can be revoked. If a reporter's pass is revoked - they usually get fired. And it's not like reporters have a lot of job security these days.


But what is different now is the sheer number of cameras. The fact that people can stream directly to the internet. The fact that a digital file on flash memory isn't so easily destroyed by a baton as film. There are cameras watching and protecting the citizens with cameras.
posted by loquacious at 3:26 PM on November 15, 2011 [19 favorites]


XMLicious: "Wow, that stepped down from "a mob who will burn, pillage, and rape" to an "endless nuisance to the city" really fast."

For the second time: I was mocking the people ON THE THREAD who started predicting a riot SECONDS after the verdict was made public. I personally don't think there will be actual riot, pillaging and rape tonight.
posted by falameufilho at 3:26 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I've been following this thread like crazy today, whenever I could snatch a refresh on the iPhone. I really appreciate it. It seems like one of the few sources of actual news.

Flunkie, I'm glad you're sending Pratchett. Every time I think of police actions against OWS, I think of Night Watch; then I promptly feel like an enormous nerd. And then I feel wistful. There wasn't any magic in the pertinent parts of that book -- it was just that Vimes could actually appeal to a sense of community in the watchmen, to allow them to see others as human. What member of the NYPD -- of any major American metropolitan police department -- would ever stop to think of such a thing? The streets are full of vermin and filth, as far as they're concerned. So many of them don't seem to believe that they deal with real citizens.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:28 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Dressing up like a bandit in advance is a losing tactic.

In the Police State that U.S. citizens are now living, photographs of protesters are taken and put into an FBI database (and probably NSA and CIA and who knows what wall as well). Photographs are then run through highly advanced facial recognition software and matches are made with other protests so that those who the government deems "organizers" can be identified and summarily harassed (no airplane flights for you!).

Masks help defend against this kind of intrusive government invasion of privacy and anigbrow, if you don't understand or believe this than you simply have not been paying attention.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 3:28 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Maybe discussion instead of mocking would be a better idea all around.
posted by troll on a pony at 3:28 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


For the second time: I was mocking the people ON THE THREAD who started predicting a riot SECONDS after the verdict was made public. I personally don't think there will be actual riot, pillaging and rape tonight.

You can walk that back but you did call them a mob:

but I prefer that to world ruled by the mob of Zuccotti Park.

It was also a pretty good prediction, that's usually how riots start after a protest. That or the police start really, really misbehaving.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:30 PM on November 15, 2011


troll on a pony: Maybe discussion instead of mocking would be a better idea all around.

This is the single greatest eponysterical moment in MeFi history.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:31 PM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


In the Police State that U.S. citizens are now living

FFS I can't. Yeah, I'll go take a walk.
posted by falameufilho at 3:31 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


(and excellent advice, too)
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:31 PM on November 15, 2011


THE MOB WILL SELF-ORGANIZE A LIBRARY

Favorite comment of the day.
posted by deanklear at 3:33 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


My friend's son lives in Brooklyn, active activist, was advising people there in the beginning of Occupy...was saying :"don't wear masks because the police can arrest you..."
posted by eggtooth at 3:35 PM on November 15, 2011


Thought experiment: a waterproof sleeping bag is probably not a structure. How about a bivvy bag? I guess there's always the vagrancy laws to consider at that point.

JakPak
donated a whole bunch of these jacket-tent-bivvy bag things to Seattle, and they were really cool and a lot of people actually slept in them in the rain and said they were quite warm and comfortable.

SPD just changed the rules to not even allow a ground cloth. No tarps. No umbrellas. No sitting on the ground. For a long time before they were officially allowing no sleeping, but after the tent ban - they'd just park their squad cars among the camp and flash their lights and spotlights and sirens - and they'd also go around kicking or pushing people with batons to prevent sleeping.

Then they just banned sleeping entirely, as well as laying (and sitting) on the ground.
posted by loquacious at 3:35 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I've got it! Blow up tents!
posted by eggtooth at 3:38 PM on November 15, 2011


As everyone knows, only homeowners have the right to achieve an unconscious state. It goes with the responsibility.
posted by mek at 3:40 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I've got it! Blow up tents!

I'm going to assume you mean inflatable.

It would still be considered a structure or shelter.
posted by loquacious at 3:42 PM on November 15, 2011


No sitting on the ground
Honest to God I read this and my eyes filled with tears. How the hell can they ban sitting on the ground? It isn't looting, it isn't littering, it isn't blocking traffic or being a safety hazard. Shit. Everyone in Seattle should go out now and SIT ON THE GROUND.

Take the blinkers off. Stop viewing this through a political filter. This is the most important right we have as citizens of the United States of America. We have Freedom of Speech and we pity any poor slob in any country in the world where they don't have Freedom of Speech. Yet, we are allowing our government to decide when and where and how long and under what conditions we can exercise that right. If we don't flex our muscles now we will become flabby and lose the ability to ever use our rights. Prey God this hasn't happened all ready.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:45 PM on November 15, 2011 [18 favorites]


Seems to me the OWS folks need organized shifts - how impressive would it be to have several hundred or thousand of people show up simultaneously for "shift change" every eight hours or so?
posted by stenseng at 3:45 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Also, a shitton of folding chairs.
posted by stenseng at 3:48 PM on November 15, 2011


But calling it ?permanent" brings up all that quantum physics thing....courtworthy?

...can't be too serious, I mean me, now.
posted by eggtooth at 3:48 PM on November 15, 2011


Police are denying entry to Zuccotti Park to anyone who has a bag, according to the NYCLU. eg. this book bag was deemed unacceptable.
posted by mek at 3:49 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


How the hell can they ban sitting on the ground?

You can get a ticket for sitting on the sidewalk here in freedom-loving San Francisco. There was a ballot question and a whole lotta people here voted for it. I find this discouraging.
posted by rtha at 3:52 PM on November 15, 2011


But calling it ?permanent" brings up all that quantum physics thing....courtworthy?

...can't be too serious, I mean me, now.


Your Honor, the ban on permanent structures is acceptable and just but the City of New York has violated the laws of causality by claiming that our tents will be permanent. How can they know we won't be leaving within the month without them having pre-arranged the outcome regarding the persistence of our tents?

Also, they are all pooty neutrino heads.

Thank You, Your Honor.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:52 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Guitars, footballs also denied entry.
posted by mek at 3:54 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I wish more people liked to passive aggressive protest. I would just stop occupying the park but call the police to report a crime every time someone entered it with a briefcase or sat down for a picnic.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 3:57 PM on November 15, 2011 [12 favorites]


Guitars, footballs also denied entry.

Astonishing. It is just as well that I am not there; I would end up thrown in the slammer for sure.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 4:00 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


> That's a good fucking question, let me tell you.

Signs you might be a reactionary who is just flat-out scared of all change: you don't know what those protesters stand for, but you're absolutely certain that the stuff they stand for would have terrible consequences, goshdarnit!
posted by mstokes650 at 4:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [16 favorites]


Astonishing. It is just as well that I am not there; I would end up thrown in the slammer for sure.

If you and everyone who felt that way showed up and stayed peaceful we would all run a better chance of not being arrested because there aren't enough jail cells. That's what happened the other night at Portland.

And it's what has happened before at other protests throughout the last century, and it's worked.

And if you do manage to get arrested? You'll probably released fairly quickly. They don't have enough cells.
posted by loquacious at 4:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


For many years I've been saying that we are a police state waiting to be enacted.

So many people are saying that the protesters are getting what we deserve because we're breaking the law. So when it comes down to it, you can't; protest without a permit, erect any structures/tents, make noise, sit down, stand in place without a destination, feed people for free, refuse to follow an officers instructions, etc., etc., et.al. all with calls of terrorism(!) and riots that make digging up every law on the books necessary. If every law in the USA were enforced rigorously, the 99% would be behind bars(instead of just mostly the people of color).

If you want to have your precious free speech, go get a blog. If you want to peaceably assemble, there's a corporate café on the corner, just please don't disturb the other customers, you could get arrested.
posted by a_green_man at 4:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [13 favorites]


Guitars, footballs also denied entry.

SHUT UP, BE HAPPY
posted by Hoopo at 4:07 PM on November 15, 2011




If you and everyone who felt that way showed up and stayed peaceful we would all run a better chance of not being arrested because there aren't enough jail cells. That's what happened the other night at Portland.

And it's what has happened before at other protests throughout the last century, and it's worked.

And if you do manage to get arrested? You'll probably released fairly quickly. They don't have enough cells.



When I was at the WTO protest in Seattle in 99, they had the same situation - they just locked up protesters for hours on end inside of charter buses...
posted by stenseng at 4:10 PM on November 15, 2011


The official catechism of reasons for people to shrug and roll their eyes at this eviction:

OWS were too broad-minded: they won't say what they stand for.

OWS were too narrowly focused: they should have supported cutting pensions.

OWS tried something too new and strange to achieve change. They should have just stayed home and waited for the elections to roll around. Maybe this time it will work!

Unlike previous movements for social change, OWS attracted some unstable mischief-makers. No mass movement can be supported unless it attracts only the pure of heart.

Unlike previous movements for social change, OWS caused a nuisance. No movement can be supported unless it is absolutely convenient to all spectators.
posted by wwwwwhatt at 4:10 PM on November 15, 2011 [26 favorites]


GA has started and there is livestream coverage.
posted by mek at 4:10 PM on November 15, 2011


loquacious: "Then they just banned sleeping entirely, as well as laying (and sitting) on the ground."

Good point - I don't see The Right to Sleep listed in your precious bill of rights, citizen.
posted by symbioid at 4:14 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


If you and everyone who felt that way showed up and stayed peaceful we would all run a better chance of not being arrested because there aren't enough jail cells.

I'm not discounting your calls to stay peaceful, because I think right now it helps the movements public perception. But don't forget Pier 57.

I wouldn't count on any strategy that underestimated the ability of the police to lock citizens up. We're very good at that in the US.
posted by formless at 4:14 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Been following this all day-thank you Metafilter-$5.00 well spent!
posted by PHINC at 4:14 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


When I was at the WTO protest in Seattle in 99, they had the same situation - they just locked up protesters for hours on end inside of charter buses...

Yeah, confirming this happens. I know the guy who was the sole person arrested at the Atlantic Yards Groundbreaking protest in Brooklyn, and he says that in lieu of a holding cell, the police stopped a passing city bus, kicked off all the passengers, and kept him held up in the bus for a couple hours. (They were expecting more arrests; there were none.)

Still think people should come down and protest anyway if they wish. But "if we outnumber the cells they can't hold us" advice may not be quite as sound.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:16 PM on November 15, 2011


Signs you might be a reactionary who is just flat-out scared of all change: you don't know what those protesters stand for, but you're absolutely certain that the stuff they stand for would have terrible consequences, goshdarnit!

Speaking as someone who supports comprehensive campaign finance reform and ending corporate personhood as a legal definition, I am flat-out scared that OWS's agenda is becoming all about being allowed to camp on municipal property indefinitely, and that a lot of energy that could be put towards the slow, unsexy process of gradual change at the level of your own city, county or school district or whatever is being diverted towards a movement that is clearly making a lot of people feel very righteous and historically relevant, but may not end up changing anything when all is said and done.
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Speaking as someone who supports comprehensive campaign finance reform and ending corporate personhood as a legal definition, I am flat-out scared that OWS's agenda is becoming all about being allowed to camp on municipal property indefinitely, and that a lot of energy that could be put towards the slow, unsexy process of gradual change at the level of your own city, county or school district or whatever is being diverted towards a movement that is clearly making a lot of people feel very righteous and historically relevant, but may not end up changing anything when all is said and done.

To an extent, I agree, but I can't help but feel that seeing what happens when people actually try to exercise their right to peacefully protest *might* be what it takes to propel this thing closer to a critical mass, awareness-wise...
posted by stenseng at 4:20 PM on November 15, 2011


Unlike previous movements for social change, OWS caused a nuisance. No movement can be supported unless it is absolutely convenient to all spectators.

I know this isn't a popular position around here, but this is actually the exact opposite of my opinion on the eviction from the park. They should make themselves as much of an inconvenience for people as they possibly can.

OWS were too broad-minded: they won't say what they stand for.

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's been a whole mess of stuff at the Occupy site in my town, including 9/11 truthers...in Canada. The message is often vague and/or confusing.

Anyways, yes a lot of people have their own reasons why they don't mind that OWS is not allowed to camp in the park. They're not all on-message and harmonious, kinda like OWS but without camping in a park. I don't care either way. I don't think camping in the park is central to what they're fighting for, but it's possible I don't get it.
posted by Hoopo at 4:22 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


We may see a Chinese-style internet system, where all computers (and their users) must be licensed in some way

That's not how the Chinese internet or personal computer systems work. China's SIM cards do require real names to purchase, but China's robust gray and black market activities make it laughably easy to circumvent the rules.

For being used as the police state bogeyman so much (not only in this thread, but everywhere), there seems to be a lot of ignorance on what China does and doesn't do, and what exists on law and what exists in real life.
posted by FJT at 4:22 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


Late to the party here but,
No, fuck you, this is what a police state looks like.
Anyway, esprit de l'escalier ...
posted by zomg at 4:26 PM on November 15, 2011 [17 favorites]


Amen zomg!
posted by jeffburdges at 4:30 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Actually, zomg, I think that's about perfect fucking timing.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:30 PM on November 15, 2011


Holy crap. They're having a 2,000-4,000 person general assembly?

This is going to take forever. I hope everyone got a good meal. The ustream guy Tim is on 20 hours of being awake.
posted by loquacious at 4:30 PM on November 15, 2011


Well played, zomg.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:31 PM on November 15, 2011


I've got it! Blow up tents!
posted by eggtooth at 6:38 PM on November 15 [+] [!]


Moonbounces? Excellent idea! That would certainly lighten the mood a bit.
posted by cheerwine at 4:34 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Flunkie, I'm glad you're sending Pratchett.
I'm sorry to disappoint, but that was The Whelk, not me. Pratchett was not among the books I sent.
posted by Flunkie at 4:34 PM on November 15, 2011


It's "Burning Man"@ Gone political!
posted by eggtooth at 4:37 PM on November 15, 2011


Just to respond to the well-intentioned person upthread bemoaning no viable candidates: Jill Stein. Jill's campaign language is nabbing a lot from OWS right now, but make no mistake, she's not a hanger-on: she's been running fantastic, big-money-free campaigns in Massachusetts for about a decade.
posted by threeants at 4:38 PM on November 15, 2011


Global Revolution feed is also showing Seattle, protester talking about pepper spray being used
posted by desjardins at 4:38 PM on November 15, 2011


Listening to the Human Microphone from mek's link above. It looks and feels so optimistic. It's so about time.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 4:40 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


"It's so about time."

what do you mean?
posted by eggtooth at 4:44 PM on November 15, 2011


I mean it's long past time for people to be taking to the streets to protest the economic and civil rights repressions that have been going on this past decade.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 4:46 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Oh, I was stuck back in that quantum thing, so, when you said:"I't's so about time" I thought you were channeling Heisenburg or something, so I'm grateful to know it was the perfect common sense statement that it was.

And beautiful it is.
posted by eggtooth at 4:52 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


And there's a very angry march that just went by my building up here just north of downtown Seattle. A lot of drums and whistles and shouting and a whole lot of "fuck you's" and "get backs" and it faded.

I haven't left yet 'cause I'm old and my back is fucked.
posted by loquacious at 4:58 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


I wish people calling OWS a mob, or entitled, or whatever negative impression they have, could spend some time with them. The 30 minutes I spent with them today--marching, surrounded by cops, on a very tense day-- impressed me so much. They were calm, positive, organized, and thoughtful. Even though their group had been violently handled last night, there was no sign of bitterness or hatred.

I think the fact that they spent all day outside those barricades at the park speaks volumes. How easy would it have been for them to forcibly "enforce" the TRO by jumping the barricades? They stood there for hours peacefully, even though the city was flagrantly violating a court order.
posted by Mavri at 4:58 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


Oh, how to get possessions back? You'll need to show up within the next couple of days between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm. You will need to bring photo id with you, receipts (!) and photos (!) in order to prove the items are yours. (Oh, and you'll need to fill out a claim form). So you can trade staying off any police or government watch lists for the remotely possible ability to reclaim your (likely damaged) belongings in the event you have photos and receipts handy for them.
posted by stagewhisper at 4:59 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Good collection of photos from today at: http://cryptome.org/info/ows-19/ows-19.htm
posted by yertledaturtle at 5:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


"And now comes the hard part. We have to decide what legal strategies, if any, we want to use to limit the police in this space."
posted by oinopaponton at 5:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


"We know this-- they're gonna regret messing with us."
posted by oinopaponton at 5:04 PM on November 15, 2011



"We know this-- they're gonna regret messing with us."

Wow...that could be either side.
posted by eggtooth at 5:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


So, it's all sad and stuff that they lost the case, but everyone seems to have forgotten the much more interesting question:

What happens to the police force that ignored a court order???
posted by cthuljew at 5:09 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


What happens to the police force that ignored a court order???

The protesters are considering legal action, just discussed at the GA.
posted by oinopaponton at 5:12 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


After the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, I know that there were groups of people organized to go and meet folks who were arrested as they were released (to give them a snack and a friendly face). Has anyone heard of anything like that being organized for the people arrested today?
posted by cheerwine at 5:13 PM on November 15, 2011


stagewhisper: "Oh, how to get possessions back? You'll need to show up within the next couple of days between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm. You will need to bring photo id with you, receipts (!) and photos (!) in order to prove the items are yours. (Oh, and you'll need to fill out a claim form). So you can trade staying off any police or government watch lists for the remotely possible ability to reclaim your (likely damaged) belongings in the event you have photos and receipts handy for them."

Property. "Who own's this property?" Public/Private spaces. Money - It's mine, don't tax me, don't take it. Is this YOUR book? Show me the proof!

Man, it really is all about property and that's totally how they think about it.
posted by symbioid at 5:17 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


Occupy New Haven just offered to give displaced OWS protesters a place to sleep.
posted by oinopaponton at 5:21 PM on November 15, 2011


So the people's library is "safely" in storage, but won't be returned, and will eventually be dumped as unclaimed? Nice.
posted by -harlequin- at 5:21 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


There isn't any doubt the U.S. is a police state. There is an outright violent revolution in Syria, not simply overly powerful police state, heck their police state might not last that much longer.

American's never have outright revolutions like that, but the last time so many were oppressed for so long the unions ended up hiring the mob hit men. If people lose faith in their government, then they'll eventually form their own governments, which in-turn eventually legitimizes their own exercise of force.

I recommend that, before that happens, we choose to reimplement Glass-Steagall and break up all the "Too Big to Fail" banks. Institute some more popular-deliberative legislative processes too, maybe not a national general assembly, but something meaningful. Ranked voting too.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:24 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


That's OK. Who doesn't have a photo and receipt for their books, pens or clothing? Hamburger, etc.

Let's hope nobody stores their receipts on their laptop...or, indeed, has the same model of laptop as another person. Or, indeed, that NYC has organised crime capable of making fake receipts. Or bent cops who just went Christmas shopping in the loot. But luckily literally none of that could ever happen.
posted by jaduncan at 5:29 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Oh, and just one random note:

How is this thread not titled "Pick up that can"?
posted by jaduncan at 5:31 PM on November 15, 2011 [8 favorites]


What happens to the police force that ignored a court order???

Not a whole lot. Their lawyer might get sanctioned, or the city might be required to review its administrative procedures or subject itself to judicial monitoring for a few years (following years of litigation, naturally). I hope you're not imagining that it gets dismantled and the Court mandates the creation of a People's Police or something, because you're going to be bitterly disappointed if that's the case. It improves the chances for protesters to recover economic and/or punitive damages for civil rights infringements if they get a favorable verdict (and if they sue, expect litigation from third parties seeking compensation for their inconvenience during the protest as well).
posted by anigbrowl at 5:32 PM on November 15, 2011


If people lose faith in their government, then they'll eventually form their own governments, which in-turn eventually legitimizes their own exercise of force.

Bingo. Also, if people lose faith in the ability of the justice system to ensure that justice is served, they will create their own parallel justice system to ensure that justice is served. And that path is a dark and scary one.

Making the system work again is, in the general sense, better than scrapping it and starting anew. I just hope that in this case, we haven't already gone too far for it to be practical. For everyone's sake.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 5:35 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


(I know this is a dead serious matter, and this is a silly thought, but... my associated girl and I have been watching boston legal in a huge marathon so it's on my mind. I know it's about as far from a realistic depiction of the legal process as possible, but I can still wish there was an Alan Shore for the protestors, can't I?)
posted by flaterik at 5:37 PM on November 15, 2011


I hope you're not imagining that it gets dismantled and the Court mandates the creation of a People's Police or something, because you're going to be bitterly disappointed if that's the case.

Well, the NYPD has played the role of People's Police Volkspolizei pretty well in this episode...
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 5:38 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Seattle is apparently holding a sit in at 5th and Pine after solidarity march, and just voted to remain in the intersection and is apparently risking mass arrest.

Livestream.
posted by loquacious at 5:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Just got back from the Occupy DC camp in McPherson square. Very tidy and organized, nice, bright folks with lots of energy and hope, though they do have a few needs.
posted by MrMoonPie at 5:42 PM on November 15, 2011


Cops are at Zuccotti now. Not sure what's going on.
posted by oinopaponton at 5:45 PM on November 15, 2011


I wish people calling OWS a mob, or entitled, or whatever negative impression they have, could spend some time with them. The 30 minutes I spent with them today--marching, surrounded by cops, on a very tense day-- impressed me so much. They were calm, positive, organized, and thoughtful. Even though their group had been violently handled last night, there was no sign of bitterness or hatred.

Mavri: welcome to the movement. You can stop saying "them" and start saying "we."

I spent 4 hours at Occupy Seattle one night, and I started saying "we" the next morning and have done ever since. Reducing OWS to just the people who have the capacity to camp out undermines the movement, the solidarity of the 99%. You don't have to camp overnight to be part of it! Just claim your space in this movement, and start doing what you can do. Maybe that's picking trash once a week, or bringing notepads or hand-warmers. Maybe it's donating money or warm clothes, or offering to let someone shower at your place. Maybe it's offering to make copies for the legal team, or to maintain a web forum or do some print design. Maybe, honest to God, maybe it's just correcting people online who say that OWS is an entitled mob, or a bunch of dirty hippies, or a patchouli-soaked hot mess of whiteboy dreads and pot smoke.

It's a diverse movement with diverse needs. You belong here as much as anyone does.
posted by KathrynT at 5:50 PM on November 15, 2011 [29 favorites]


That Occupy Seattle intersection bullshit is making me really mad.
posted by Errant at 6:01 PM on November 15, 2011


I bought a pizza for Occupy Tampa last Friday, after spending the better part of the week in a hellacious run-around with Bank of America, trying to get them to undo a $575 charge they'd stolen. (They own the nearly-foreclosed mortgage for a grace period, nothing I can do about that until it's over, at which point I will run away from those fuckers so hard I will kick dust up in my wake.)

It was cold for Tampa, that night, highs in the low fifties, and plenty of wind off the river. There's no cover at Curtis Hixon Park where they are, just concrete and the downtown wind-tunnels. Not half chilly. I figured warm food would be appreciated, and I wanted to do something to stick it to the man after the week I'd had.

I walked up to the one information table that TPD grudgingly allows them to have, and looked around a bit lost for the moment, until I was approached by a guy named Pepe who I recognized from news stories about his arrest for, I forget what exactly, I think he was "being an object on a sidewalk." (TPD's terms, not mine. We're just debris around here.)

I said: "Hey. I have cash. Y'all want dinner?"

I shared introductions with my new activist pal Pepe, who recommended a good pizza place about two blocks away, and off we walked to go get some cold and hungry activists some dinner. We chatted the whole way there and the whole way back, about political stuff and personal stuff too - "How do you not know about pirates if you grew up in Florida?" "Catholic school!" - and I bought the last pizza the place had, before they closed. It was a XXL double-triple cheese pie, gigantunormous, and Pepe willingly carried it back because he'd been outdoors for days and his hands were cold.

When we got back, something happened that I did not expect. Pepe set the pizza down, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed.

Pepe: "MIC CHECK!"
Everyone: "MIC CHECK!"
Pepe: "THIS IS JULIE."
Everyone: "THIS IS JULIE."
Pepe: "SHE BOUGHT US PIZZA!"

They cheered, applauded, and I got hugs from two of them. The pizza was set down on one of the big concrete park-boundary blocks and opened up - they swarmed, and the thing vanished in 30 seconds flat. I think they ate the box too. Good thing I'd already had dinner.

"We're all family here," I remember one guy telling me that night. "Look, you got all this family now."

I spent most of the following Saturday there, where I met a lot of people, signed up for stuff, and participated in all kinds of things. That Friday night, though, was when it changed from a "them" to an "us" for me, because I have never before in my life felt so welcomed or safe among a crowd of strangers on a city sidewalk at night.
posted by cmyk at 6:07 PM on November 15, 2011 [84 favorites]


Watching Rachael Maddow right now evening and she's covering the police raid on the protesters. Nice reference from her to the Mario Savio speech
posted by Poet_Lariat at 6:08 PM on November 15, 2011


Really? Why does it make you mad?
posted by felix at 6:10 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


From reputable pollster Public Policy Polling:
Going to have some pretty bad numbers for Occupy Wall Street tomorrow...movement not wearing well with voters
posted by Rhaomi at 6:10 PM on November 15, 2011


There is a sense in which we've already gone that far, one more dead town's last parade, the Tea party has flows small planes into buildings and shot representatives.

All the Tea party's anti-tax sentiments ultimately stems from the federal government destroying it's own legitimacy through illegitimate spending, i.e. graft. Yes, obviously the Koch brothers' right-wing machine redirects that sentiments against 'entitlement' spending, rather than the more deserving military and DHS/TSA graft. Yet, both movements stem from an underlying rejection of the legitimacy of our rulers. In fact, we might owe the Koch brothers thanks for pealing off anyone incapable of recognizing bank CEOs as our rulers.

As an aside, all the southern Italian mafia families started as local government resistance against the unification of Italy, which gives them an incredible history and internal legitimacy. Real democracy is afaik the only way to prevent low-level political violence, i.e. assassinations, kidnappings, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:11 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Damn right. The Tea Party is the political face of organized right wing militias -- check out the Joe Miller campaign in Alaska, for example, not just the astroturf production of the Koch Brothers. Don't tell me they are or ever were primarily civil or democratic. They infiltrated town halls in order to shout down and intimidate duly elected officials.

Who's a "mob," then?
posted by spitbull at 6:13 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Because that's one of the busiest intersections downtown, at rush hour, when people are trying to get home to their families. It's inconsiderate and disruptive to the very people they claim to represent, and not every siren is a cop. Obstructing roadways is not just annoying and alienating, it's also dangerous to people who aren't them. A march is one thing, and I could live with that, but the whole point of Occupy is that they set up and don't move, and that's a problem for me.

I do not think they should be pepper-sprayed or have the shit beaten out of them for it, and it absolutely sucks and is a travesty that that's happening right now.
posted by Errant at 6:17 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


My fear is that by the time things are really that bad, it won't matter that people are dissatisfied because democracy, as we understand it, will have already been swept away by the elites.

One of the most terrifying things I've ever read. Time for an uprising now.
posted by tr33hggr at 6:18 PM on November 15, 2011


I have to agree that occupying commuter traffic routes is a TERRIBLE idea for protestors, just from a strategic perspective. That's the best way to generate a lot of bad will, VERY quickly.
posted by flaterik at 6:20 PM on November 15, 2011


Do you need to occupy the route completely? Why not simply hand out photos of protestors wounded by police violence?
posted by jeffburdges at 6:22 PM on November 15, 2011


Errant: well hopefully you, and everyone else who's inconvenienced, reflects on what has driven these people to do that, and what the 'opposing team' is doing and has done to this country.

"We're human beings!...There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -- Mario Savio
posted by felix at 6:23 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


People have blocked traffic for all sorts of things. And typically, your first knowledge that its happening is just "okay, all of a sudden traffic is horrible. I'm hungry, and tired, and just want to get home to eat. what the hell is going on? oh, it's those protestors i heard about. well, fuck them, this is obnoxious!" is really a not unreasonable train of thought. at the very least, it's not going to be an uncommon one.

we should not make it difficult for people to identify with the protest. it should be as easy as possible. that's the whole point. when you fuck with people's commutes, they're going to turn against you. they just will.
posted by flaterik at 6:27 PM on November 15, 2011 [7 favorites]


My husband will have walked right through the protest on his way home. When he gets here, I'll ask him what the mood was like.
posted by KathrynT at 6:29 PM on November 15, 2011


My husband will have walked right through the protest on his way home. When he gets here, I'll ask him what the mood was like.

Can we wager a favorite as to what his mood will be?
posted by Slackermagee at 6:34 PM on November 15, 2011


Thanks cmyk - lovely story.
posted by tr33hggr at 6:35 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Errant: well hopefully you, and everyone else who's inconvenienced, reflects on what has driven these people to do that, and what the 'opposing team' is doing and has done to this country.

Oh, for fuck's sake, I don't need a lecture on the evils of capitalism and entrenched power or the tyranny of the plutocracy. I'm pretty sure I can agree with the message and the movement and then also think that this is a shitty thing to do.

I don't know where you got your sports metaphor "opposing team" from, or why you are implying that I think this is a game.
posted by Errant at 6:37 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


or why you are implying that I think this is a game.

But Errant, it IS a game! The best of games.

The Game of Thrones.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:41 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Not the Game of Thrones: The Great Game.
posted by absalom at 6:45 PM on November 15, 2011


RT on Goldman Sachs ripping off Libya, et al. (June)
posted by jeffburdges at 6:48 PM on November 15, 2011


Or War Games. "The only way to win is not to play."*

*totally NOT my opinion
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:49 PM on November 15, 2011


He says that nobody was there, they were all peppersprayed. He was bummed because he wanted to join, however briefly.
posted by KathrynT at 6:53 PM on November 15, 2011


*peppersprayed and removed
posted by KathrynT at 6:54 PM on November 15, 2011


Rhaomi: "From reputable pollster Public Policy Polling:
Going to have some pretty bad numbers for Occupy Wall Street tomorrow...movement not wearing well with voters"
Good thing they're not politicians or a political party then, eh?
posted by symbioid at 6:56 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


"Going to have some pretty bad numbers for Occupy Wall Street tomorrow...movement not wearing well with voters"

Good thing they're not politicians or a political party then, eh?


One would think that a group claiming to represent the 99% would have some interest in how the 99% was feeling. If OWS is serious about generating broad societal change, then they need the support of that society; without it, OWS is just another group lobbying for their own interests.
posted by modernnomad at 7:05 PM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


There is a sense in which we've already gone that far, one more dead town's last parade, the Tea party has flows small planes into buildings and shot representatives.

No, they didn't.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 7:07 PM on November 15, 2011 [4 favorites]


You got your Alphas, Betas and Outsiders. Alphas want to lead and be aggressive. Betas want to serve a leader in exchange for protection. Outsiders don't want to be part of the system. It's so easy to slip into a role because they're programmed in. And even if you're not actively leading or actively following, it's still reflected in attitudes: "don't rock the boat". OWS has to cross the bridge from being just outsiders. I think a few charismatic leaders would be just super. I'm not sure America is ready for a guerrilla egalitarian revolution. Though I guess it doesn't have to be ready as long as it continues to sit back in bemused annoyance until onlookers wake up and go "oh, shit, those people are me!"
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:16 PM on November 15, 2011


This thread was captivating to read on my way home from work. You guys are awesome. Unfortunately I was following the "live news" a couple hours late so I was able to scroll right through the tense parts, heh.

In the interest of using one's skillz to help out - I like web programming and I was trying to come up with something to make that might be a useful resource for those wanting to learn more. A wiki I threw up turned out to be redundant redundant redundant, and after discussions with some fellow wiki-starters there's now an email list of people who are working on creating a single wiki-farm for OWS-related things worldwide. (if anyone is interested in getting involved with that, the email list is at owswiki@lists.riseup.net. I didn't create the list but am on it.)

Anyway a lot of people involved in that group are outside the US and are focused on non-USA-specific issues and general worldwide social and economic justice. I'm into that, it's awesome, etc, but I'd really like to contribute to or create a more immediately-relevant-to-US-citizens resource. I've had a couple thoughts - a location-based election information resource? a 'how economically ethical are the businesses i frequent' chart? - but I've been talking myself out of these ideas assuming already they exist in some form and I'd just be adding more noise where it's not needed. If anyone knows of any needs to this end or existing projects I could get involved with I'd love to know about 'em.

Occupy Boston is getting my winter clothing giveaway box and my personal trash cleanup services as soon as I can get my butt over there. :)
posted by ghostbikes at 7:28 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


You might find opencongress.org pertinent, ghostbikes.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:35 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


You got your Alphas, Betas and Outsiders.

Not really, no. Human beings are much more complicated than that, and being lucky enough to have the generosity and support of well-off friends and family have much more to do with success than some mythical Alpha gene.

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of “rags to riches” were true for a few men, but mostly a myth and a useful myth for control.
posted by emjaybee at 8:20 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


It must be midnight there by now. Surely something has happened since supper time. Is anyone occupying?
posted by five fresh fish at 9:30 PM on November 15, 2011


I was sort of expecting to hear chants along the lines of "YOU! ARE! THE 99!" when it came time to square off against beat cops. I sort of still am. Give it a try, OWS?

Occupy Chicago has chanted "CPD needs a raise" on at least one occasion.
posted by wayland at 9:37 PM on November 15, 2011


I think one thing that might benefit the movement, but I'm not sure what would actually be needed - from the technical end, is working towards unifying them...

I still think that the ultimate goal should be a national assembly with elected delegates to go bring thoughts/messages of each group and hash out a potential platform to bring back to the local assemblies and have people then verify at the local level an agreement.

I think this type of representation was proposed by one of the anarchists that I read about, but I can't remember who, exactly.

But I think it might work when it comes to dealing with a "message".

Other people are fine not having a message. Some people think having a message somehow distorts it or makes it dirty and corruptible. But I don't think so.

So what sorts of technical tools would help the movement work towards this goal? Democratizing tools? I pictured things like apps/miniradios/transmitters of some sort that could act as the human megaphone. The "Talking Stick" could be a token passed around phones. Voting/ranking systems for discussion online (I think the official occupy has "twinkle fingers" as a "like" button, but that's fairly primitive).

Anyways, I'm sure there's plenty that could be done, but being that I haven't even gotten my ass down to my local Occupy to give them shit that they need, I don't feel I have a right to speak for them at all ("them" -- heh -- "US") until I've been in their shoes and see what their needs are and how it all works.
posted by symbioid at 10:10 PM on November 15, 2011


>>"Going to have some pretty bad numbers for Occupy Wall Street tomorrow...movement not wearing well with voters"
>Good thing they're not politicians or a political party then, eh?


Wait -- if the goal isn't convincing the public, what is it? You just wanna fight police?

That's their game, that's what they do best. You lose the fight and most uninvolved people think you're a dirty violent person, so they flock to whoever is against you. What is that going to accomplish, other than showing off how tough you are?
posted by msalt at 10:15 PM on November 15, 2011


I was down near the Occupy Oakland encampment at Ogawa Plaza post-eviction this evening as I needed to walk by it to get to another place.

Van full of cops rolls up just as I start to walk down the street. They proceed to follow me in slow-motion reverse for three-quarters of a block, all staring me down, waiting to do something.

Apparently it is now a crime to walk downtown at 6 p.m. Police state, indeed.
posted by Hot Like Your 12V Wire at 10:15 PM on November 15, 2011 [5 favorites]


It must be midnight there by now. Surely something has happened since supper time. Is anyone occupying?

There was a march after some reports of sexual harassment of female protestors custody. There was a general assembly in Zuccotti at some point, not a lot of details on what happened there. It sounds like they're facing a lot of issues with infrastructure right now--there've been several tweets/livestream conversations about getting drinking water in and distributed to everyone.

TheOther99 ustream right now is showing people gathered right outside the park, apparently while Brookfield send a cleaning crew through.
posted by kagredon at 10:17 PM on November 15, 2011




Picture of Dorli Rainey, a 84 year old citizen and activist who was pepper-sprayed by the police at Occupy Seattle today. via slog.
posted by formless at 10:20 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Democratizing tools? I pictured things like apps/miniradios/transmitters of some sort that could act as the human megaphone.

IMO it is long past time for Make:-type folk to invent a samizdat network device that will allow us to maintain communications when the government pulls the Internet.

Governments are actively hostile to the use of twitter et al as a tool for political, economic, or social change.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:25 PM on November 15, 2011 [10 favorites]


re: samizdat: Someone half-jokingly suggested we all get HAM licenses at the Tampa General Assembly on Saturday. Wouldn't be a bad idea to have a few on hand, I reckon.
posted by cmyk at 10:46 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


I just got in from Occupy Seattle (stopped by the SCCC camp on my way home.) I was at the very end of the march this afternoon - got a good view of the first confrontation with police on 4th avenue just before 5pm. I saw no reason for the police reaction. People were swarming toward a running man (the police were chasing him?) The ensuing screaming and police spraying pepper spray was far enough from me that could back off with no problem. After that attack, I moved forward and tried calming people down (trying to neutralize the 'retaliation' mood) although Mama D and the sanctuary woman (who got sprayed) were doing much more; the campers know and trust them. Grandmothers rule.

As I was standing with the medic and one victim (we thought he might need an ambulance), I told an older officer that I was really disappointed in them this evening. He responded with a rant about all he had been through for the past weeks with this movement. I was a bit shocked (but not quick enough to ask, "So, this is a *revenge* thing today?!") I am still a bit wobbly. There were a LOT of police around.

And, not to let the OS 'black_bloc_wannabes' off the hook, the group then went out of control. I left them and walked in the opposite direction. Sorry, Errant that 'intersection sit-in' was a typical stunt of this sub-group that has dominated the camp -- that was simply meaningless, dangerous and egotistical.

When I stopped by the camp tonight I found the 'elders' are getting weary. If the camp falls (*when* it falls), we will start over and take OS back to basic Occupy principles.

Meanwhile, we are counting injuries.
posted by Surfurrus at 10:53 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


a samizdat network device that will allow us to maintain communications when the government pulls the Internet.

It's sort of a solved problem.

I was mulling this over earlier today, when it became apparent how reliant on cellphones the protesters are for communication.

That would certainly change the tone of the politics on the local 2m net...
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:54 PM on November 15, 2011 [2 favorites]


Picture of Dorli Rainey, a 84 year old citizen and activist who was pepper-sprayed by the police at Occupy Seattle today.

... along with a priest and a pregnant woman who was taken away by ambulance (there were two spraying incidents -- once on 4th and then later at the intersection). I also saw the PI photojournalist being treated (he must have gotten it bad, he was completely blind for a while).
posted by Surfurrus at 11:01 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


It must be midnight there by now. Surely something has happened since supper time. Is anyone occupying?

Hard to tell. It looks like all live streams from NYC are showing reruns from earlier in the evening or even yesterday. The Other 99 has been in reruns since Tim stopped for the evening. One of the livestream feeds is apparently showing the ousting from Liberty Plaza from yesterday.
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:07 PM on November 15, 2011


Surfurrus, I agree. It seemed like a move designed solely to provoke a confrontation with the police, and atypical of the Occupy movement to date. The police response was of course excessive and unjustified.

There's a tweet going around from the PI journalist which suggests that he got a faceful of pepper spray.

Thank you for checking in, and I'm glad you're mostly ok.
posted by Errant at 11:09 PM on November 15, 2011


cmyk beat me to the punch. But just as a followup:

There is historical precedent for using Amateur Radio in that manner, as well... although it's not a well-known story, the Student Information Net was operated during May, 1970 on 20 and 40m. (Net control K1WGM Brandeis University, and W2UC at Union College.)

To say that it was controversial would be a bit of an understatement. I think the reason it's not frequently discussed even in radio circles is that it was not the community's finest hour. Despite there not being a formal prohibition on the use of amateur radio for political purposes (it's more of a self-imposed social norm), there was a lot of intentional interference and general asshattery.

I'm not sure exactly what the reaction would be like to an 'Occupy' net today.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:12 PM on November 15, 2011 [1 favorite]


Thank you, Errant. I was next to the journalist when he was staggering to the curb -- he couldn't even see. He was treated by the OS medics for quite a while. It looked really painful. I didn't see the elderly woman; she must have been in the middle of the crowd. One person at the camp tonight had his hand bandaged; he said he punched a mail box to keep from attacking the police. I know him as a beautifully articulate and gentle young man. This was a hard day.
posted by Surfurrus at 11:16 PM on November 15, 2011 [6 favorites]


Is it just me, or is it legit to call a cop (99%er) who attacks Occupy folks a collaborator? (After viewing photos of the old lady that got pepper sprayed)

And isn't it really the case, after all these years, the problem is still "The Establishment"? The huge structure called "society" which perpetuates the system that keeps the elites in power?

Seems to me, the real message of OWS is simply that, WE are the 99%, and WE ARE the fabric of society. Things WILL change, because WE require it. FULL STOP.
posted by Goofyy at 11:53 PM on November 15, 2011 [3 favorites]


is it legit to call a cop who attacks Occupy folks a collaborator

Clearly. The police are an arm of the state.
posted by beerbajay at 12:34 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


Seems to me, the real message of OWS is simply that, WE are the 99%, and WE ARE the fabric of society. Things WILL change, because WE require it. FULL STOP.

Goofyy, can I share that with all my new activist pals on the internet?
posted by cmyk at 1:23 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hey, they're back in! Zuccatti Park is reoccupied!
posted by biddeford at 1:54 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Going to have some pretty bad numbers for Occupy Wall Street tomorrow...movement not wearing well with voters.

1. Don't let the vagaries of daily polling dampen this movement.

2. These poll numbers are likely directly related to public perception of the crackdowns on OWS encampments. Respond on your own terms, not theirs.
posted by wemayfreeze at 2:06 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Photos from last night in Seattle, by Josh Trujillo of the Seattle PI. There are a couple "great" shots of the police methodically and efficiently spraying down the crowd with pepper spray.
posted by Errant at 2:08 AM on November 16, 2011


FFS, SeattlePI, why do you think I want to dismiss a takeover ad every 3rd picture about an anti-corporatism protest? Could you be any more tone-deaf?
posted by flaterik at 2:34 AM on November 16, 2011


On that subject, it is really important for all of us who even *sympathize* with OWS to do everything in our power to strike back at corporate power where it really hurts. The very first easy step you can take is to shut them the fuck up. If you are not rigorously and systematically blocking ads, tracking cookies, and the like in your daily internet use, it takes 10 minutes to set it up and it denies the conglomerates access to reams of information about you, your tastes, your habits, and your politics (by the way). It cuts immediately into the bottom lines of the big companies that own most media in the US. And remember, social media are corporate media. They are not on our side over at Google and Facebook and Twitter or CNN or MSNBC or even the NY TImes. They are in the business of the 1%, and yet we rely on and need their networks and provide them, freely, with a lot of what they need to know to sell us stuff, but also to subjugate us and censor us. BLOCK YOUR ADS! BLOCK FLASH PLUGINS! REFUSE SOCIAL NETWORKING AND TRACKING COOKIES systematically. If millions of people do this, it will disrupt business in this country in a serious way.

The next and more difficult step is to actually not BUY STUFF unless you really need it. And then, when you do, buy thoughtfully, whether goods or services. Bank at a credit union. Buy union-made American products. Buy used. Spend cash. Barter. Avoid paying sales taxes, most of which are collected by state and city governments and used to pay for the police who pepper spray you for saying hey, wait a minute now.

Symbolic occupation of places is one thing. Actual mass protest is another. Our economy depends on mindless consumption. The 99% can, thus, in fact, do real harm to the interests of the 1%. We can all run over to one side of the ship and make it list hard to port.
posted by spitbull at 3:30 AM on November 16, 2011 [14 favorites]


Not, by the say, that I am saying these are substitutes for direct action. But they scale. A few million people turning off the ads and tracking on their browsers is probably the force equivalent of 100 people standing in the rain with signs. But a lot of people aren't ready to commit to actual street protest. And what is more, you can (correctly) convince many more people to be scared of being tracked and databased in every preference and proclivity for eternity than you can of "income inequality" in the abstract, or "police state" in the abstract. Yes, they are watching *you* -- mostly to sell you shit, but the information they collect can also be used to keep an eye on your politics, your sexuality, your friends and networks. Wouldn't you rather opt out?
posted by spitbull at 3:34 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


The dude who created that Fela Kuti and De La Soul mash-up album just put out a tune called Who We Are.
posted by gman at 3:55 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


BLOCK YOUR ADS! [...] If millions of people do this, it will disrupt business in this country in a serious way.
Many small companies like Metafilter rely on ads for their income. Those are not part of the 1%.
posted by davar at 4:39 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Many small companies like Metafilter rely on ads for their income.

Support MetaFilter! Never log in!
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 4:43 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Going to have some pretty bad numbers for Occupy Wall Street tomorrow...movement not wearing well with voters.

1. Don't let the vagaries of daily polling dampen this movement.


This can't be stressed enough. I seem to remember hearing things the last time I was out in the street fairly close to outraged and pretty squarely against popular opinion -- and it didn't make us any more wrong that time, and I wish I hadn't given into the frustration. Further, with this same example, people often start looking at the facts (either differently or at all) and come up with a completely opposite opinion just a few years later. This is a big problem with the need for big solutions, and anybody who thinks a couple of months of camping and a few public opinion polls in the wrong direction is going to break their spirit needs to do something stat to prepare themselves for the long haul. If this is going to work, this needs to be looked at more like a social movement and less like a political campaign.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 5:01 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


It can be argued that the protestors represent the true America regardless of popular backing, much as it can be argued that de Gaulle represented the true France even if Pétain had the popular support.
posted by klue at 5:20 AM on November 16, 2011


much as it can be argued that de Gaulle represented the true France even if Pétain had the popular support.


ugh. come on with these analogies. This is just offensive.
posted by JPD at 6:10 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


AlterNet:
Who convened the mayors call? In an interview with the BBC, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan alluded to her participation in a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities just prior to the raids on encampments across the country. Mayors' associations do exist, but they do not typically organize police interventions or local decision-making in such detail. Given the abuses of the past, such as the notorious COINTELPRO and other intervention programs that the U.S. government organized during the Vietnam protests, the public has a right to know the details of who organized that call.
Minneapolis Examiner
according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.
(my bold)
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:29 AM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


Considering the apparently indiscriminate way the SPD are releasing that pepper spray, they have terrible pepper spray karma.
"Report! Which dangerous anarchists did we subdue?"
"An 84-year old grandmother, sir."
"And?"
"A pregnant woman."
"Huh. Anyone else?"
"A guy in a wheelchair..."
"A Black Bloc agitator feigning a disability?"
"It's Professor Stephen Hawking, sir."
"Oh."
"And he had a family of baby otters in his lap, sir. The baby otters are now crying. They don't understand what's happening."
"At least it can't get any worse."
"Sir, we have uncomfirmed reports that Danny Pudi was tickling one of the baby otters when the tear gas hit."
"You have got to be kidding me."
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:41 AM on November 16, 2011 [11 favorites]


the protestors represent the true America regardless of popular backing

what

I can't tell if this is an appeal to to history or patriotism or what... but talking about the "true America" as something distinct from "popular backing" seems both creepily undemocratic and dangerous. There's not a lot you can't justify that way. Down that road lies madness.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:49 AM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


So, Gravy, what you're saying would say there is a conspiracy from within the Obama administration with the several city governments, to limit the free speech rights of these various groups. Oh, and steal/vandalize their property.

I just get disgusted with the casual attitude towards the constitution, these days, from the political folks. It's like they just can't be bothered to make the effort to do things the legal way.
posted by Goofyy at 6:51 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Many small companies like Metafilter rely on ads for their income.

Well, that's too bad, in my opinion. I would happily subscribe to MetaFilter for $10 a year rather than a one time $5 signup to make up the difference. And I'd consider enabling ads on the very few websites where I feel respected as something more than a product to be sold to advertisers. But once you have installed tools to reject and alert you to the ad networks and data-gathering you subject yourself to every time you browse naively, you will be horrified. I just dropped down my Taco information panel and saw that it had blocked over 12,000 attempts to track my web usage in the last month. Fuck that shit.

For those who care about this, I just wrote an AskMe question to help gather tips and tricks for improving privacy and security without going paranoid-overboard. It's here:

http://ask.metafilter.com/201069/Help-Me-Lock-It-Down
posted by spitbull at 6:55 AM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


I can't tell if this is an appeal to to history or patriotism or what... but talking about the "true America" as something distinct from "popular backing" seems both creepily undemocratic and dangerous.

I don't know - isn't the Constitution there partly as a balance to ochlocratic whim? Because it means that when there is a groundswell of popular feeling about e.g. curtailing freedom of speech, the Constitution acts as a brake on populist legislation. Obviously, a long-term government not of, by or for the people is un-American, but part of the role of government and the law is to balance out the legislative impact of spikes in popular sentiment...
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:56 AM on November 16, 2011


spitbull "Taco information panel "????
posted by NiteMayr at 7:24 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


It's a web security program.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:33 AM on November 16, 2011


I found it, thanks
posted by NiteMayr at 7:39 AM on November 16, 2011


Well, that's too bad, in my opinion. I would happily subscribe to MetaFilter for $10 a year rather than a one time $5 signup to make up the difference.
Even if all 12.000 active users of Metafilter paid $10/year, that's only $120.000. Not enough to support an owner, a developer and four moderators.

If millions of people start to block ads, as you want, thousands of small companies will go bankrupt and thousands of people who have good jobs now will lose them. In the meantime, I don't think it will actually accomplish anything that's worth that. Big companies will still be big, banks will still have the same amount of power. A tiny amount of big companies will have to shift their focus a bit, and that's that.
posted by davar at 7:53 AM on November 16, 2011


So davar, what's your alternate proposal?
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:13 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


I work near Zuccotti Park and was there last night when they began letting the protesters back in. I joined then briefly, and would have stayed longer if I could have. I cried.

I have tried to explain this to people before, but it bears repeating- I have never ever had faith in my country, because my first moment of political consciousness was the first time Bush was elected. I was 12 on 9-11. I spent all of my formative years, in high school and most of college, knowing beyond a shadow of doubt that this country was ruined and that there was no real hope for people like me to change it, that the movements of the 60s had failed and that the best I could hope for was to either sell out or check out. I never thought something like this could happen, I thought it was just simply too late. And I know that this could fail too, but the fact that it is happening at all has moved me in a way I didn't think was possible.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:17 AM on November 16, 2011 [30 favorites]


That examiner article - I can't read it right now - but... it doesn't pass my sniff test - I'm not saying they didn't do that, but...

His ... source seems to just be some random dude claiming to be in Justice? What's this guy's creds? Does he have any contacts, or was this a stranger? It sounds like some guy on the street said this and he has no confirmation of the guys identity.

Grain of salt. Massive grain of salt.
posted by symbioid at 8:19 AM on November 16, 2011


We could imagine a movement to whitelist small business and socially responsible businesses, I suppose. But no, I think a general strike against mindless overconsumption and/or continued erosion of our privacy is bound to have economic casualties, as strikes do. The point is that people who feel they have too much to lose to participate don't yet know what losing feels like.
posted by spitbull at 8:21 AM on November 16, 2011




Bloomberg lied about the library and personal possessions not being destroyed.
posted by stagewhisper at 8:26 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


Actually, I should mention that AdBlock, Taco (and other such programs) permit you to turn things on selectively on a per-site basis. So I have ads enabled on a very few sites (MeFi being one, although since I would never click on a web ad, I'm not sure what value that has), but I don't let any tracking networks operate on any site. It's very easy to pick and choose your boycott targets, starting from a default of "no fucking way you can follow my browsing from here on out."
posted by spitbull at 8:27 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


OWS protester: "we're gonna burn this shit to the motherfuckin' ground... in a few days you're gonna see what a molotov cocktail can do to Macy's."

Good call. Remember when the Weather Underground and other violent anti-government groups brought the revolution in the 1960s, and fixed everything, and didn't cause a backlash that brought us Nixon, Reagan and Bush? That was awesome.
posted by msalt at 8:29 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


Yes, BobbyVan, I see that guy talking about molotov cocktails. That's unfortunate, and, from what I've seen, not representative of the movement as a whole. Did you see the part where the cops are handcuffing the elderly lady, too?
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:30 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yes. She didn't appear to be in any great distress.
posted by BobbyVan at 8:32 AM on November 16, 2011


No great distress.
posted by spitbull at 8:42 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


So it's okay to be handcuffed for nothing if you're not showing signs of distress? Ricockulous.

And one person is not indicative of a movement.
posted by tr33hggr at 8:43 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


That examiner article - I can't read it right now - but... it doesn't pass my sniff test - I'm not saying they didn't do that, but...

This diary on Daily Kos agrees with you and posts that Rick Ellis is backing down a little from his claims. However the Examiner article is gaining traction: It was discussed by Micheal Moore and Keith Olbermann on the news last night and The Guardian and Wonkette have both run with the story. It may turn out to be a complete fabrication, or the guy may be backing down due to pressure from outside. Paranoia or cynicism?

Unfortunately it is all too believable. Those of us keeping an eye on Homeland Security while they crack down on "domestic terrorism" have always been afraid of just this situation. How far can political dissent go in this country while the Government has such massive and all-encompassing powers at their disposal?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:50 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


Sorry, should have clarified that photo was Dorli Rainey, 84 year old Seattle grandma. And she wasn't handcuffed, just pepper-sprayed into that undistressed appearance, it's true. So it's nothing, never mind. Story here.

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/11/seattle_police_pepper_spray_84.php
posted by spitbull at 8:50 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


The video doesn't establish that she is being handcuffed "for nothing". The elderly are not above the law.

That said, it's sad to see an old person who has been exposed to pepper spray. From what I've gathered, the woman in the "no great distress" photo has a long history as an activist, and has bravely risked her health to stand in solidarity with her much younger comrades in a confrontation with police. There are attendant risks with that, and I think that it would speak well of the Occupiers if they asked the elderly to move to the "rear echelons" for their own protection when a confrontation with police appears evident. If they are passively (or actively) allowing the elderly to serve as "human shields," I would find that to be morally abhorrent. And to complete the equation, the police should of course use all reasonable restraint when dealing with the elderly.
posted by BobbyVan at 8:51 AM on November 16, 2011


correction: confrontation with police appears evident = imminent
posted by BobbyVan at 8:55 AM on November 16, 2011



OWS protester: "we're gonna burn this shit to the motherfuckin' ground... in a few days you're gonna see what a molotov cocktail can do to Macy's."


And did you see the older man walk by and smile? We have people who rant like that young man all over the city. In the camp they are known and tolerated; others will help bring them down or distract them when they get too far out ("Hey, there is hot pizza over there!").

I am not discounting the anger, nor am I saying that 'ranter' is definitely not a danger to others. I'm just saying ... well, fear of such people who shout (in public?!) is really wasted energy. And these kinds of images/films are way overused by people who seek police state "orderliness".
posted by Surfurrus at 8:55 AM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


You know what else is morally abhorrent? Pepper spraying peaceful protesters.
posted by spitbull at 8:55 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


Last night Karl Rove spoke on the topic at hand :
"Who gave you the right to occupy America?” asked Rove to the protesters, apparently unaware of the Bill of Rights. As they repeated their slogan, “We are the 99 percent!” Rove petulantly responded, “No you’re not!” He snidely added, “You wanna keep jumping up and yelling that you’re the 99 percent? How presumptuous and arrogant can you think are!”
I wonder what all that was about? That guy is too savvy to go around riling people up for no reason.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:57 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


What should police do with people who disobey lawful orders? Use nightsticks? Jiu-jitsu? Tasers? It sucks to be pepper sprayed, and it shouldn't be used the way Officer Bologna used it, but it's a legitimate tool.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:00 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


We had a quarter of a million people in Madison, Wisconsin this spring (one weekend, almost as many several others) and somehow the police did not find it necessary to use pepper spray, to my knowledge, even once. Now, BobbyVan, why do you suppose that is?
posted by dhartung at 9:07 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


You know what else is morally abhorrent? Pepper spraying peaceful protesters.

So we should just let them block the streets whenever they want?
posted by Jahaza at 9:09 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


As a side note, there is no such newspaper as the "Minneapolis Examiner". What there is is Examiner.com (wiki description), a 'hyperlocal news aggregator' that's branded for dozens of specific markets.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:10 AM on November 16, 2011


There's a petition going around for Trinity Church to offer asylum to Wall Street protesters. (Don't think this has been posted yet, but haven't been able to read all comments.)
posted by ejaned8 at 9:14 AM on November 16, 2011


dhartung: Because the the occupiers of the Wisconsin capitol building had a huge base of support and Gov. Walker deemed it more prudent to wait out a political solution than to treat the protesters like the trespassers that they were. And because most Democratic representatives had already fled the state, the protests were not disrupting much Capitol business anyway...
posted by BobbyVan at 9:14 AM on November 16, 2011


I wonder what all that was about? That guy is too savvy to go around riling people up for no reason.

Rove is betting that the American people have turned against the Occupiers. And he's daring mainstream Democrats - who earlier spoke out in favor of the movement - to defend them.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:16 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


BobbyVan: From what I've gathered, the woman in the "no great distress" photo has a long history as an activist, and has bravely risked her health to stand in solidarity with her much younger comrades in a confrontation with police. There are attendant risks with that, and I think that it would speak well of the Occupiers if they asked the elderly to move to the "rear echelons" for their own protection when a confrontation with police appears evident. If they are passively (or actively) allowing the elderly to serve as "human shields," I would find that to be morally abhorrent.

Also, if they are screwing guinea pigs to death, I would find that to be disturbing.

If I were to find - just hypothetically - that the protestors were sneaking into people's houses while they slept and putting their hands in warm water so they wet the bed, I would find that utterly jejune.

And if it turns out that every single member of the Occupy movement had teabagged an otter? I'd be pretty fashed.
posted by running order squabble fest at 9:18 AM on November 16, 2011 [16 favorites]


Be very clear, the police in Seattle last night were not spraying pepper spray because people were doing something illegal. The march had been in the street for almost an hour before the first incident happened. From my point of view, there was a chase that sent police flying into the middle of the group (on their bikes) ... others are saying they saw something at the front that halted and shocked the marchers. Either way, it did not seem entirely accidental. The people were responding to a perceived attack by the police. I'm still asking questions. NO one in the march had been violent or threatening the police (from my point of view).
posted by Surfurrus at 9:18 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Be very clear, the police in Seattle last night were not spraying pepper spray because people were doing something illegal.

Provide some evidence.

The Seattle PI says
Protesters gathered in the intersection of 5th Avenue and Pine Street after marching from their camp at Seattle Central Community College in support of Occupy Wall Street. Many refused to move from the intersection after being ordered by police. Police then began spraying pepper spray into the gathered crowd hitting dozens of people.
How were they not doing something illegal? Did the police not order them to disperse? Were they actually not blocking the intersectuin?
posted by Jahaza at 9:25 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


You know what else is morally abhorrent? Pepper spraying peaceful protesters.

Jahaza: So we should just let them block the streets whenever they want?

False dichotomy much?
posted by syzygy at 9:26 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


False dichotomy much?

It's not a false dichotomy, it's an actual situation. The intersection was illegally blocked and the police used lawful force to disperse the illegal activity. Whether the protesters were "peaceful" is moot.
posted by Jahaza at 9:28 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Oh, and I am not a "human shield" BobbyVan. That term was invented to excuse people from their responsibility in taking part in inhumane attacks and atrocities. (We are ripping away the language cover-ups, too.)
posted by Surfurrus at 9:29 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


Jahaza: It's not a false dichotomy

Wrong. There are worlds of possibilities between the false dichotomy of "let them block the streets whenever they want" and "Pepper spraying peaceful protestors".

Yours is one of the falsest dichotomies I've ever had the displeasure of witnessing.
posted by syzygy at 9:31 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


I was at the first incident, Jahaza - the one where the worst of the pepper spraying happened (the priest, the blind woman, the 84 year old woman, the pregnant woman, the young teens, the news photographer carrying tons of equipment ...). I did not see the incident in the intersection. That was the second spraying last night.
posted by Surfurrus at 9:32 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


It's my understanding that the first incident occurred when a 17 year old girl attempted to assault a police officer. The police sought to arrest her, but claim they were obstructed by a crowd of protesters. The pepper spray was used in that instance to disperse the crowd.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:36 AM on November 16, 2011


"Assaulting a police officer"

/raspberry

Whenever you hear that term, it doesn't necessarily mean what you think.
posted by symbioid at 9:40 AM on November 16, 2011


In this case, "assaulting a police officer" was apparently swinging a stick at one of them. Any reasonable person should expect to be arrested for doing that.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:43 AM on November 16, 2011


My anarchist friend was just on the Diane Rehm show, representing Occupy DC. He has a knack for getting himself in the news over stuff like that.
posted by empath at 9:45 AM on November 16, 2011


Here is livestream video from Seattle march last night (condensed; parts missing) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNZ3WwXxRNw
posted by Surfurrus at 9:48 AM on November 16, 2011


cmyk made me cry.
posted by desjardins at 9:56 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


Any reasonable person should expect to be arrested for doing that.

And any octogenarian within a hundred yards of any reasonable person should expect to be pepper sprayed.
posted by running order squabble fest at 9:57 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


"Officers say they were trying to arrest a woman who swung a stick at them and had to pepper spray people who got in the way."

Key words: 'Officers say.'

I was involved at a protest a couple years ago where a young woman was pushed by some cops, then reached out to steady herself in the direction of a cop. The police then picked her up and slammed her repeatedly against the hood of a car, arrested her, and charged her with assaulting an officer. There was video of the whole exchange on youtube at the time, but I'm not able to find it right now.

When I was arrested at a protest some years ago, I was charged with carrying a weapon, which, it eventually turned out, was a protest sign. And one I wasn't carrying, even; the police had put the same text on everyone's arrest record.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:04 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


Wait, so a 17 year old girl waves a stick at a police officer, and you think it's appropriate that she was pepper sprayed and arrested?
posted by Big_B at 10:06 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


... and any crowd out Christmas shopping should expect a line of police bikes in pursuit of a 'dangerous person' to race into them from behind -- at any moment -- pushing and shoving -- and, of course, to spray them with pepper spray should they object.
posted by Surfurrus at 10:07 AM on November 16, 2011


Do we even know what kind of a stick it was? Did it have a flag on the end of it? Or maybe a flower?
posted by ambrosia at 10:08 AM on November 16, 2011


Unless someone has a video of the incident in question, this is all baseless speculation.

We know that some people got pepper sprayed -- unfortunately an elderly lady was among those -- and the police have a plausible explanation for it (they say they were attempting to disperse a crowd that was preventing them from making a lawful arrest). I don't think there's enough info available here to GRAR about, unless the mere fact that an old person was exposed to pepper spray is ipso facto sufficient to deem this an atrocity by the police.
posted by BobbyVan at 10:14 AM on November 16, 2011


I really don't get the objections expressed in this thread and elsewhere. So people are inconvenienced. Yes, and? This happens frequently. Part of life. Is an army of lizard-brained uniforms hopped up on adrenaline and tribalism looking for any excuse at all to wield "lawful force" the proper response to inconvenience? Not a kind of empathic, "well what's up with that? Maybe I should go around or perhaps inquire as to what the deal is perhaps it is important!" Myopic othering; I don't care, fuck them; is a non-civilized response. Lashing out. I keep going back to loq's "house nigger" quote which was horrifying and soul-baring all at once. That and Patty Hearst. So trapped and hypnotized by the system that you cannot conceive of another mode of existence; frozen with fright. I get chills.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:18 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


The minister who was sprayed just wrote a long letter to Occupy Seattle: https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/occupyseattle/ (FB - sorry; they will republish elsewhere soon) Here is one part:

On Tuesday night a small group of the rag-tag campers of Seattle’s Occupy Movement left their camp to protest the destruction inflicted upon the Wall Street Occupy site. Throughout the march I, as a Pastor in full clergy alb, stole and cross, acted as a peacekeeper placing myself between the police line and the Occupy Movement. On four occasions I stepped between verbal battles between the police and the protesters. The point being that it was evident to all who I was and what my role was in this non-violent march of the few escorted by the many.

The incident was minor in nature. A girl, dressed in Anarchist black waving the Anarchist black flag was plastered side by side with an officer on the bike. They were jawboning each other. At one point her flag was thrust in his direction --- a provocation yes – threatening?—no. The officer grabbed the flag and in the pulling, pulled down the girl. Her friends reacted jumping in to pull her away from the officer. It was at this point that the first wave of pepper spray went off.

Point --- one might think the officer acted within reason, that the officer was suddenly threatened. But with what? By whom? The friends of the offender were grabbing for the girl, they were not grabbing at the police. Basically the officer, and his comrades, were trigger happy as if they couldn’t wait for just this moment. And so the spray went forth.

I leapt to the front and tried to place myself between the parties --- with spray in the air the protesters were also fleeing. Separation between the police line and the protesters was clearly visible … there was certainly no threat of the “mob” suddenly rampaging into the well armed police. The separation had occurred (as can be clearly seen on the video captured by King 5 News). But the spray continued. I walked between the lines, I was alone, I was in full clergy dress, everyone knew who I was and what I was --- with the protesters fleeing and the police line holding --- with my back to the police and my hands waving the protesters to get back --- alone in full alb, stole and cross --- six officers turned their spray on me thoroughly soaking my alb and then one officer hit me full throttle in the face.

I praise the courage and compassion, the discipline and the decency of the Occupy Movement. Out of the rag-tag mob came help, grabbing my hands, leading me (I was blind by then) to the wall and administering care and concern for my well being. The protesters were assembled around all the wounded, and maintained the discipline of nonviolence (granted the nonviolence was in behavior but not language). And they were not afraid. The spraying had been a baptism sealing them into the security of knowing that their prophecy of repentance was indeed the Spirit-Word through them --- it is as if they did not prophecy their very bones would melt within them. Against the wall in increasing pain and burning I realized I was in the midst of church.

posted by Surfurrus at 10:18 AM on November 16, 2011 [26 favorites]


an old person was exposed to pepper spray is ipso facto sufficient to deem this an atrocity by the police.

About the way I see it, yes.
posted by spitbull at 10:19 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Wait, so a 17 year old girl waves a stick at a police officer, and you think it's appropriate that she was pepper sprayed and arrested?


Well, let's be clear - a 17-year old girl was arrested. She may or may not have been pepper sprayed. People who were pepper sprayed included an 84 year old woman, a blind man and a pregnant woman. These people were apparently, according to the police report, either refusing an order to disperse (and to be fair to the police, none of them would necessarily move very fast without a bit of encouragement, especially if they were being held in place by other protestors to act as human shields) or engaging in assaultive behavior.

Of course, when talking about assaultive behavior, it would be remiss not to remember that assaultive behavior covers a lot of ground - for example blowing bubbles with malice aforethought.
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:20 AM on November 16, 2011


Ah, ministers, old ladies, girls on bikes with flags, they're all filthy fucking hippie riff raff and deserve whatever they got for daring to challenge the police, who are never brutal or excessive.

/sarcasm
posted by spitbull at 10:22 AM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


Remember that page-by-page analysis of why "Left Behind" was not only badly written but actively sinister, sociopathic, religiously ignorant, heartless and cruel? One thing the reviewer kept pointing out was how, amid all the death and destruction and end of the worldness, the main characters are obsessed with convenience of transit. The vanishing of everyone you ever loved? Not worth a page. Just how hard and long it is to find a cab during the end of the world and you have to walk for almost two whole miles, that's an epic struggle of many pages.

Give me convenience or give me death.
posted by The Whelk at 10:24 AM on November 16, 2011 [13 favorites]


I really don't get the objections expressed in this thread and elsewhere. So people are inconvenienced. Yes, and? This happens frequently. Part of life.

Precisely. I used to work near the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, and FREQUENTLY was similarly "inconvenienced" whenever there was a big event taking place there or there was a VIP staying there. The Waldorf-Astoria is where all the dignitaries stay during the UN General Assemblies, and the police always make sure to keep a WIDE berth between the public and the hotel (and my subway was ON THE SAME CORNER, so they had to shuttle people two blocks out of their way to get into the damn subway).

And that's not to mention all of the frequent times people in New York are similarly "inconvenienced" by police rerouting traffic because of parades, car accidents, etc.

If we are to take the "but they were inconveniencing people" reason as just cause to stop an assembly, then we'd better arrest the entire UN for inconveniencing a hell of a lot more people a hell of a lot more often, plus all the members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (those people shut down Fifth Avenue for several blocks every March 17th!), etc.

And yet we don't do that. So what's the difference?....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:26 AM on November 16, 2011 [11 favorites]


Thanks for this, Surfurrus. So it seems that this anarchist flag was thrust like a spear at the police officer, who responded by attempting to take her into custody. By the priest's own admission, the crowd attempted to obstruct the police officer (a crowd that may have included an elderly but experienced and wily activist who has been arrested in the past for refusing to obey police orders). The police officer, probably fearing for his own physical safety at this point given the quick escalation, uses pepper spray to disperse the crowd -- unfortunately hitting an elderly woman and others in the process.

What should he have done? Allowed the girl to get away, emboldening the crowd to commit ever more provocative acts against the police?
posted by BobbyVan at 10:30 AM on November 16, 2011


seanmpuckett: "I really don't get the objections expressed in this thread and elsewhere. So people are inconvenienced. Yes, and?"

So we have everyone saying we should just get outta the way, and we can't inconvenience people because they won't support the cause then. So then what? Go back, hide, and don't make a fuss?

So what if we took it to the other extreme. What if, instead of Occupy, we have "Serve" as in "To serve and protect" (not "To serve man" - that's what we will do with the bankers), and not so much "protect" (though the defense of foreclosed property is one form of protective action that's happened at least once throughout all this). What if we created an army to "serve" and help their communities. "Need groceries picked up while you're out busting your ass? Join the movement, we'll help!" When they taste the camaraderie and community, maybe they too will join. Of course, there's plenty of people who are struggling to survive.

Propaganda of the deed. The good kind. The kind that makes people love you. I think it goes with the spirit of community that's happened.

Our modern economic and justice system is so biased towards distrust. The media teaches it to us, our politics breeds it. How do we enable trust? How do we make it a communal thing? Don't try to make a political donation out of it, that's bullshit - we're trying to avoid "politics as usual" so what if we just said "hey fuck these guys - let's help each other".

This also ties into the Libertarian ethos (in the sense that it's not "The State" enforcing volunteerism for some abstract cause)...

We can't reach everyone, but those on the fence? Those who may even be on "the other side" who agree with local/community style outreach (there's a lot of crossover between "Green"/local values and conservative rural communal values - but there's been a division and a breeding to hate each other over other things...)

Anyways. Let's not "inconvenience" our fellow 99% - let's inconvenience the one percent, and in order to do that, we need to be "hyperconvenient" for the other 99%. I say this, because talk is easy, sadly. But these folks have shown that it can be done, and with more community support and more bonding it makes it easier to build the willpower and communal spirit that's needed.

Just an idea.
posted by symbioid at 10:31 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


WILLY GRANNYOTE!
posted by symbioid at 10:32 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


And yet we don't do that. So what's the difference?....

Permits.
posted by Jahaza at 10:33 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Occupy Wall Street Favor Fading
The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country. Only 33% now say that they are supportive of its goals, compared to 45% who say they oppose them. That represents an 11 point shift in the wrong direction for the movement's support compared to a month ago when 35% of voters said they supported it and 36% were opposed. Most notably independents have gone from supporting Occupy Wall Street's goals 39/34, to opposing them 34/42.

Voters don't care for the Tea Party either, with 42% saying they support its goals to 45% opposed. But asked whether they have a higher opinion of the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movement the Tea Party wins out 43-37, representing a flip from last month when Occupy Wall Street won out 40-37 on that question. Again the movement with independents is notable- from preferring Occupy Wall Street 43-34, to siding with the Tea Party 44-40.
posted by BobbyVan at 10:33 AM on November 16, 2011


We know that some people got pepper sprayed -- unfortunately an elderly lady was among those -- and the police have a plausible explanation for it (they say they were attempting to disperse a crowd that was preventing them from making a lawful arrest)

Spraying pepper spray into a crowd is not a reasonable crowd dispersal technique, any more than randomly swinging a baton at a group of people is. Pepper spray is supposed to be used in situations where physical violence would otherwise be necessary, where there is no possible alternative to avoid the use of force. It seems to me that it would be extremely unlikely that there would be a plausible reason to use force against each individual member of a crowd unless that crowd was physically attacking the officer.

Increasingly these sorts of less than lethal weapons like pepper spray and tasers are being used as a tool to punish people who disobey police orders regardless of the actual physical threat or situation. This is just one of many incidents, such as the Bologna case last month that shows that trend. This is becoming a problem precisely because police are free to use these tools in situations where they are not at all necessary because they know there will be no serious repercussions for doing so.
posted by burnmp3s at 10:36 AM on November 16, 2011 [11 favorites]


Spraying pepper spray into a crowd is not a reasonable crowd dispersal technique, any more than randomly swinging a baton at a group of people is.

More like a swing and a miss. Pepper spray results in temporary discomfort. Baton swinging can cause serious injury.

What other methods could the Seattle police have used to disperse a crowd -- blocking them from making a lawful arrest -- that would have been safer than pepper spray?
posted by BobbyVan at 10:47 AM on November 16, 2011


Based on my own experiences around the Seattle police, I'm actually just kind of thankful nobody was tased or shot.

Blocking the intersection of 5th and Pine was a dumb move and I'm surprised they went for it, it's way beyond the kind of expression of solidarity with OWS that they seemed to be aiming for. Swift police response was inevitable.

However, I can't seem to reconcile BobyVan's proposed version of events with this photo, which would almost be funny in its sheer Keystone Kops overreaction if it weren't, y'know, horrific.
posted by chaff at 10:50 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Everything's "lawful" if a cop says it is.
posted by symbioid at 10:56 AM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


Pepper spray results in temporary discomfort. Baton swinging can cause serious injury.

Have a 1999 Duke University study on the health dangers of pepper spray (PDF). Personally, I'd rather take my chances with the baton.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:57 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


However, I can't seem to reconcile BobyVan's proposed version of events with this photo, which would almost be funny in its sheer Keystone Kops overreaction if it weren't, y'know, horrific.

So it seems that pepper spray was used to disperse an ad hoc crowd that gathered to keep a protester from being arrested for attempted assault; then again later when a crowd refused to leave an intersection after being ordered to do so. This picture seems to be of the latter incident.

In pre-pepper spray times, the police would have lined up behind riot shields, pulled out their night sticks, and marched in unison to back up the protesters. Some would have fought back, and you'd end up with broken arms, knocked out teeth and concussions. This is much more humane. In addition, I'm sure the police warned the crowd many times about the use of pepper spray before it was actually deployed in this instance.
posted by BobbyVan at 10:58 AM on November 16, 2011


So it seems that this anarchist flag was thrust like a spear at the police officer

What the priest actually said:

They were jawboning each other. At one point her flag was thrust in his direction --- a provocation yes – threatening?—no.

The "like a spear" bit? Totally invented editorial insertion.

This is how news agencies lose credibility. I imagine the same standards should ideally apply to commentators.
posted by running order squabble fest at 11:01 AM on November 16, 2011 [9 favorites]


I live next to a park that is frequently Occupied by a Farmer's Market, frisbee golfers, and dog walkers.

In the summer there is a large festival that really inconveniences me. There is a lot of traffic and people cross the street in the middle of the block. They park in front of my garage and throw trash on my lawn.

About two or three times a year there is a bike race and a marathon that closes down the street in front of my house. I can't go anywhere by car since my house is on the lake side of the street, and I can't cross it.

I suppose I am justified in pepper spraying all these folks?
posted by desjardins at 11:02 AM on November 16, 2011 [7 favorites]


This is great news, this means I am justified in pepperspraying slow walkers and people who stop right in front of doorways. Man, Christmas shopping is gonna be a snap this year!
posted by entropicamericana at 11:08 AM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


Pepper spray everyone!

But watch out for those wily elderly women. They fight back.
posted by spitbull at 11:10 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


The "like a spear" bit? Totally invented editorial insertion.

Well, the police say the flag pole was "swung" at them and the priest says it was "thrust" at them. When you swing a pole at someone, you're doing so like a "baton". When you thrust a pole at someone, you're doing so like a "spear". Either way it's grounds for arrest. The priest tries to say that it was "provocative" but not "threatening" but that's a pretty fine distinction...

And word of advice -- the American public tends to be pretty conservative when deciding whether to support political movements that fight battles in the streets with police. If this is what OWS is going to be, it's lost, notwithstanding a few hardy, and yes wily, grannies at the barricades.
posted by BobbyVan at 11:22 AM on November 16, 2011


So it seems that this anarchist flag was thrust like a spear at the police officer
Now you're just making shit up, BobbyVan.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:24 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


When you swing a pole at someone, you're doing so like a "baton". When you thrust a pole at someone, you're doing so like a "spear".

Weirdest. Porno. Ever.
posted by running order squabble fest at 11:25 AM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


I was part of an activist march that occupied an intersection (1993, DC "die in"). The cops gave several orders to disperse, and threatened us with arrest. When people refused, cops on horseback who edged towards the crowd. People who continued to refuse were arrested. There was no pepper spray, no violence or real antagonism. The cops weren't our best friends but they were professional. Things have gone massively downhill since.

I dispersed, because I was 18, broke, and would have had to call Mom for bail money and a bus ticket home.
posted by desjardins at 11:29 AM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


cops on horseback who edged towards the crowd.
posted by desjardins at 11:29 AM on November 16, 2011




Rich Lang is a friend of my pastor. He's not some whackjob lunatic who goes around making things up -- he's a freaking METHODIST. The cops in Seattle have a history of going off half-cocked and violating people's rights, and I see no evidence that they've done any different here, your fevered imaginations of flags being thrust like spears not withstanding.
posted by KathrynT at 11:31 AM on November 16, 2011 [7 favorites]


BobbyVan, your whole perspective is clinically disconnected. When I see a young person in the beginning stages of being assaulted by riot police, I will step in and at least try to protect them. I'm not worried about the safety of a bunch of cops in full riot gear armed to the teeth surrounded by other cops. I'm worried about someone in plainclothes getting the shit beat out of them, and having no recourse because they committed the crime of trying to have a voice. Yeah, they'll probably grab me and beat the shit out of me instead, but I will have made the choice to protect a fellow citizen because the police seem to be unable or unwilling to make that choice.

When you move from "innocent until proven guilty" to "according to police", guess what: you live in a police state, even if there's a song and dance called a trial where the judge never goes against the word of an officer.

When those police don't even have the basic human decency to respect the right to protest, or to go the extra mile to protect the old, or the young, or the pregnant, or the handicapped, something is seriously wrong with the way they have been trained. Nationwide our police forces need to be demilitarized. Right now they may be in the hands of simpletons who like money and power, who at least want enough votes to stay in power, but give them over to a totalitarian leader and the consequences will be drastic.
posted by deanklear at 11:41 AM on November 16, 2011 [38 favorites]


Hear hear, deanklear! Nicely put!
posted by tr33hggr at 11:46 AM on November 16, 2011


Slightly more seriously:

And word of advice -- the American public tends to be pretty conservative when deciding whether to support political movements that fight battles in the streets with police.

You speculated about evil protestors forcing old women into acting as human shields. You ascribed spear-like qualities to the thrust of a flagpole (most obviously, spear thrusts have intent to wound; in the priest's account, no such intent was present). You appear now to be hallucinating a battle on the street between protestors and police.

The police report records three assault arrests. One was your imaginary spear-thrust - that is, no contact was made until the policeman (according to the priest's report) dragged the woman to the ground. One involved a non-harmful liquid being splashed over a policeman. One other offers minimal details, but gives no account of a police officer being harmed. This is not how battles work.

I sympathize. Your life must be absolutely terrifying. Every lateral motion a spear thrust, every crowd an army, every granny a hostage or patsy to sinister powers she can barely understand. However, these fevered imaginings are adding little to the discussion.
posted by running order squabble fest at 11:47 AM on November 16, 2011 [13 favorites]


And word of advice . . .

Your deep and sincere concern for the success of the larger OWS movement is truly inspiring.

Concern trolling, as it's called on more political sites, is a specialized form of patronizing dismissal, bless your heart.

OWS isn't asking for pity or advice. It is deploying classic techniques of successful populist resistance movements, something we haven't seen on this scale in the US in decades, frankly, and I've been involved in a lot of what there was, mostly the anti-war movement for both Iraq wars (remember the first one?). Any reasonable social thinker can look at the current state of the capitalist world, or the US specifically, and see that we are on a collision course as rising inequality meets diminished expectations, low education, resource shortages, and all the rest. I have no idea how old you are, but speaking as a middle aged guy whose led a relatively politically active life on various levels, I detect in OWS the first real shift in the direction of history I've noticed in the US, especially compelling coming on the heels of the Arab Spring.

As deprecated as Marx is in contemporary popular discourse, wherein Keynes has become the newly unthinkable "left" extreme (and the law of the jungle the only yet unthinkable right wind alternative), Marx was right about a lot of shit, and what he missed, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School added to the mix (namely, the complexity of the cultural dimension of political economy). Things are in motion in strange and major ways. The world is realigning. Fangs are being bared, teeth gnashed, and blood drawn. The niceties of a pretend world of law and order and prosperity and peaceful democratic processes basically working to keep the classes acting responsibly toward one another, and nations alike, are falling by the wayside with every turn of the screw. OWS is trying the Hail Mary, or perhaps we should call it the Hail MLK or the Hail Mario Savio, the recognition that nothing will change without confrontation, sacrifice, and a damn sight more inconvenience than we've seen to date.

Team Blue, as I said above, cannot be expected to act any differently than the security forces always must act in order to justify their own privilege. Some will identify with the law and order cover story that gilds the lily of systematic police violence and race/class-differentiated forms of enforcement. But the fact is a world in which you can steal a billion or two and retire to a yacht but get caught with a joint and wind up with your life ruined is a world in which no one who thinks about it for two minutes can see "the authorities" as representing the abstract ideals of the rule of law.

It's a hard rain that's gonna fall. But fall it will. The only question remains, which side are you on?
posted by spitbull at 11:47 AM on November 16, 2011 [11 favorites]


Yeah, they'll probably grab me and beat the shit out of me instead, but I will have made the choice to protect a fellow citizen because the police seem to be unable or unwilling to make that choice.

If you know that going in, why do you pretend to be angry when it happens? Isn't the whole point of civilly disobedient, non-violent protest to force the police to use heavy-handed tactics, thereby denting their moral authority?

When those police don't even have the basic human decency to respect the right to protest

Since when does unlawfully blocking intersections or turning public-use parks into illegal campgrounds = protest? The Tea Party didn't need to do that... oh yeah, they didn't need to because they had a much larger base of public support, and didn't need to resort to victimization-seeking antics.

go the extra mile to protect the old, or the young, or the pregnant, or the handicapped, something is seriously wrong with the way they have been trained.


The marchers should have told the weakest among them to go home when the time came for street battles. They knew they were headed for a confrontation, and are callously using the elderly, the sick and the pregnant to gain sympathy points. I haven't seen anything to suggest that the police intentionally targeted any of them, however.
posted by BobbyVan at 11:50 AM on November 16, 2011


Said more bluntly, as the ship is sinking, suddenly a whole bunch of people in steerage can see the fancies monopolizing the lifeboats through acts of sheer cynical corruption. At that point, the ship's bursar loses his authority over the jewels in the safe.
posted by spitbull at 11:52 AM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Seeing the Seattle coppahs stand in a line and empty their pepper spray weapons onto peaceful protesters is an embarrassment to white males everywhere. These "police" are squamous thug/cowards.
posted by telstar at 11:54 AM on November 16, 2011


No, you see the marchers are not confronting the police with the intention of engaging in a street battle. They are engaging in a moral battle in which the weakest among them are actually the idiots who talk shit about molotov cocktails. Grannies willing to take a pepper spraying are our strongest members. No one is asking you to pity her. Rather, behold what a potent symbol of the police brutality happening all over the country she is becoming. She's on the evening news as I write.
posted by spitbull at 11:55 AM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


The Tea Party didn't need to do that... oh yeah, they didn't need to because they had a much larger base of public support, and didn't need to resort to victimization-seeking antics.

The Tea Party had guns. If OWS had guns, the police approach would be more careful, more thought out. Instead, we get these bullying tactics to unarmed, peaceful protesters.
posted by zerbinetta at 11:56 AM on November 16, 2011


The Tea Party had guns. If OWS had guns, the police approach would be more careful, more thought out. Instead, we get these bullying tactics to unarmed, peaceful protesters.

If OWS had guns, the National Guard would be firing on them as we speak. The Tea Party serves the interests of the financial hegemony, so they can have all the guns they want as openly as they want. OWS simply needs to wave a stick in order to draw tear gas, pepper spray, and beatings.
posted by Errant at 12:00 PM on November 16, 2011 [26 favorites]


No, you see the marchers are not confronting the police with the intention of engaging in a street battle. They are engaging in a moral battle in which the weakest among them are actually the idiots who talk shit about molotov cocktails.

"Shut down Wall Street. Occupy the subways. Take the square."

That's not a moral battle - it's a call to arms. It's not something to fear, but the police are tasked with maintaining public order, and shutting down a city street is a deliberately provocative act.

The Tea Party had guns. If OWS had guns, the police approach would be more careful, more thought out. Instead, we get these bullying tactics to unarmed, peaceful protesters.

That is so hilariously off-base. The Tea Party got permits for their marches and cleaned up after themselves -- why would the police have needed to stop them? They organized, asked questions of their Congresspeople at townhalls, and participated in the political process -- and succeeded in defeating a significant number of Republican representatives in primaries who had been backed by corporate interests.
posted by BobbyVan at 12:02 PM on November 16, 2011


Step back and look at what you are saying. A teenaged girl with a flag is a legitimate danger to a cop in full riot gear? Really? That's completely ridiculous. The cop has riot gear, body armor, a plastic face shield, probably a big shield too. The girl has the clothing on her back and a flag.

If I'm in a crowd and there are a line of riot cops facing me, I do not know what they will do. Pepper spray, tear gas, nightsticks, arrest is the goddamn least of my worries at that point - I want to get that cop away from me as soon as possible. If the cop is doing the same to somebody near me, I am going to try to get them away, because an unarmed protester doesn't stand a chance, and at this point I have no reason to believe that it will not end with another body in a hospital.

Taking the flag away would be a legitimate reaction. Do not tell me that a police officer cannot wrestle a flagpole out of the hands of a teenaged protester. Anything above that is aggression, plain and simple. Emptying pepper spray on a crowd of people trying to prevent another American from getting brutalized - because at this point we don't know what they will do so we naturally expect the worst - is ridiculous.
posted by cmyk at 12:03 PM on November 16, 2011 [14 favorites]


I beg your pardon, but over a dozen times groups of tea partier activists, many likely paid and planted and rehearsed, undertook to shout down members of congress in vicious ways (as well as fellow citizens trying to ask questions) in "town hall" format meetings across this country. In many cases they had to be forcibly removed (as is true of the hecklers who bedevil President Obama to this day), and seeking forcible removal is clearly an understood goal of the heckler going into the speech or the town hall. A complicated boundary exists there between the politician's entourage, other attendees, and law enforcement, when it shows up. But I don't recall hearing of any pepper spray being used.

Let's not rewrite the Tea Party's various attempts at civil disobedience. Of course, representing the interests of bankers (under the ideological guise of populism) means the police would most likely handle the Tea Party with kid gloves, giving them no traction in seeking confrontations with the law. A better example might be the right wing militia movement, which is indeed in my opinion an interesting precedent for OWS, and far more radical but also fairly widespread with a core of activists and a large number of sympathizers. The militias are overtly disdainful of legitimate law enforcement in many cases, and especially believe federal law enforcement is bought and paid for by the New World Order (or the Jews, or Muslim Socialists, or Terrorists, or the UN, or whatever).
posted by spitbull at 12:03 PM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


The most amusing shit in the world is when police apologists rationalize teenage girls and old people getting pepper sprayed, beaten, manhandled, and arrested as "The Police have to PROTECT themselves from ASSAULT!!" like the giant gang of armed stormtroopers are in dire threat from a largely peaceful protest movement.

I drew a crude cartoon of it, because this is what I picture.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 12:03 PM on November 16, 2011 [22 favorites]


or, what cmyk said, seconds prior.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 12:04 PM on November 16, 2011


Yeah, but your cartoon is awesome.
posted by cmyk at 12:05 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hey, the MOAR GUNS!1!! people are here.
posted by telstar at 12:06 PM on November 16, 2011


If the cop is doing the same to somebody near me, I am going to try to get them away, because an unarmed protester doesn't stand a chance, and at this point I have no reason to believe that it will not end with another body in a hospital.

You need to think shit out a little bit more. Let the girl get arrested and continue on your march. Don't give the cops an excuse to shut the whole thing down. Unless that's your ultimate objective...
posted by BobbyVan at 12:06 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


cmyk, spitbull, many others, you guys are burning through my favorite allowance!
posted by tr33hggr at 12:07 PM on November 16, 2011


That cartoon is awesome indeed, Uther. Deserves to go viral.
posted by spitbull at 12:08 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hey, the MOAR GUNS!1!! people are here.

I don't really think people should be bringing guns to a protest. My point was that Tea Partiers were treated much more gently by police compared to OWS protesters, and I believe that part of that was due to the threatening presence of firearms. But, of course, another part of that is what spitbull wrote up there.
posted by zerbinetta at 12:09 PM on November 16, 2011


Occupy Wall Street Favor Fading

The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country. ...


Useful historical perspective, courtesy of Charlie Pierce:

Generally, people tend to love goals in the abstract, but resent the inconvenience that accomplishing those goals may cause them in their daily lives, and the impact of the tactics necessary to accomplishing those goals will have on the placid surface of their quiet lives. In 1954, for example, a Gallup Poll showed that 55 percent of the people supported the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Five years later, after the stirrings of a larger movement, and the violent backlash against it, had become increasingly obvious, Gallup found that 59 percent of the people it polled thought the decision had "caused more trouble than it was worth." In May of 1961, Gallup found that 57 percent of its respondents thought that the sit-ins at lunch counters and various other forms of direct action against segregation "hurt the cause" of black people around the country. Fifty years later, of course, we build monuments, thump our chests, and tell folks like John Lewis how we were with them all along.

posted by dogrose at 12:09 PM on November 16, 2011 [19 favorites]


Good cartoon Uther, but shouldn't the cops be saying "Now we have to protect YOU, heh, heh."
posted by telstar at 12:10 PM on November 16, 2011


I haven't seen anything to suggest that the police intentionally targeted any of them, however.

The police report says:
Pepper spray was deployed only against subjects who were either refusing a lawful order to disperse or engaging in assaultive behavior toward officers.
You can claim that an 84-year-old women deserved to be pepper sprayed, but unless you are calling the police liars you cannot say that she was not intentionally targeted. The police identified valid targets, by their own account, and deployed pepper spray against them and only them.

You also continue to believe that there was a street battle, when the police report makes it clear that there was not.

Are you calling the police liars, BobbyVan? Why do you hate the police?
posted by running order squabble fest at 12:11 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


Let the girl get arrested and continue on your march.

I think it is better to leave the 99 and go after the one that is lost.
posted by Errant at 12:12 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


I beg your pardon, but over a dozen times groups of tea partier activists, many likely paid and planted and rehearsed, undertook to shout down members of congress in vicious ways (as well as fellow citizens trying to ask questions) in "town hall" format meetings across this country. In many cases they had to be forcibly removed (as is true of the hecklers who bedevil President Obama to this day), and seeking forcible removal is clearly an understood goal of the heckler going into the speech or the town hall. A complicated boundary exists there between the politician's entourage, other attendees, and law enforcement, when it shows up. But I don't recall hearing of any pepper spray being used.

I'd beg your pardon as well, and humbly suggest that citizen participation in the townhall process looks a lot more like "democracy" than anything OWS has done.
posted by BobbyVan at 12:13 PM on November 16, 2011


Then you haven't been paying attention to OWS.
posted by spitbull at 12:14 PM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


Or the townhall process
posted by one_bean at 12:15 PM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


The Tea Party had guns.

Not to mention the support of an entire cable network who dedicated vast amounts of time to covering anything even remotely interesting relating to them. If the police had started pepper spraying elderly Tea Party protesters, the Fox news cycle would have run that story non-stop for weeks.
posted by quin at 12:17 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


In addition, numerous recent acts of violent terrorism have been committed by figures linked in various ways to the Tea Party. Here's some info. Some more, a bit more humorously presented. Since, like OWS, there is no official "Tea Party" of which you can simply be a "member," the boundary between member/follower and marginal hanger-on is always disputable. I don't claim Mr. Molotov Cocktail as a "follower" of OWS on faith. He's just there. Protests attract crazies. And agents provocateur, by the way. Who talk shit about violence while getting paid by the police. Just saying.

We are constructing a Straw Tea Party here. It was not simply focused on electoral politics in its origins, nor is it now. It has not been particularly law abiding. It has spawned violent extremists, or at least tolerated and praised them. "It" is not even a definable thing, and neither is OWS.
posted by spitbull at 12:20 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


Isn't the whole point of civilly disobedient, non-violent protest to force the police to use heavy-handed tactics, thereby denting their moral authority?

Um... no.
posted by desjardins at 12:21 PM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


Let the girl get arrested and continue on your march.

Impossible, and I will tell you why.

One of the central tenets of Occupy is that everyone has a voice. Everyone is equally important. There are no ranks, there are no leaders, there are no least of us. Every single body on the ground is important, valuable, valued.

If people need help, they get it. Have you lost somebody? People will go search. Panic attack, need somewhere quiet and someone to sit with you? Got it. Need someone to walk you back to your car through a dark area? People will offer to go with you. Need a ride home, or to the hospital? Someone is going to make sure you get there. Hungry? We got food for ya.

The corollary to 'everyone is involved' is 'nobody gets left behind.' Roll that around in your head for a bit. It's the exact opposite of the "I got mine" mindset that Occupy protests.

They didn't try to grab that girl from the riot cops because they hate the cops. They did it because the girl's safety was as important to them as their own.
posted by cmyk at 12:25 PM on November 16, 2011 [36 favorites]


the police are tasked with maintaining public order

How'd that go, by the way.

'To serve and protect' sounds kind of funny now.
posted by shakespeherian at 12:26 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Also, I don't think it's helpful to call BobbyVan names. He is obviously sincerely committed to his perspective and is arguing it cogently, if (in my view) within a very narrow contextual framework. It is a common viewpoint out there -- maybe a majority viewpoint. It is the basis for the respect and authority the police rely upon to continue to do their job. I appreciate the chance to rehearse a challenge to its premises.
posted by spitbull at 12:27 PM on November 16, 2011 [11 favorites]


cmyk, keep this up and I'm going to develop an internet crush on you!
posted by tr33hggr at 12:27 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


I like how the concept of 'nobody gets left behind' is considered valid, valued, and admirable if you're a Marine or firefighter, but otherwise, it's *SOCIALISM* *GASP*
posted by stenseng at 12:28 PM on November 16, 2011 [8 favorites]


They did it because the girl's safety was as important to them as their own.

If you all really think that the police are out there seeking to harm helpless little girls, well, then I can almost sympathize with you -- if I didn't find such a concept so deranged and unhinged. If I truly thought that the police were so malicious, I'd be marching alongside you, and thinking of devious little ways to fight the system too, even if the battle was doomed from the start.
posted by BobbyVan at 12:28 PM on November 16, 2011


Hey, hey, hey.. Gooood-bye!
posted by telstar at 12:28 PM on November 16, 2011


If you all really think that the police are out there seeking to harm helpless little girls, well, then I can almost sympathize with you -- if I didn't find such a concept so deranged and unhinged. If I truly thought that the police were so malicious, I'd be marching alongside you, and thinking of devious little ways to fight the system too, even if the battle was doomed from the start.

Best just to tie yourself in knots convincing yourself there was a reason to pepper spray an 84 year old woman. It is the best of all possible worlds.
posted by one_bean at 12:30 PM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


She's a brave woman who inserted herself into a crowd in a confrontation against the police to support her political objectives. I don't pity her -- I have great respect for her. It's a shame that she got sprayed and I'm almost sure that the police officer didn't recognize her as an elderly person when he tried to disperse the unruly crowd (that she was probably part of) that was keeping him from making a lawful arrest.
posted by BobbyVan at 12:34 PM on November 16, 2011




Option 1: Show the citizens of your city that your are committed to peace and justice by forgiving the stupid antics of a young woman swinging a flag in your direction
Option 2: Pepper spray pregnant women and grandma

There are people in this world with malicious and violent tendencies. The police force exists. Is it so deranged and unhinged to believe that there are violent and malicious people on the police force?
posted by one_bean at 12:41 PM on November 16, 2011 [7 favorites]


Once again, Dane County Sheriff Mahoney:
As the incident continued, we started to utilize law enforcement from all over the state; there were well over 2000 police officers from around the state involved in keeping the peace. The number one direction that was provided by Chief Tubbs of the Capitol Police Department, Chief Wray of the Madison Police and myself was that we were going to ensure that it was a safe gathering, and that we were not going to be protecting marble; we were going to be protecting people's rights to assemble and their right to free speech, because we knew this was a highly charged gathering.

Really amazing what these other police forces decided to protect.
posted by dhartung at 12:42 PM on November 16, 2011 [8 favorites]


If you all really think that the police are out there seeking to harm helpless little girls, well, then I can almost sympathize with you -- if I didn't find such a concept so deranged and unhinged.

You mean like Officer Bologna, Or the cop that struck a woman for holding up a piece of paper?

It is deranged and unhinged. That's what we are all so upset about. This is not policing, this is not protecting people or upholding justice, this is about bullies beating up those that can't legally defend themselves and then closing ranks and denying that anything illegal or improper happened when the footage comes out.
posted by quin at 12:46 PM on November 16, 2011 [14 favorites]


keeping him from making a lawful arrest.

Nothing at all is keeping the police from making lawful arrests for outrageous fraud in the banking sector. What exactly is the holdup?
posted by telstar at 12:47 PM on November 16, 2011 [9 favorites]


I like how the concept of 'nobody gets left behind' is considered valid, valued, and admirable if you're a Marine or firefighter, but otherwise, it's *SOCIALISM* *GASP*

It's not socialism, but it is criminality. When a locksmith picks the lock and lets you into your apartment when you lose your keys it's valid, valued, and admirable. When a burglar does it, it's criminality.

The right of assembly is subject to reasonable time place and manner restrictions. You can't exercise it in the middle of a street without a permit.

When participants in an illegal assembly try to prevent an arrest, the police can use reasonable non-lethal force against them. Indeed, even if it was a legal assembly they could do this.
posted by Jahaza at 12:48 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Nothing at all is keeping the police from making lawful arrests for outrageous fraud in the banking sector. What exactly is the holdup?
posted by telstar


Money.
posted by symbioid at 12:48 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


That interview is great, especially these two bits:

At the end of the day, most people left under their own accord. But some people said they wanted to stay to make a point, they wanted to be carried out. And we successfully accomplished that as well. No law enforcement officers were injured, no protesters were injured, there was no damaged property. There were no reports of police brutality, no complaints, I really just feel it was a success on all aspects.

--

This occurred after the Capitol had been closed for cleaning and protesters were assured that they could reenter the Capitol on Monday morning. The unions had requested a court order that the Capitol be opened because there had been discussions that it be closed during certain hours. The court issued a temporary order that the Capitol be open pending a hearing. When the building remained closed, people started to get upset, gathering at the doors, pushing at the doors. Deputies started questioning "Why aren't we opening, what's our responsibility?" I was contacted. I went over to the Capitol. As the Dane County Sheriff, who knew that there was a circuit court order to open the Capitol, I made the statement that our deputies would not be palace guards, and that we would not be taking part in violating a court order. As a sworn officer, it's my duty to take every measure to uphold a court order. Our people were pulled from the doors and remained on the terrace. We still had a responsibility to protect everyone there, but we pulled back from the doors. And then at 1 o'clock the doors finally opened.


The contrast is pretty notable, I think.
posted by Errant at 12:49 PM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


I used to be a police officer. Got out of it. Didn't like what it was doing to my head.

When we were trained about force, it was emphasized that you don't escalate too quickly or you run out of maneuvering room. Try to stay only one step in force above the person you are dealing with. When you escalate too quickly, you nearly force a violent confrontation.

Now, I didn't have riot training and I didn't work in a big city. But I think the basic principles would still be valid. Don't push people in to a situation you don't want to handle, or can only handle at unacceptable levels of violence.
posted by QIbHom at 12:50 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


one_bean, you do raise a valid point. Cops are humans and are every bit as likely to be malicious and violent as people from other walks of life. The girl with the flag may have been waving it innocuously (the priest said it was "provocative", however). But once the cop decided to arrest her, the marchers should have let him do so. It's a concept as old as Thomas Hobbes: the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Even if you think she's being arrested unjustly.. it's wiser to document the arrest on video and complain later than to resist.

And again, it's unfortunate that pepper spray was used, but when you confront the police and interfere with them, you assume that risk. Even if the cop was wrong to make the initial arrest.

I'm glad that Bologna was brought up again. His actions were caught on video and he was disciplined (too lightly in my opinion). Fighting the police will harm OWS and it changes the debate from an economic one (where OWS has some valid reasons to be upset) to a law & order one (where the American public is much less sympathetic).
posted by BobbyVan at 12:51 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country.

If I've learned nothing in my half century in Amerika it's that I shouldn't believe everything that I read. The same people that run Wall street pretty much also run all mainstream media as well.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 12:56 PM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


Seriously, invoking Hobbes as justification for force? Did you bother to read Leviathan? Hobbesian compacts are antithetical to modern liberal government. Hobbes hated Cromwell and wanted to justify a dictatorship as preferable to civil war — would you also like to justify dictatorship?

Further, attempts such as yours to make morality flow from the law ignore the fact that there are both unjust laws and unjust implementations of neutral laws, and that the law exists to safeguard freedoms not to justify force. Otherwise, you open yourself up to so many historical counterexamples that the counterexamples have themselves become cliche.

But good on you for providing post hoc argumentation for turning dogs on Selma marchers, I guess.
posted by klangklangston at 12:59 PM on November 16, 2011 [16 favorites]


OWS strategy meeting happening now on LiveStream.
posted by tr33hggr at 1:02 PM on November 16, 2011


But once the cop decided to arrest her, the marchers should have let him do so. It's a concept as old as Thomas Hobbes: the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Even if you think she's being arrested unjustly.. it's wiser to document the arrest on video and complain later than to resist.

Okay, fine. The best action for the protestors at that time to not escalate the situation would be to let the girl get arrested. You ascribe the potential for choice to the protestors. But then you won't admit that the police had a choice, too. They could have let her go. Then nobody would have been pepper-sprayed. If this woman had stabbed or shot a cop, or was threatening to do so to another protestor, the police would have been in the right to try to do everything in their power to arrest her. The fact that there is some question about how violent her provocative flag swinging was suggests that the police should have been the responsible ones and let it go. They didn't. They escalated. They should be better than that, as other police in Wisconsin were.

You are going to say that if they let her get away with swinging her flag at them, then somebody else would do something more violent to see how much they could get away with without being arrested. You will say that the protestors need to be more peaceful so that they will be sympathetic to the rest of the country. How about the police? Why not try to convince the public that they're on our side? Why not act so that protestors are sympathetic to the police, so that nobody will defend a young anarchists swinging a flag provocatively? The police should be the leaders in our communities; they should be confident enough in themselves so that they can handle getting a flag swung in their face. As much as the dirty marching hippies should take a shower so that Joe Cornstalk can finally see that we're all broke, the police, when confronted with non-violence, should be preaching non-violence
posted by one_bean at 1:04 PM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


I would love to live in a world in which law and order function with the sort of justice and equity upon which your argument for the legitimacy of the way police in the United States deploy their monopoly on force. Hopefully you can see that many of us here (and we represent a significant number in various communities that have been especially targeted by law enforcement especially) simply don't have faith that the system you describe normally functions as you describe it. We disagree about the necessity of using force or violence to confront non-violent protesters, even if they are illegally occupying a right of way. You pick them up and carry them carefully away and you accomplish the same thing.

You know most forces call their cars off from high speed chases even when the driver they are chasing is a killer or a bank robber, right? The reason is that too many innocent civilians might get hurt, and have gotten hurt. They make a cost benefit analysis of the risks to the law-abiding public and the necessity of enforcing the law in that way in that moment, and they pull over and the bad guy zooms away. Despite what you see on TV, that is policy in most big city police departments today.

By that argument, a few thousand people blocking an intersection is insufficient reason for escalating to violent confrontation before you have negotiated, tried other non-violent means, and just plain waited the moment out and worked around it.

Pepper spray and batons and shields and sound cannons and rubber bullets are disproportionate use of force in almost all the cases where they have been used against OWS protesters, perhaps in every single instance. The more so because the "crime" (of trespassing or blocking the right of way, both of which are misdemeanors, right?) is committed incidentally to exercising a guaranteed constitutional right the police are sworn to protect. And one that is as fundamental to American democracy as the right to your own property or the right to get to work by the fastest route.
posted by spitbull at 1:06 PM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


It's a shame that she got sprayed and I'm almost sure that the police officer didn't recognize her as an elderly person when he tried to disperse the unruly crowd (that she was probably part of) that was keeping him from making a lawful arrest.

There really is no distinction between imagination and reportage, here, is there? Now we have telepathic insight into the mind of police officers, to go with the psychic spear at the end of the flagpole. I'm interested to see which X-Men's powers are going to turn up next:

I'm pretty sure that protestor turned his body into organic steel before the baton hit, so I don't imagine he could have been hurt.

Pregnant or not, she had the option to phase and let that pepper spray pass harmlessly through her intangible body, and she didn't take it.

The protestors had the power to teleport the old and infirm out of there. That they didn't take it I find morally repugnant.

The police need to use appropriate force, and it's a well-known fact that protestors are nigh-invulnerable when they're blastin'.
posted by running order squabble fest at 1:07 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


And again, it's unfortunate that pepper spray was used, but when you confront the police and interfere with them, you assume that risk.

Someone assuming a risk of action on another person's part does not obviate responsibility for that other person's action.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:09 PM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


So what's it going to take to get the SEC or the Attorney General to start enforcing and prosecuting laws that were broken? What's it going to take to get the laws changed to swing even slightly in the direction of social responsibility? Because if any of you "legal force"-defending bright eyes have an idea that's going to be more effective and hopefully less painful than "stand in the street and get pepper sprayed for the sake of a youtube video" then I think you should kind of make your voice heard to that effect. No, I'm serious: the thing at hand is this is how regimes are changed. Once the criminals are in charge of the courtroom (as they demonstrably are when we're talking about financial law) there's not a fucking thing you can do except start expending tears, sweat and blood in order to remove them. Unless.... I'm listening!
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:15 PM on November 16, 2011


Hobbes hated Cromwell and wanted to justify a dictatorship as preferable to civil war — would you also like to justify dictatorship?

Do you believe that the government does not/should not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? That's pretty much a foundational principle for liberalism, notwithstanding Hobbes' feelings about Oliver Cromwell.

Of course there are situations where the government loses legitimacy and can morally be opposed by the public through force. Hobbes would agree with that statement... But I don't think that a grandmother who ended up in the wrong place @ the wrong time = Hobbesian justification for revolution.

As much as I'd love to respond to everything here, I just don't have the time or the bandwidth...
posted by BobbyVan at 1:21 PM on November 16, 2011


If you all really think that the police are out there seeking to harm helpless little girls, well, then I can almost sympathize with you -- if I didn't find such a concept so deranged and unhinged. If I truly thought that the police were so malicious, I'd be marching alongside you, and thinking of devious little ways to fight the system too, even if the battle was doomed from the start.

Court: Seattle police used excessive force on pregnant woman
Another SPD excessive force case headed to trial
Justice Department investigates use of force by Seattle police
New video of Seattle police officer stomping on suspect
Seattle Police Officer Kicks Hispanic Man. Police Brutality? You decide.
Seattle Police Officer Charged With Assault, Perjury For South Dakota Shooting
Deputy is target of 22 internal investigations

With fine, upstanding members of the force like these, how dare we impugn the accounts of SPD?
posted by ryoshu at 1:21 PM on November 16, 2011 [13 favorites]


I admire her pluck.
posted by BobbyVan at 12:39 PM on November 16 [+] [!]



Oh, go pluck yourself.
posted by stenseng at 1:29 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


"Do you believe that the government does not/should not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? That's pretty much a foundational principle for liberalism, notwithstanding Hobbes' feelings about Oliver Cromwell."

No, it's not. The reason why Hobbes is an antecedent of liberalism is because of his view of people as essentially self-governing, and his incorporation of "interest" into the conceptual framework of government. Neither Locke nor Rousseau would grant a general statement of monopoly of legitimate force to the government (Locke more out of his reaction against Hobbes and articulation of natural rights; Rousseau because he's quite explicit in pointing out that the government can conflict with the true legitimizing force of the "general will").

Even further though, you're using circular logic: Arguing a normative that government should have a monopoly on legitimate force does not imply that force used by the government is thereby legitimate. It's even trivial to hold that normative view (governments should have a monopoly) while recognizing the obvious counterexamples (the War for Independence).

"Of course there are situations where the government loses legitimacy and can morally be opposed by the public through force. Hobbes would agree with that statement..."

No, he wouldn't. Seriously, read Leviathan before you spout off on Hobbes. Hobbes recognizes a natural right (or inclination, maybe) to both life and freedom, and considers it moral for citizens to fight back against the death penalty, but still holds that the totalizing compact of the sovereign gives the sovereign total power to enslave or kill his subjects. There is no right to revolution under Hobbes per se, and it's certainly not predicated on any theory of legitimacy, as the compact precedes and supersedes all government — it's not even something that the sovereign is really a part of, hence the difference in the language between "contract" and "compact."

The only real cart Hobbes can pull in a modern discussion is anti-anarchic (or statist), in that he recognizes the reasons why people organize themselves into states and the consequences of failed states and unformed states. He's interesting, fascinating even (especially his wild-ass theology), but Hobbes is not who you want running your liberal democracy.
posted by klangklangston at 1:37 PM on November 16, 2011 [13 favorites]


Do you believe that the government does not/should not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? That's pretty much a foundational principle for liberalism, notwithstanding Hobbes' feelings about Oliver Cromwell.

The government does not and never has had a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in this history of this nation. That's what the Second Amendment is all about. If we're going to argue Enlightenment political philosophy, our model of the republic is founded on a blend of Locke and Rousseau, the freedom of the individual constrained only reluctantly by the need for assembly within a republic, and it is specifically modeled as an antithesis to the necessary tyranny of the Hobbesian social contract.

You have the foundations of liberalism completely backwards. Hobbes promoted a subservience to the sovereign authority as a necessary evil to forestall the greater brutality of the state of nature. This is about as antiliberal as you can get. Locke is the guy you want for liberalism, and he asserts the right under law for every one (well, every man, but it's the 17th century) to defend their "life, health, liberty, or possessions". Sound familiar? It ought to, Jefferson cribbed it almost word for word. The Hobbesian contract is almost literally what this government was founded in opposition to.
posted by Errant at 1:49 PM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


Clearly I'm outgunned on Hobbes so I defer to you, Klangklangston. I shouldn't have cited him directly in support of my argument.

My essential point is that madness/anarchy follow when we admit other legitimate wielders of force into society outside the government. Fighting back against the police with force is almost always a losing proposition unless you're willing to take it all the way (as in the War for Independence which you cite).

Of course the police can use force wrongly (and illegitimately), but let's be honest when we talk about the girl with the flag. I find it hard to believe that she was in physical danger... most likely, her friends just didn't want to let her be arrested. Not sure which of my psychic powers I'm using there... just a hunch.

And on preview, wow, never thought I'd read such a stirring defense of the 2nd Amendment here.
posted by BobbyVan at 1:51 PM on November 16, 2011


The reason is that too many innocent civilians might get hurt, and have gotten hurt. They make a cost benefit analysis of the risks to the law-abiding public and the necessity of enforcing the law in that way in that moment, and they pull over and the bad guy zooms away. Despite what you see on TV, that is policy in most big city police departments today.

Yes, if the Occupy people suddenly marched into the middle of a shopping mall and were surrounded by shoppers, it would be wrong to pepper spray them.

But who are the innocent civilians? The ones who refused to disperse when ordered from an illegal assembly? The ones who tried to prevent someone from being arrested with physical force? The minister who acknowledges imposing himself between the police and the woman they were trying to arrest?
posted by Jahaza at 1:51 PM on November 16, 2011


But once the cop decided to arrest her, the marchers should have let him do so.

If a cop wants to arrest someone and make that intention clear, I do believe they can use language. Protesters are not telepathic, and do not assume that use of physical force against a fellow protester means "you are under arrest". There's a simpler explanation.
posted by parudox at 1:55 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Just saw CBS news report that OWS is going to deliberately disrupt traffic in the financial district with a large protest there tomorrow and plans to "occupy" the subway. This is self defeating. Annoyance, disruption and inconvenience will turn many New Yorkers who are ambivalent or indifferent to OWS against them, not to mention shift benefit of the doubt to the NYPD.
posted by knoyers at 2:06 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Another note about Wisconsin: I'm at work so I can't find the YouTube link, but there's a video of a kid being arrested in the capitol. His pants started to fall down, so the officers stopped and allowed him to pull them up. That is responsible police work.

Throughout my visits to Madison, I was very impressed with the professionalism of the police. They apologized for searching me when I went into the Capitol after metal detectors were installed. They smiled, joked and talked to us, probably because they knew they were next on Walker's public employees union hit list. Hell, the off duty cops and firefighters marched WITH us.

There were also people occupying the capitol square* (tents and everything) and none of them were teargassed or had their belongings destroyed. My point is that it's not necessary and recent examples prove this.

*Hipster cheeseheads: We were occupyin' before occupyin' was cool.
posted by desjardins at 2:06 PM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


They knew they were headed for a confrontation

That's the whole point. If I'm an average American upset that I don't have a job, or access to a good education or to healthcare, and choose to express myself in a demonstration, there's a good possibility that I'll get maced, beaten, jailed, and then charged with a crime.

Meanwhile, others have the money to buy government influence, and then pass laws to enrich themselves through tax cuts and deregulation, and then demand that the taxpayers bail them out with trillions of dollars when their bets go bad, and then demand that the middle and working class suffer while they continue to enjoy all of the money they "earned" by purchasing our government, and they don't see so much as a subpoena.

It's nothing short of aristocracy. The injustice is untenable, inexcusable, and violates everything the Constitution stands for. As citizens of a democracy, we bear the burden of fixing this injustice through meaningful action. Some people have the vision to go out there and bear that burden for you by illustrating the wanton cowardice and violence being perpetrated by every single police force across the United States. You should be thanking them, or at least wondering why you think it's acceptable to expect violence from the police during a non-violent demonstration.

I don't buy the garbage that shutting down an intersection for a few hours, or even a few days, is comparable to the wholesale destruction of our economy. There are people fretting over delayed ambulances, but ignoring the tens of thousands of people who die due to lack of access to medical care every year. Corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash, and they're still firing people and sending jobs overseas while they don't pay taxes. Wealthy individuals are paying the lowest effective tax rates in modern history while they block our desire to balance the budget with sane tax policy adjustments. They are literally destroying our nation with their greed, in a pattern that's near 30 years long, and you're concerned about inconvenience?
posted by deanklear at 2:15 PM on November 16, 2011 [25 favorites]


I find it hard to believe that she was in physical danger...

Why? I mean, the police shot a war veteran in the head. There have been multiple other police-inflicted injuries across the US since OWS began. This is well documented. What basis do you have for your belief?
posted by desjardins at 2:19 PM on November 16, 2011 [7 favorites]


You ain't wrong desjardins: Wisconsin Protests Provided Clues about Upcoming Occupy Movement.
posted by quin at 2:19 PM on November 16, 2011


Last night Karl Rove spoke on the topic at hand

Karl Rove Joins the Battle Against Violent Hippie Monster Elizabeth Warren
posted by homunculus at 2:21 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


But who are the innocent civilians? The ones who refused to disperse...?

Whoa. I need to go now.
posted by spitbull at 2:22 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hey, I'm all for police violently clearing out obstacles to peoples' freedom of movement, rie? So the Seattle PD should head out to I-5 in about an hour and haul all those people out of their cars, mace them, arrest them, and push their cars off the road with bulldozers because they're in the way. Same goes for MTA offices when the subways break down. That would be rad. And, ah, maybe I should join spitbull, in not being here. Beer?
posted by zomg at 2:33 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


Fighting back against the police with force is almost always a losing proposition unless you're willing to take it all the way (as in the War for Independence which you cite).

This is not an argument for a government monopoly on force but for the government claim on force to supersede any individual claim. This is, of course, federalism, and hey presto, let's all go to Philadelphia and argue about what goes into this new constitution of ours and whether we should have a Bill of Rights or not.

I'm joking, but seriously, the central tension of individual rights versus the power of the state is the basic question of American democracy going all the way back. There is, for me, a great irony in modern politics in that the left is considered to be the strong-central-government people and the right claims to represent the rights of the individual, but it's actually frequently the reverse, especially when force is invoked.

And on preview, wow, never thought I'd read such a stirring defense of the 2nd Amendment here.

I know, I'm surprised too, but I'm learning a lot about myself today.

There are people fretting over delayed ambulances, but ignoring the tens of thousands of people who die due to lack of access to medical care every year.

It is possible to "fret", as you so condescendingly refer to it, and also to work for the expansion of health care to those who need it most. It is, in fact, internally consistent to want health care for many and also to not want to harm individual people in the accomplishment of that action. It is possible to think that occupying the intersection is ill-judged decision to force a confrontation for the wrong reasons and also to be appalled by the unjustified violence of the police in reacting to it. It is possible to be outraged over the co-opting of the government by private interests and the rapacious greed of the financial sector and also to disagree with a particular method of protest, while concurring with the overall movement.

You would have been on the winning side of the vote to occupy the intersection, and I would not have been. Suggesting that disagreement with a manner of protest is tantamount to being complacent, unaware, and ignorant is incredibly histrionic. No one here has equated occupying an intersection to 30+ years of wanton pillaging, until you did. There is nothing about this movement that demands my unswerving and unthinking loyalty, which is precisely why it is such a powerful and progressive one. You are welcome to be inclined to excuse any action as long as it's not as bad as what the banks are doing. I can live with your derision for not being similarly inclined.
posted by Errant at 2:53 PM on November 16, 2011 [15 favorites]


And on preview, wow, never thought I'd read such a stirring defense of the 2nd Amendment here.

I would be curious to see if the SPD, OPD or NYPD would be so quick to turn to pepper spray and batons if the protesters were exercising their 2nd amendment rights. More a mental exercise than wanting to actually see it happen.
posted by ryoshu at 3:01 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


ryoshu - Occupy Phoenix had the right-wing racists/border folks there with gun facing the cops. Standing up for the people's right to speak. Link is to a youtube clip.

Have to suffer through the unbearable camera twits attempts to proselytize the grand news of Libertarian philosophy to a guy who most likely already is into it.

Either way - I posted that to my LJ a while ago, because I thought it deserved mention and pointing out that, maybe just maybe you might want to make such alliances, even if some of their stances are dangerous/not-acceptable to people like me.
posted by symbioid at 3:13 PM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


I am not capable of addressing BobbyVan directly without breaking the guidelines of the site; thank you to those that did. I took a break from the thread and tried to formulate something, but catching back up has me back to the same mental state. I just can't even comprehend what is going on in people's brains that need so badly to defend police violence. It's just so alien to me.

Since I was one of the people above saying it's a bad idea to block traffic, I want to be absolutely clear on this:

I think it's a bad idea and I think there are better tactics.

But, piled on top of everything else, the police action upset me so much that I had trouble sleeping last night, and reading BobbyVan's inhumanity this morning made it hard to face the world today.

So I hope no one thought I was in any way saying they brought it upon themselves or deserved it.

I'm not 100% pacifist, but I'm beyond disgusted with our society's acceptance of violence right now.

How can we stop this insane notion that simply disobeying police is grounds for immediate violence? How can we keep allowing the police to constantly strike first? When do they go back to protecting?
posted by flaterik at 3:48 PM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


Flaterik, if reading my comments make it difficult for you to face the world, I suggest that it might be time for you to step away from the thread again.

Let's get a grip. It's pepper spray were talking about here. I was pretty careful not to say that the police officers who used pepper spray were absolutely in the right. I don't know because I haven't seen what led up to each use (though I've heard differing accounts). What I'm trying to do here is offer some balance to the hysterical cries that atrocities occurred in Seattle. I'm suggesting that perhaps the use of force was justified, and that the protesters should have been aware that they faced consequences if they disobeyed lawful orders or obstructed the police when they attempted to arrest certain specific individuals.

If the cops overstepped their bounds (as has certainly happened in the past), they should be disciplined and prosecuted (if appropriate).
posted by BobbyVan at 4:06 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


But who are the innocent civilians? The ones who refused to disperse

All they had to do was pick up the damn can.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 4:13 PM on November 16, 2011 [7 favorites]


I don't know because I haven't seen what led up to each use (though I've heard differing accounts).

And written some great fanfic, travelling from the fiercely empirical:

Unless someone has a video of the incident in question, this is all baseless speculation.

to the super dramatic

So it seems that this anarchist flag was thrust like a spear at the police officer

to the actually telepathic

I'm almost sure that the police officer didn't recognize her as an elderly person when he tried to disperse the unruly crowd (that she was probably part of) that was keeping him from making a lawful arrest.

I'm kind of hoping for a move into some slash fiction, at this point. Hobbes/Policeman?
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:13 PM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


You have been going out of your way to come up with hypotheticals to defend the police, even when presented with information quite to the contrary.

I think the justification for force should be an awful lot higher than "but she waved a pole that had a flag on it at me!". That you don't see that puts you very far into a thought process I can only understand at the most clinical of levels.

I've spent a lot of my life saying "yeah, well, you shouldn't provoke the police, even though it's unjustified that's just what we should expect they do".

I'm sick of that. We should no longer be afraid of our "protectors" and justify their overreaction with a shrug.
posted by flaterik at 4:14 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


I just find the ease with which many people justify the use of force sickening and inhuman.

Oh no! They stopped short of obsequience! Time for violence!

For fuck's sake.
posted by flaterik at 4:18 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


Flaterik, I share your pain. The best antidote is to simply not read what BobbyVan posts. Just skip over it. Your life will be better for it. I wish I had started doing so earlier, but at first, I thought maybe he was here to, you know, actually engage in a conversation or a debate. It's become clear to me, though, that he's really just looking to antagonize liberals. You don't have to play that game.

I mean, you know he doesn't really believe what he's posting; no reasonable person could say those things and mean them. He doesn't really think the aforementioned flag was at all spearlike. I don't think he's a troll, per se, as he does seem to have some ideological basis for his position (unlike, say, anigbrowl, someone else whose posts I studiously ignore), but he's clearly looking to stir up trouble. He's not here to change anyone's mind, and he's obviously not here to have his mind changed. He's here to fight, and you can just walk away from that.

This thread changed my mind about the movement. I didn't care much either way until yesterday, when I saw the police openly defying the court order. Even though OWS lost the appeal, the actions of the police, so blatantly ignoring the TRO, made me decide to do something. My wife and I took a carload of ice, food, and medical supplies to the Occupy DC camp last night. I'll be taking blankets and shoes tonight.
posted by MrMoonPie at 4:25 PM on November 16, 2011 [8 favorites]


Errant, I can only respond with a portion of my favorite letter from MLK. I know everyone has probably read it, but I'd recommend reading it again.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham...

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
We protested the Iraq War, and our government still sunk trillions of our dollars into a lie. We voted for change; we didn't get it. The left-ish side of the spectrum has proposed cuts to social programs in exchange for tax hikes and the end of corporate loopholes to help with the budget, and they are still saying no.

The only option left is to present to them this choice: crisis or negotiation.
posted by deanklear at 4:27 PM on November 16, 2011 [27 favorites]


I mean, you know he doesn't really believe what he's posting; no reasonable person could say those things and mean them. He doesn't really think the aforementioned flag was at all spearlike.

Well at least there are psychic X-Men powers on both sides of the debate!
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:31 PM on November 16, 2011


Judging from the different accounts a flag pole was either "thrust" or "swung" at an officer in a "provocative" manner by a black-clad self-branded anarchist. Seeking to detain such a protester is not unreasonable. Protesters seeking to obstruct the detention of a protester by a police officer is illegal, and doing so as part of a mob may get you pepper sprayed. Don't be surprised if it does. Also don't be surprised that if you try to "occupy" public spaces that the rest of the 99% uses to conduct our legitimate business, the police will ask you to move, and if you refuse, you may be pepper sprayed.

Notice that very little of this thread, especially lately, has been concerned with the economic agenda of OWS.

With that said, I think I'll go ahead and check out of here. I've made my points several times, and emotions are quite hot on this issue. I think I've kept my cool, but it's obvious that I'm just making folks angry, so I'll call it a night.
posted by BobbyVan at 4:32 PM on November 16, 2011


Thanks, MrMoonPie.

For years it's seemed like the best path of action politically has been public support of positions and giving money to specific causes, because protests were so roundly ignored. So that's what I've done.

These are the first in a while that seem to have possibility of going anywhere.

My father, a white southerner, marched for civil rights.

It's becoming clear that I should be doing a little more myself.
posted by flaterik at 4:35 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


I don't have to be surprised by something to be upset about it, and the fact that I'm not surprised is part of what I'm upset about.
posted by flaterik at 4:38 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Thank god protesting and expressing your first amendment right as "protected" in the constitution (by who is it protected exactly? Not those who "serve and protect") isn't a "legitimate business" unlike all those other 99% of the public.
posted by symbioid at 4:39 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Notice that very little of this thread, especially lately, has been concerned with the economic agenda of OWS.

Mission accomplished, then.
posted by dhartung at 4:40 PM on November 16, 2011 [8 favorites]


flaterik: "I don't have to be surprised by something to be upset about it, and the fact that I'm not surprised is part of what I'm upset about."

Upvote a million times. It's the cynicism that says "Y U MAD BRO?" "That's how it goes. Don't be surprised." And that leads to the fucking apathy that's run this country for too damn long.
posted by symbioid at 4:41 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


I'm really not sure how you read my comment as an argument against direct action or demonstration, but ok. Let's just say I agree for the most part and leave it there.
posted by Errant at 4:46 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


If you all really think that the police are out there seeking to harm helpless little girls, well, then I can almost sympathize with you

Except for the times when they assault a 12-year-old girl, then charge her with a crime for fighting back.

Milburn had gone outside her home in the 2000 block of 24th Street on Aug. 22, 2006, to flip a circuit breaker when she was confronted by the three police officers. They were responding to a call that three white prostitutes were soliciting in the neighborhood. Milburn is black.

The girl’s parents, Wilfred and Emily Milburn, heard her cries for help and came outside to see the hysterical girl hanging onto a tree, according to testimony. The defense alleged that the officers struck the girl on the head and face, causing injuries that resulted in an $8,000 medical bill.

posted by emjaybee at 4:52 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


So - where does Occupy get ahold of an LRAD for their own selves? Cuz, I think, ya know -- that would be kinda cool. Just saying - a way to control those violent angry police officers without having to hit them with sticks and shit.
posted by symbioid at 5:44 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


There are definitely police "out there seeking to harm helpless little girls", BobbyVan. Cops and soldiers are basically proto-thugs who've channeled their thuggish urges in a socially acceptable way. Any who indulge their nature must be imprisoned with the real thugs, making way for more young males seeking that style of adrenaline rush.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:53 PM on November 16, 2011


So - where does Occupy get ahold of an LRAD for their own selves?

The People's LRAD. I'm thinking thousands of whistles.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:01 PM on November 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


charlie don't surf: "So - where does Occupy get ahold of an LRAD for their own selves?

The People's LRAD. I'm thinking thousands of whistles.
"

Vuvuzelas?
posted by symbioid at 6:08 PM on November 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


Oh, and lookie this here little chart showing number of criminal prosecutions against wall street going back to Bush I...

Want a nice concise way to point out one reason 99% movement is pissed, I think that's an easy to grok summation of one part of the hugely multi-variate behemoth of rage driving the movement.
posted by symbioid at 6:10 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm gonna sneak back in here just to post this stirring comment from a retired Philadelphia Police *Captain* who has joined the OWS protest, on the subject of police conduct toward OWS. (SLYT)

He's in (retired, I believe) uniform. He's a real cop's cop, to judge from his bearing. Tell him shit ain't fucked up.

He's a pretty awesome protester too.
posted by spitbull at 6:21 PM on November 16, 2011 [11 favorites]


where does Occupy get ahold of an LRAD for their own selves?

I'm curious. My general impression of the Occupy movement is that demographically, it doesn't much overlap with Second Amendment supporters, NRA members, etc.—"gun owners," broadly. Maybe that isn't correct, or maybe it isn't true in this thread. But it's striking to hear suggested that protestors who stormed and occupied public spaces, spaces that in most cities they at least initially (and proudly) admitted they had no legal right to occupy, should be able to arm themselves specifically to fend-off police enforcing the law to evict them...if a concurrently held belief is that citizens living quietly in their homes should not have the right to arm themselves to defend against an intruder come to kill them.

Obviously there are differences between an LRAD and a pistol, and maybe those differences are dispositive for some people. I'm not criticizing if these are your beliefs; you're entitled to them, and there's nothing inherently wrong with holding contrasting beliefs. But it's a bit striking, to me at least.
posted by red clover at 6:40 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


I'm not criticizing if these are your beliefs; you're entitled to them, and there's nothing inherently wrong with holding contrasting beliefs.

I think "disingenuous" is an appropriate word here.
posted by stagewhisper at 7:13 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]




I guess some people are just tools. Tools of the State. With citizens like that, who needs enemies?
posted by five fresh fish at 7:31 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


I agree with all of Errant's comment and I think it's astoundingly well written. Thanks Errant. I've been wanting to say things like this in real life and online but I feel like there's a real "with us or against us" attitude on this topic sometimes.
posted by sweetkid at 7:38 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm expecting the black block to cut Goldman Sacks' fiber during some particularly critical moment, clearly they'll need some insider information for that critical moment, but that's surely available.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:41 PM on November 16, 2011


For my part, red clover, I would like for advocates of unregulated gun control to admit a similar lack of restriction on freedom of assembly, or else accept the same limits on gun ownership that they would like to impose upon occupiers.
posted by Errant at 8:03 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Let's get a grip. It's pepper spray were talking about here.

Seriously. So-called "non-lethal" police weapons have never seriously injured anyone. Besides, it's their fault anyway if something happens to them.
posted by inigo2 at 8:05 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


"The Los Angeles Times has reported at least 61 deaths associated with police use of pepper spray since 1990 in the USA." (cited to a 1995 print article)

As a rule, any less lethal weapon's death toll will grow rapidly once your police thugs start attacking wider segments of the population.

We should print bag numbers on all police clothing, attach tamper resistant cameras to all police helmets, archive their data with internal affairs and the public defender's office, and prosecute all police who engage in criminal violence as if they were drug dealers rounded up off the street.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:25 PM on November 16, 2011 [7 favorites]


We should print bag numbers on all police clothing, attach tamper resistant cameras to all police helmets, archive their data with internal affairs and the public defender's office, and prosecute all police who engage in criminal violence as if they were drug dealers rounded up off the street.

I thought pony requests went in MetaTalk.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 8:28 PM on November 16, 2011 [9 favorites]


Shit; sorry. I sort of meant to add "hamburger" to be clear that I was being sarcastic, but I decided that should be clear enough on its own. But now I just reread some of the stuff above, and obviously it isn't. Mea culpa.
posted by inigo2 at 8:30 PM on November 16, 2011


red clover: "where does Occupy get ahold of an LRAD for their own selves?

I'm curious. My general impression of the Occupy movement is that demographically, it doesn't much overlap with Second Amendment supporters, NRA members, etc.—"gun owners," broadly.
"

Personally I'm not a "gun-nut" and I think the 2nd amendment folks are a bit tiresome (the NRA is just a Republican front group, IMO). I think you can be a liberal and for guns, and certainly if you're a radical you can be for it. A little known fact is that it was St. Reagan who as a governor was pushing for more gun control... But that was because those pesky Black Panthers started having guns and wasn't leaving it up to just the good honest white god-fearing americans.

I'm a liberarian-socialist (i.e. sympathetic to anarchist concepts), so yeah... I don't necessarily have a problem w/guns.

I did post upthread a link to a video of a small "Border Patriot" type group who was at the Phoenix Occupy to defend them from the cops (they pointed out that they were there to defend 1st amendment rights and that they had their backs turned to the protestors, because they knew they weren't the threat). That's why I keep saying: we need this to really be a broad based movement, and the image of "hippies and liberals out there protesting again" is again, part of the problem. The original non-coopted Tea Party agrees w/Occupy (or at least some of the initial messaging of being against corporate welfare and bank bailouts -- see Lawrence Lessig talking about this stuff -- he proposes we start talking about "crony capitalism" which both free marketers and socialists hate.

Whether actually obtaining an LRAD is *smart* is another question. I used to be a fan of black bloc when I was in my 20s, then I grew up. In a case like this what is the right to self-defense? Police brutality is endemic in our culture, and the mindset that in general happens a lot is a problem that needs to be addressed. The Madison Police force (as mentioned upthread) and that other Police Chief from Philly are examples of a way to gain trust in the police back.

Speaking of trust: Here's an image showing that Congress is currently polling at 2% less than Communism (though banks are still higher than either :\)
posted by symbioid at 8:32 PM on November 16, 2011 [4 favorites]


John Robb, on his Global Guerrillas blog linked this video of a "robokopter" taking aerial footage of riots in Warsaw between Fascists and Anarchists this past weekend during the Polish Independence day.

He posits that the future of this thing is the State and Plutocrats releasing drones above the crowd and doing all the dirty work of pepper-spraying, and easily hunting everyone down who breaks away.

What if hackspaces started building these things (I know I've seen different projects like this copters on youtube before - but I don't know what it takes to make one, nor how long they can stay afloat, etc...) What if they gave protesters a birds eye view of the situation that I'm sure most police departments have.
posted by symbioid at 9:05 PM on November 16, 2011


What if hackspaces started building these things (I know I've seen different projects like this copters on youtube before - but I don't know what it takes to make one, nor how long they can stay afloat, etc...) What if they gave protesters a birds eye view of the situation that I'm sure most police departments have.

Expensive. Also probably highly illegal to the point that these expensive contraptions would be shot out of the air within minutes. My money is on the governments using them to terrorize before activists use them to organize.
posted by Defenestrator at 9:33 PM on November 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Oh, this is gorgeous. Karl Rove gets mic checked by Occupy Baltimore. He really can't handle it.

"If you respect free speech, siddown and shaddup!" The mind boggles.
posted by cmyk at 9:39 PM on November 16, 2011 [11 favorites]


One of the things that I was talking about with some of my friends at work is how Black Bloc is a terrible tactic, violence wise. It just sews chaos, invites crackdowns and pisses people off. Cranking off with it is pretty undisciplined. And discipline is more impressive than random force. Teaching Occupiers to march in formation will deter more violence; throwing rocks from the crowd only invites it.
posted by klangklangston at 10:15 PM on November 16, 2011 [6 favorites]


Black Bloc participants always reminds me of, "rebel without a clue."
posted by ryoshu at 10:19 PM on November 16, 2011








Oh, this is gorgeous. Karl Rove gets mic checked by Occupy Baltimore yt . He really can't handle it.

"If you respect free speech, siddown and shaddup!" The mind boggles.


I know nothing about how to do this sort of thing, but that video is crying out for a lightly-autotuned Youtube remix. The call and response of "We are the 99%!" "No, you're not!" "WE. ARE. THE. 99%!" is just perfect, aurally and symbolically.
posted by kagredon at 10:55 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez Describes His Violent, Unprovoked Arrest at Occupy Wall Street

That just proves that elected officials should not attempt to observe the police.

Pick up that can.
posted by ryoshu at 10:58 PM on November 16, 2011 [2 favorites]


I know nothing about how to do this sort of thing, but that video is crying out for a lightly-autotuned Youtube remix.

Oh my god, that would be brilliant. If anyone can do this, you will get all my favorites and an activist spousing. (It's like a normal spousing except there are pizza and signs and MIC CHECK!)
posted by cmyk at 12:30 AM on November 17, 2011


The thing I can't figure out is how the black bloc doesn't realize that their tactics are precisely the strategies used by the FBI during COINTELPRO to discredit leftist movements. We've been here before, we should learn from our history instead of doing the institution's work for it.
posted by Errant at 1:01 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


klangklangston: is how Black Bloc is a terrible tactic

Doubly so as an anarchist strategy, as an ongoing program of violence will tend to condense hierarchies and leaders into being. Both because some people are better at the commissioning of violence, but mostly because most people feel much about engaging in it if they can offset the cause to something other (order, the cause) than personal choice.

It's perhaps telling that one of the few anarchist movements named after a person is Makhnovism, a military part of the anarchist involvement in the Russian revolution.

Also when you have undercover cops trying to do the same sort of things, that's a bit of a clue right there that your actions are benefiting the wrong side.
posted by titus-g at 1:08 AM on November 17, 2011 [7 favorites]


I should really have clicked that 'one new comment' message before posting, huh? :D
posted by titus-g at 1:09 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Leading social ethicist Gary Dorrien has written an article about OWS for The Christian Century, which is firewalled, but has a free Q&A accompanying it. Takeaways:

My chief impression is the one that I highlight in the article: I'm struck by the ideological, economic, racial and ethnic diversity of the protesters.... a great many people from nearly all walks of life are fed up with the system and with typical liberal attempts to reform it.

The 1960s generation, I thought, made important breakthroughs on racial justice and building an antimilitarist movement, and I thought the work of our generation was to fulfill the social revolutions of the 1960s. That didn't happen.... But the Occupy movement will not have to live down what is usually said about the social movements of the '60s--that they set off a backlash that drove American politics to the right....

Today virtually all Republican[s want privatization, tax cuts, and exculpation for the financial industry]. So it's hard to imagine that the Occupy movement could set off anything more reactionary than the situation we already have....

Meanwhile, at least half of the Occupying protesters are deeply alienated from the Democratic Party.... because Obama and the Democrats are functionaries of a prevailing order that does not work for most people.

The greatest strength of the Occupy movement is its rebellious spirit. It is angry, and it is planning to stay. You have to be awfully stubborn and rebellious to persist in opposing Wall Street's dominance of the economy. And it is inspiring many people, especially young people, to believe that democracy is stronger than the economic oligarchy, at least potentially.

[W]hat worries me most is that it would not take much of a spark to set off a violent crackdown by the police. We know this because numerous crackdowns have occurred already, despite the fact that this is a disciplined and peaceable occupying group--one that prohibits alcohol and drugs in the square and one in which all manner of spiritual practices are practiced daily.

posted by dhartung at 1:10 AM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


No OWS biggest problem isn't violent crackdowns, its the fact that it has basically stopped growing. This gives politicians less of a reason to pay attention and gives them less of a reason to keep the police from violently cracking down. (which is clearly that groups immediate inclination)

So the question to ask yourself why has it stopped growing.

And if your answer is because most of American are "Petainist collaborators" or "Quislings" or "Sheeple" take a step back and rethink it.
posted by JPD at 4:43 AM on November 17, 2011


Great feed of the march: http://www.ustream.tv/theother99

The crowd is unstoppable.
posted by Skygazer at 4:51 AM on November 17, 2011


The crowd is unstoppable.

They seem pretty stopped to me.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:13 AM on November 17, 2011


Oh, they're sort of on the move again. Oh, no, wait, they're stopped again.

I'm not seeing the point of this. I mean, yes, I understand the ideological justification behind it, but I don't see what marching is going to do. Part of what made OWS work was because it wasn't just a march. At some point, lots of people are going to get arrested from this march, and then that will be that.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:17 AM on November 17, 2011


No. That will not be that. Bloomberg, and Wall Street need to hear and see that what happened on Tuesday night: The suppression of the press. The destruction of property, the tyrannical justifications of King Bloomberg and his use of a toady judge and the suppression of First Amendment Rights was not okay.
posted by Skygazer at 5:45 AM on November 17, 2011




Bloomberg et al. will not suffer grave repercussions from today's events. This will not make them more sympathetic to OWS or OWS-like activities in the future. If anything, it will just turn more independent/moderate voter-types against OWS.

I mean, why am I seeing crap like this on occupywallstreet.org:

8:53 am: protestors taking police barricades, barricading Police vehicle

How is this going to help, in the long term? Or even the short term? They'll call in more cops, it'll become a bigger hullaballoo, and eventually a bunch of people will be arrested. It gives the movement a bad name.

...

N17 was pitched before OWS was raided anyhow.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:01 AM on November 17, 2011


So, cops now without visible identification or badge numbers? Oh, my. It must be terribly frightening for those poor little piggies to face those unarmed protesters!
posted by Goofyy at 6:09 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Bloomberg is moving here towards making himself the face of Wall Street and the "1%." Authoritarian, arrogant, scheming, manipulative, and willing to dissolve anyone's rights for his own ends.

He will leave office seriously dinged by this, but more importantly he's a good person to bring protestors together.

As for the moderates and Independents, you don't think a big chunk of those people don't have a bad taste over how broken Wall Street is?
posted by Skygazer at 6:24 AM on November 17, 2011


its the fact that it has basically stopped growing.

Are you not watching the news feed from NYC? Stopped growing my ass. There are thousands of people on the streets of lower Manhattan and more streaming in by the minute.
posted by spitbull at 6:25 AM on November 17, 2011


I am just so amused by the concern trolling... oh, dear, this mass action with all its risks of chaos and damage is going to turn off those all important low-information moderate independent voters, ohnoes! You may be confusing this with a movement targeting electoral politics or seeking to win a popularity contest. For every independent "voter" who is turned off, dozens of totally apathetic, disaffected, alienated young people seem to be drawn into political action with every turn of the ratchet. The ability to cause a melee, to actually *shut down wall street,* which is currently the state of affairs downtown, is inspiring to people who feel there is nothing they can do, no way to register their anger or alienation.

I'm tired of worrying about some middle of the road guy who gets all his news from CNN and USA Today in Columbus, Ohio.

OWS is full of people who have given up on electoral politics, which have become totally corrupted by big money and media circusry. There are millions of Americans who feel that way who don't even bother to vote.
posted by spitbull at 6:31 AM on November 17, 2011 [16 favorites]


Stopped growing my ass

Its stagnant. The truth hurts, but there are no more people out there then there where after the Union Square incidents. If it weren't stagnant Bloomberg wouldn't screw with it.

his use of a toady judge

Am I misremembering of wasn't that the same judge who ruled against Bloomberg on the Critical Mass rides? Just because someone rules against you doesn't make them a toady.

Hell someone upthread was even cracking jokes about it once the draw was announced.
posted by JPD at 6:31 AM on November 17, 2011


Its stagnant. The truth hurts,

Says you. You have no proof it's stopped growing. The TV cameras tell a different story. Get back to me at the end of the day. I'm off to Wall St.
posted by spitbull at 6:33 AM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


Nevada Grand Jury Indicts Two in Alleged Robo-Signing Scheme

606 counts. Now there's another 99,394 incidents of perjury to go...
posted by ryoshu at 6:33 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Be safe and strong spitbull.
posted by tr33hggr at 6:35 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


The ability to cause a melee, to actually *shut down wall street,* which is currently the state of affairs downtown,

Yes, it's pretty impressive that they managed to stop the start of trading at the NYSE... oh wait.
posted by Jahaza at 6:39 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Sitting here in Columbus, Ohio paying attention to the rest of the world. Using the middle of the country as a punching bag certainly won't help your cause.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:40 AM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


There seems to be confusion over whether the exchange is operating. On Big Charts, the Dow shows a change. However, when I checked the detail on a stock, I find NA as an opening price.
posted by Goofyy at 6:40 AM on November 17, 2011


However, when I checked the detail on a stock, I find NA as an opening price.

Are you looking at delayed prices? Since the exchange only opened at 9:30, prices on a 15 minute delay wouldn't show up yet.
posted by Jahaza at 6:43 AM on November 17, 2011


Yea, I was just realizing that. I used to have live prices, and forgot that problem.
posted by Goofyy at 6:44 AM on November 17, 2011


Bloomberg is moving here towards making himself the face of Wall Street and the "1%." Authoritarian, arrogant, scheming, manipulative, and willing to dissolve anyone's rights for his own ends.

He will leave office seriously dinged by this, but more importantly he's a good person to bring protestors together.


Okay, but that doesn't explain how today's events are going to help anything with regard to him. If anything, to many, they're going to lend more legitimacy to his tactics.

Also, the protestors had already been brought together before Bloomberg kicked people out of ZP. What's more, before, when they were occupying, they were doing something interesting and productive.

Now they're still together, sure, but they're doing something silly and ineffectual. Trading is going on now.

As for the moderates and Independents, you don't think a big chunk of those people don't have a bad taste over how broken Wall Street is?

There's a big, big, big difference between dislike for the idea of "Wall Street" and support for OWS. OWS may be attracting some extra disenchanted young people to the street, but it's been losing support in nationwide polls.

For every independent "voter" who is turned off, dozens of totally apathetic, disaffected, alienated young people seem to be drawn into political action with every turn of the ratchet.

People in general, especially voters, are getting turned off at a greater rate than young people, especially voters, are becoming productively engaged. Not a good result. I'm getting a big 1968 vibe.

I'm tired of worrying about some middle of the road guy who gets all his news from CNN and USA Today in Columbus, Ohio.

So why should he care about you?
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:47 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


From Livestream: "In Capitalist America, Bank robs YOU!"

That probably works better than any such saying I've ever heard.
posted by Goofyy at 6:51 AM on November 17, 2011 [19 favorites]


No offense intended to Ohio. I've spent lots of time in Columbus. Just picked it as a "swing state" where supposed "independent voters" get to decide which corporatist party will win the "elections" this time.

Apologies. Not insulting the Midwest, just low information voters.

Now out the door.
posted by spitbull at 6:55 AM on November 17, 2011


I'm getting a big 1968 vibe.

Stop buying into the Right Wing narrative. This is not Chicago during the DNC in 1968, by a LONG shot.

This is a sea change and anyone who thinks this country is going back to the old ways is sadly mistaken. And if they aren't then, I don't even want to thin about the true despair that that's going to engender. Because, if this country doesn't seriously move itself forward and evolve, it is so incredibly fucked. And you think this is anything, wait until that despair and frustration mounts again...
posted by Skygazer at 6:56 AM on November 17, 2011


I'm getting a big 1968 vibe.

I'm getting a 1930 vibe.
posted by syzygy at 6:57 AM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


For those of you who think nothing is going to happen and OWS is a waste of time that doesn't speak to voters... what do you think will happen in the coming years? The economy is not getting any/much better. Despite "Obamacare," our health care system is still pretty fucked. And most importantly, politicians are still bought by corporations so it doesn't much matter who you vote for. How is any of this going to change? If the system is broken, how do you work within it to change it?
posted by desjardins at 7:01 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


all you need to know
posted by The Whelk at 7:03 AM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


So, cops now without visible identification or badge numbers? Oh, my. It must be terribly frightening for those poor little piggies to face those unar
med protesters!
posted by Goofyy at 6:09 AM on November 17


Referring to the police as pigs is just disgusting. If you get robbed, will you call 911 and say, "I need a couple of piggies here right away"? Do you think that you're a black panther or something?

Bloomberg is moving here towards making himself the face of Wall Street and the "1%." Authoritarian, arrogant, scheming, manipulative, and willing to dissolve anyone's rights for his own ends.

He will leave office seriously dinged by this, but more importantly he's a good person to bring protestors together.

As for the moderates and Independents, you don't think a big chunk of those people don't have a bad taste over how broken Wall Street is?
posted by Skygazer at 6:24 AM on November 17


Actually more like OWS is sabotaging its own popular appeal into irrelevance right now by becoming a movement about camping and disrespecting authority in spite of the fact that Wall Street couldn't be more unsympathetic to most Americans.
posted by knoyers at 7:04 AM on November 17, 2011


The Whelk is back!
posted by tr33hggr at 7:05 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Actually more like OWS is sabotaging its own popular appeal into irrelevance right now by becoming a movement about camping and disrespecting authority in spite of the fact that Wall Street couldn't be more unsympathetic to most Americans.

OWS isn't going anywhere - inequality has been on the increase for 30 years. It's only a matter of time before 99% of the population is behind the 99% movement.

There's really no other choice, no matter how you slice it.
posted by syzygy at 7:06 AM on November 17, 2011


Referring to the police as pigs is just disgusting.

Really. Why insult a fine animal like that?
posted by tr33hggr at 7:06 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Eh, not to harp on the Ohio thing, but a swing state with a hardline republican governor just voted to repeal an aggressively anti-union bill supported by the republican governor and republican legislature. Even those low-information supposed independent voters vote against party lines and in hte interest of PEOPLE. But Ohio has been literally swamped with reminders to vote against SB5 and the consequences of not doing so. I think that OWS is doing a great job swamping the people who are paying attention. How do we swamp the people who aren't?
posted by ChuraChura at 7:09 AM on November 17, 2011


I feel a "not all cops are bad" derail coming on.
posted by desjardins at 7:09 AM on November 17, 2011


Referring to the police as pigs is just disgusting.

I prefer the Japanese derogatory slang: "inu". Means "dogs".
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:14 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


The calling of police "pigs" has a history, and is particularly appropriate in this context. If you don't approve, go speak to someone who cares.
posted by Goofyy at 7:15 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


And defending collaborators seems considerably more offensive than calling the collaborators "pigs".
posted by Goofyy at 7:17 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Letter to Mayor BLoomberg
posted by The Whelk at 7:17 AM on November 17, 2011


I'm getting a 1930 vibe.

I hope you're right, but we'll have to wait and see.

Back in the 1930s, you had not only the Progressives and the socialists massing at the gates, but also right-wing populists who were severely anti-corporate and for the "little guy," as they defined it, often with great vigor and racism. Nowadays, however, right-wing populism is of the Tea Party variety - laissez-faire fan fiction, worship of a Reagan Era that never really existed. That's a crucial difference. Even more moderate right-wingers are still very fond of that fictive Reagan Era, with its attendant focus on deregulation, American exceptionalism, tax cuts, and a tear-down of the Great Society.

(Of course, even the real Reagan Era saw several tax raises, as well as revenue-neutral laws meant to put the tax burden more on corporations than on individuals, as well as an openly-stated, openly-held protection of New Deal reforms, as contrasted with those of the Great Society, to say nothing of massive government spending and bailouts, but people worship the fictive era, not the real era.)

How is any of this going to change? If the system is broken, how do you work within it to change it?

OWS as originally conceived had been doing a pretty great job of getting the 99% meme out there and of pitching several discrete, actionable reform ideas to the greater stage. I saw lots of happy tourists and visitors stopping by OWS to take snaps and express their support. OWS as originally conceived did a good job of figuring out that creating a fixed, peaceful scene was a good way to create a forum for yourself.

What OWS got right was the creation of that forum and that snappy meme. It was a great networking opportunity for activists old and new, and for the dissemination of relevant, punchy facts and statistics.

What OWS is getting wrong is a belief that people sympathized with OWS because they love OWS - the same absurdity as the famous Mamet quote, "Of course everybody needs money. That's why they call it money!" People sympathized with OWS because OWS was voicing real concerns. People are not going to love you more just because you are doing more things and louder things, even if your points of view have not changed. More marching and tromping around is not going to accomplish more than something more difficult but also more quiet, like truly writing politicians en masse - as in at least tens of millions of individual physical letters en masse - to create a true health care solution for the US.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:21 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Letter to Mayor BLoomberg

Some borderline NSFW ads here, so heads up.
posted by griphus at 7:21 AM on November 17, 2011


Interesting moment this morning. I sometimes get a cab to work when I'm running late, and my route from Brooklyn goes through the lower Manhattan area. As we rode through, the cabbie suddenly remarked on the OWS protest and whether I'd heard what was going on, was it over or were they back? I told him what I'd heard, that the protestors were being allowed back in, but no tents or sleeping bags.

There was a pause. Then he began, "listen, I am not against anybody, but...."

He said something brief about the protestors that sounded a little bit kind of like it was coming from the 53% playbook ("hey, I work for my money, I'm not sure what they're on about..."); kindly stated, but clearly something that pointed out that he didn't really get the point.

I asked him a few careful questions, and he let slip that he hadn't always been a cab driver. "About a year ago, I was a salesman," he said. He had been working in a shop selling men's suits, but business dropped off and the shop closed. He tried to go on unemployment, but after 6 months of red tape he gave up and went to get his hack's license and was doing that instead. "And I work 70 hours a week," he started again, and...

"....But wouldn't it be better if you were working 70 hours in the suit shop?" I asked.

"Oh, I didn't have to! I could take it easy, I could see my friends...."

"So why did the shop close again?"

"No business," he said.

"....So wouldn't it be better if the economy was better and everyone was able to buy suits and keep them in business?"

He nodded, but then said that he thought the problem was that everyone was too afraid to spend. I pointed out that too many people didn't have enough money to spend even if they wanted to.

Then he remembered something. He told a story about a fare he'd had -- "a guy from some big company," he said -- whom he overheard making what sounded like a multi-million dollar tax dodge while on a cell phone in the back of his cab. "And I got mad," he said. "I almost kicked him out of my cab. Because he was playing! It was about five million dollars, and it was like he was playing a game!"

"And that's what the Wall Street Protests are actually about, you know," I told him. "It's about how those guys are playing -- but the problem is, they're playing with our money. I reminded him of the government bailouts; he said he remembered them. "Do you know what those banks did with that money?"

"No."

"Gave themselves raises. And do you know what the government did about that?"

"No."

"Nothing."

"Really?" He looked at me in the rearview.

"Yup." I nodded. "THAT'S what the Wall Street protests are about. That's what that '99%' and '1%' stuff is about -- the people there are protesting because guys like that guy in your cab are doing the same kind of stuff he did, and taking all the money away from the rest of us."

I could see wheels starting to turn in his head. He railed against the guy in his cab again, and I again reiterated that "that's what the protests are about are guys like that." I told him what little I knew about the bank deregulations of the 80's and 90's ("there used to be laws against it, but the guys at the big companies were all friends with guys in the government, so the guys in the government took those laws away...") and pointed out that the people on Wall Street weren't just "people who didn't want to work", like he'd thought, they were people who were saying that the corporations were "taking all our money" and that wasn't fair.

He dropped me off, and I could tell the wheels were still turning in his head a bit. He told me one more time how mad he was at the guy in his cab, and I once more told him that it was guys like that that the protest was against. He nodded thoughtfully. He admitted that he hadn't really had a chance to talk to someone who knew much about OWS before this and thanked me. We shook hands and I gave him a big tip, and he still was looking thoughtful as he drove away.

This, I hope, is the real legacy of OWS -- that conversations like that can start happening ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. And this is how people who want to be down on the streets, but can't, can support them.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:22 AM on November 17, 2011 [59 favorites]


Police seem to be getting violent on the stream.
posted by tr33hggr at 7:22 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


People are back in Zuccotti Park. Seeing it on TheOther99's stream.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:24 AM on November 17, 2011


Zuccotti Park re-opened and protestors are streaming in with large bags and prohibited items.

And hey, the kitchen's open!!
posted by Skygazer at 7:26 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I'm not going to get any writing done today either, am I?
posted by The Whelk at 7:28 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


My thoughts exactly Whelk.
posted by tr33hggr at 7:30 AM on November 17, 2011


My sinus infections are always so poorly timed.
posted by The Whelk at 7:37 AM on November 17, 2011


It's very easy to get people to agree with the common ideas of OWS. Most people already did. People are already perfectly aware that normal justice does not apply to powerful people, that the finance industry is a mess, that politicians are corrupt, etc.

What's almost impossible is shaking people out of the "yes, I know, but..." phase. People know that the powers that be are not acting in their interest, but they refuse to break down the status quo. It's easy to snort about how the powerful use off-shore banking and other strategies to dodge taxes, while also driving off into the distance, because you need to get back to work, and that when it comes to politics, your only concrete action will be to later vote for Candidate A over Candidate B.

Politics is seen as dirty or as something for other people to deal with. Career politicians, bad dinnertime companions, college students, and "dirty hippies." Putting politics into the hands of others was a great way to keep out the hoi polloi. Branding politicians as dirty was a great way to prevent too much anger over their more serious transgressions. After all, wouldn't that be like getting mad at a bear for crapping in the woods? Sure, politicians could get in trouble for crimes here and there, usually sex scandals or tax evasion, but those are little people crimes.

OWS had been opening the door a crack, though, putting politics at the forefront of discussion again. It was okay to finally talk about how inequality was getting worse.

But what OWS is doing today is just associating political action with marching around and blocking traffic. That's something the cabbie doesn't do. He's not going to see himself as a part of this, especially since their actions are sapping his livelihood. So they'll keep on marching, and the cabbie will keep on driving, and even though he may agree with many of their ideas, his only later political action will be on election day, pulling the lever for Candidate A.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:40 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


It's fairly useless to guess at how people will respond to things. If you disapprove of this action, go ahead and state your own reasons; there is no reason to create a mythical cabbie who can voice your viewpoint. My mythically cabbie is Travis Bickle, and he would respond to this action by shooting a pimp.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 7:43 AM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


I think, if nothing else, the marching and traffic-blocking sends this message - these are our streets. Everyone's. And perhaps that idea will grow into other variations - this is our money. These are our people. This is our country.
posted by tr33hggr at 7:46 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


spitbull: "No offense intended to Ohio. I've spent lots of time in Columbus. Just picked it as a "swing state" where supposed "independent voters" get to decide which corporatist party will win the "elections" this time.

Apologies. Not insulting the Midwest, just low information voters.

Now out the door.
"

'cept they defeated AB5, thankfully :)
posted by symbioid at 7:49 AM on November 17, 2011


I sure hope the police pull out all the stops soon. Firehoses, dogs - whatever.
posted by blaneyphoto at 7:50 AM on November 17, 2011


I sure hope the police pull out all the stops soon. Firehoses, dogs - whatever.

Would you care to elaborate, or may I assume you just enjoy seeing people getting hurt?
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 7:51 AM on November 17, 2011


So now the police are only letting people through who have IDs for companies on the street

or are in suits.

jesus.
posted by The Whelk at 7:53 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Obviously the key is to get protesters some suits. Didn't they have a "dress up" day recently?
posted by desjardins at 7:56 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


So now the police are only letting people through who have IDs for companies on the street

or are in suits.

jesus.


Actually, jesus won't be allowed through either.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:57 AM on November 17, 2011 [19 favorites]


I sure hope the police pull out all the stops soon. Firehoses, dogs - whatever.

Like this? Or this?
posted by desjardins at 7:57 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Yes there is a charity to provide suits to protestors, I am blanking on the name however.

This year, have a revolution in style.
posted by The Whelk at 8:01 AM on November 17, 2011


"NYPD is breaking the law to maintain the status quo -- when that's happening we really have to question it
posted by The Whelk at 8:01 AM on November 17, 2011


I sure hope the police pull out all the stops soon. Firehoses, dogs - whatever.
posted by blaneyphoto at 10:50 AM on November 17 [+] [!]


Yeah, that always looks so good on camera.
posted by Skygazer at 8:02 AM on November 17, 2011


If you disapprove of this action, go ahead and state your own reasons; there is no reason to create a mythical cabbie who can voice your viewpoint.

My mythical cabbie is no more real or fake than the mythical cabbie who drives off feeling more inclined to take concrete steps to get the political process to work for him. Maybe EmpressCallipygos changed his mind in an important way, maybe his mind was changed in a more minor way, maybe his mind was changed but he's never going to do anything about it, maybe his mind wasn't significantly changed at all, or maybe he was nodding and smiling because he was being polite (plus he's in the service industry). We don't know.

I think, if nothing else, the marching and traffic-blocking sends this message - these are our streets. Everyone's. And perhaps that idea will grow into other variations - this is our money. These are our people. This is our country.

I get that, but that's not how it plays to me. Marching and traffic-blocking sends the message to me that OWS wants to march and block traffic, because that seems like a nifty and satisfying thing to do for them. Yes, they have internally consistent ideological reasons behind what they're doing, but that's not the message being sent out by their actions. If the streets truly belonged to everyone, then they wouldn't block the streets, because that's not sharing or recognizing others' needs - everyone else needs to use them for their intended purpose.

Getting back to the cabbie - he was pissed at them for marching. EC had to talk things through with the cabbie to temper the annoyance at the demonstration. What about all those people who don't have an EC beside them to give voice to the other side then and there?

Besides, it's not like the 1% of the US all had to get a 10:30am cab to the financial district. Even if some of them did, making them late to their meetings will not change anything.

I've already made my opinions clear on the march in general, so I'll stop reacting until a truly new stimulus comes along.

I sure hope the police pull out all the stops soon. Firehoses, dogs - whatever.

As much as I think N17 is a bad idea: let's not do this.

Although, to be fair, if the cops brought out dogs and firehoses, maybe people would be reminded of the civil rights marches. Wouldn't you NOT like that?
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:05 AM on November 17, 2011


I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post it, but I'm very proud of the media in Dallas. Last night, the Occupy Dallas protesters were evicted with 18 protesters and it was all over the news this morning. Just a shimmer of hope that sometimes police going in during the middle of the night to do their shady business doesn't go unnoticed. Yet, it's a bit scary how the NYC raid has set a trend for the rest of the nation. Yikes.
posted by hillabeans at 8:07 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


If you disapprove of this action, go ahead and state your own reasons; there is no reason to create a mythical cabbie who can voice your viewpoint.

"Mythical"?

I didn't make the guy up. You want me to upload a scan of the taxi receipt from this morning to prove it?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:11 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]




Actually, jesus won't be allowed through either.

Jesus is already there, dressed in full riot gear, ready to pepper spray and beat anyone who looks at him funny. Apparently the Third Testament will be about how to dominate and exploit the poor to make yourself wealthy and powerful.
posted by deanklear at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


I didn't make the guy up. You want me to upload a scan of the taxi receipt from this morning to prove it?

I know you didn't make him up, but you have absolutely no way of knowing what was going on in his head and how he's going to think and act going forward.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:14 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Oy, look away for a few hours, and all heck breaks out. Stuff's moving very fast now, looks like parts of the barricade are down on multiple sides of the park, and NYPD are making spot arrests.

A couple of webstreams:

Global Revolution

TheOther99
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:19 AM on November 17, 2011


I know you didn't make him up, but you have absolutely no way of knowing what was going on in his head and how he's going to think and act going forward.

I know that. But at least he now knows what OWS is really about, and at least he is thinking about that. At least now he has made the connection between "that asshole in my cab" and "oh, THAT'S what the protests are about". Whatever conclusion he draws is his own lookout; at least he is drawing a conclusion based on more info than he already had. That's all I personally wanted.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:21 AM on November 17, 2011


Brookfield security apparently has left the park.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:23 AM on November 17, 2011


SHIT JUST GOT REAL
posted by The Whelk at 8:23 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yes, the barricades were being dismantled and the police began to use them as weapons against the press!! It is heating up quick. This was on TheOTHER99.
posted by Skygazer at 8:24 AM on November 17, 2011


Whatever conclusion he draws is his own lookout; at least he is drawing a conclusion based on more info than he already had. That's all I personally wanted.

Fair enough, but even if we assume a good or best result for his POV, he was also lucky to have you as a customer at that time. What about all of the other people, whether they're literally on the road or somewhere else, who won't have an EmpressCallipygos sitting just behind them? His first reaction to the blocked traffic was "who are these protestors, what do they want," but rather irritation and dismissal.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:26 AM on November 17, 2011


Lots of journalists about today. It looks like there are multiple perimeters of barricades. The police appear to be using zipties to hold the barricades together now.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:27 AM on November 17, 2011


"his first reaction to the blocked traffic was NOT", rather.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:27 AM on November 17, 2011


...the barricades were being dismantled and the police began to use them as weapons against the press...

Wasn't this how The Baader-Meinhof Complex started?
posted by griphus at 8:28 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I wish I knew what Blaney Photo meant with that comment. Perhaps he will come back and explain.
posted by winna at 8:30 AM on November 17, 2011


He was either being a dick, or hoping that the cops would tip their hand in a "always darkest before the dawn" sort of manner. I don't know if I'm missing any other possible interpretation.
posted by griphus at 8:33 AM on November 17, 2011


He was being a dick. I can only assume that he's donned a Godzilla suit and is trampling a miniature Zuccotti Park.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:34 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


griphus: "...the barricades were being dismantled and the police began to use them as weapons against the press...

Wasn't this how The Baader-Meinhof Complex started?
"

i fucking LOVE their albums!
posted by symbioid at 8:34 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


oh hey, they mentioned the Sacred Tree, the spot for religious meetings or meditation in the Plaza, I always liked that.
posted by The Whelk at 8:34 AM on November 17, 2011


Barriers going back up-
posted by The Whelk at 8:35 AM on November 17, 2011


and down!

Wow there are a lot of people there.
posted by The Whelk at 8:36 AM on November 17, 2011


i fucking LOVE their albums!

Dear Luke Haines,

Please amend my former fan letter to say: "two people I know have enjoyed this album."

Sincerely,

griphus
posted by griphus at 8:36 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


By the way, the retired Philadelphia Police Captain was arrested today.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:37 AM on November 17, 2011




Video stream: Something's happening in Greece
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:44 AM on November 17, 2011


staaaaaaandoff
posted by The Whelk at 8:47 AM on November 17, 2011


more barricades open!
posted by The Whelk at 8:47 AM on November 17, 2011


The protesters are chanting: The cops are marching with us!
posted by Skygazer at 8:50 AM on November 17, 2011


Fair enough, but even if we assume a good or best result for his POV, he was also lucky to have you as a customer at that time. What about all of the other people, whether they're literally on the road or somewhere else, who won't have an EmpressCallipygos sitting just behind them? His first reaction to the blocked traffic was "who are these protestors, what do they want," but rather irritation and dismissal.

I'm not quite sure I'm clear on your ultimate point, then.

I wish I knew what Blaney Photo meant with that comment. Perhaps he will come back and explain.
posted by winna at 8:30 AM on November 17

He was being a dick. I can only assume that he's donned a Godzilla suit and is trampling a miniature Zuccotti Park.
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:34 AM


I kind of recall prior b-photo conversations that would confirm this, as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:51 AM on November 17, 2011


There's an interesting thing the CNN commentators are doing where they're saying that the police have to act to protect citizens from the protesters. Which nicely implies that the protesters aren't also citizens.
posted by Errant at 8:51 AM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


And now they're showing video of the police dragging a woman protester through the street by her hair and backpack. Incredible.
posted by Errant at 8:55 AM on November 17, 2011


Police told CNN that they are prepared to arrest TEN THOUSAND..STAY PEACEFUL.
posted by The Whelk at 8:55 AM on November 17, 2011


they're so sensible "WHAT WE NEED TO DO! IS CREATE A PATH! FOR PEDESTRIANS!"
posted by The Whelk at 8:59 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


on Twitter:

@evilmatthew
#n17 protest turns violent as terrorist protesters vicously attack innocent peace officers fists with thier faces livestream.com/globalrevoluti… #ows
posted by desjardins at 8:59 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Dick: What? You got into a fight?
Allan: Yep.
Dick: With who?
Allan: Some guys were getting tough with Julie. I had to teach them a lesson.
Dick: Are you all right?
Allan: Yeah, I'm fine. I snapped my chin down onto some guy's fist and hit another one in the knee with my nose.
posted by griphus at 9:01 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Your Twitter Round-Up

Some bankers are holding signs that say, "get a job." Unemployment is at 10% and they're smug in suits.


CNN now showing viewer-submitted video of NYPD dragging a woman into the street by her hair

LA has over 1,000 marching to their bridge. Portland has shut down their bridge & NY is going big

posted by The Whelk at 9:03 AM on November 17, 2011


"been lookin' for a fist -
to put your face in..."

LOOKIN' DOWN THE BARREL OF A GUN
posted by symbioid at 9:03 AM on November 17, 2011


About 60 minutes ago, #ows pr team announced a New York-Wide Student and Education Workers Convergence at Union Square, 3pm, today
posted by The Whelk at 9:04 AM on November 17, 2011


the medics have advised them to return to the Plaza, to aid the wounded.
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM on November 17, 2011


"They're asking for my ID to walk down the street, my ID! In America!"
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


"Corporate or student ID" to get on Wall Street, apparently.
posted by oinopaponton at 9:09 AM on November 17, 2011


Re: suits.

I'm sure I read or heard somewhere once (possibly a documentary about the Blues Brothers or some history of soul book), that when Jazz players back in the 30/40's started wearing them it was actually done as a subversive act.

So it's got darn good lineage. [caveat: completely unable to find anything to back the memory up though, unfortunately]
posted by titus-g at 9:11 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Somewhere there's a few thousand feet of hurricane fence just ready to get unspooled around that park with people in it so they can process each and every one of them, and at that point "shit" will actually get real. Stay calm, friends.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:13 AM on November 17, 2011


Portland has shut down their bridge

The Steel Bridge, apparently. "That one bridge, you know, the one in Portland" is pretty much like "that one movie, you know, with the guy in it".
posted by cortex at 9:15 AM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


They're barricading the park right now. I'm watching the Occupy Wall Street feed on livestream.
posted by padraigin at 9:16 AM on November 17, 2011


Some bankers are holding signs that say, "get a job." Unemployment is at 10% and they're smug in suits.

Occupy Wall Street protesters vow to wear suits, blend in and get revenge for the Zuccotti Park raid

posted by BobbyVan at 9:16 AM on November 17, 2011


I'm not quite sure I'm clear on your ultimate point, then.

My point is that the march only annoyed the cabbie and made him think worse of the protestors. The march actively annoys people whom OWS would want on their side. You, on the other hand, engaged him in dialog, which is a strategy vastly superior to blocking traffic. One could say that the march "started" the conversation, but there are other, better ways to start conversations.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:18 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


"that one movie, you know, with the guy in it".

The stuff with the things.
posted by The Whelk at 9:20 AM on November 17, 2011




stitcherbeast: obviously the best way to demonstrate is to stay home and comment on internet sites, thus starting conversations without having to worry about inconveniencing anyone. #concerntroll

You know who's fucking inconvenienced me? Wall street.
posted by kaibutsu at 9:22 AM on November 17, 2011 [22 favorites]


Portland has more than one bridge — protestors are moving on after several arrests.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:22 AM on November 17, 2011




My point is that the march only annoyed the cabbie and made him think worse of the protestors. The march actively annoys people whom OWS would want on their side. You, on the other hand, engaged him in dialog, which is a strategy vastly superior to blocking traffic. One could say that the march "started" the conversation, but there are other, better ways to start conversations.

Without the march, there wouldn't have even been a conversation to start having in the first place.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:25 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I am going to go ahead and bet that cabbies were also annoyed by the Selma to Montgomery marches. In fact, if your goal is to not annoy cabbies, really the only protest you can do is one that involves not being a pedestrian, because hacks seem perpetually frustrated that I do things like, oh, cross the road on foot or ride a bike.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 9:27 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Milwaukee is also protesting on a bridge today, but it's in a poor neighborhood. There's a bridge right on the major street downtown, right next to Chase Bank. I don't get the strategy there.
posted by desjardins at 9:28 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I-5 traffic stop yields incendiary devices and gas masks
A traffic stop of a speeding vehicle led to the arrest of three men, who claimed to be Occupy Portland demonstrators, and the seizure of incendiary devices, gas masks and fireworks.

...

In addition to the marijuana, Postlewait found a quantity of firecrackers and two commercially manufactured mortars like those fired into the air during professional pyrotechnic displays. The mortars were contained in glass "Ball" canning jars. One was found on the floorboard at Luff's feet; the other was in a jacket belonging to Luff. Also found in the car were two gas masks, some protective eye goggles, and safety helmet.

All three suspects said that they had spent the night at the Occupy Portland demonstration. They admitted that they brought the seized items to the demonstration in preparation for a confrontation with police when they expected to be forcibly removed from the park. They admitted being at the protest during the police confrontation and had left about an hour before Postelwait stopped them.

During the earlier Occupy Portland confrontation between police and protesters, a Portland Police Officer was injured when protesters began throwing fireworks at them. These subjects denied being involved in throwing the fireworks at the Officer.

The subjects were questioned further about the explosives. Each of them said that they knew the "Ball" canning jar would explode and cause glass shrapnel to fly out and possibly cause injury to anyone close to it.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:29 AM on November 17, 2011


They admitted that they brought the seized items to the demonstration in preparation for a confrontation with police when they expected to be forcibly removed from the park. They admitted being at the protest during the police confrontation and had left about an hour before Postelwait stopped them.

If they brought those items to use during a confrontation, why didn't they use them during the confrontation? Doesn't make any sense.
posted by KathrynT at 9:31 AM on November 17, 2011


From Twitter:

Wall Street is indeed shut down. Emerged from the subway this AM to find at least 80 riot police, plus more cops on horses.


I couldn't tell if I was barricaded in or barricaded out. My block (Exchange, runs parallel to Wall) is completely filled with police vans.

A lady cop let me through a barricade when I pointed to my building. Not that it's anyone's fucking business where I live.

Chatted w/doorman, who thinks the protestors are "doing it all wrong" and should've talked to their Congresspeople.

I pointed out that Bank Transfer Day was a success, and that, effective or not, people have a right to peaceably assemble. He agreed.

Pointed out to my doorman that the riot police are way more terrifying than the protestors. Who the hell are the police protecting? Not me.

They're protecting me from making hot chocolate and distributing it like this kindly matron I was always meant to be.

posted by The Whelk at 9:33 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Yeah - if they never used them and they were leaving. Shit - is their anything illegal about it? I suppose maybe fireworks or something, but firecrackers and gas masks aren't illegal... Oh it is if the cops say so, that's right.
posted by symbioid at 9:34 AM on November 17, 2011


Bank disappears $600 million of customer money.

But yeah, omg! fireworks!
posted by furiousxgeorge at 9:37 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


I'm pretty sure it's illegal to make a homemade bomb. An incendiary mortar inside a glass jar would qualify.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:38 AM on November 17, 2011


PEOPLE RUNNING DOWN TRINITY AT FULL SPEED NOW
posted by The Whelk at 9:39 AM on November 17, 2011


Turns out, it was a couple of jars of kim chee and some Pop Rocks.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:40 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I'm not sure anyone is going to argue that they shouldn't have been arrested if in fact they were planning to use the items in a violent manner. So... what is your point, then, BobbyVan? Some people do bad things?
posted by desjardins at 9:40 AM on November 17, 2011


Well, we don't know whether it was a firecracker or a pipe bomb, and so speculating either way is futile at the moment.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 9:40 AM on November 17, 2011


Bank disappears $600 million of customer money.

Not that it makes a hell of a lot of difference, but for meme accuracy, MF Global was a brokerage firm, not a bank.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:42 AM on November 17, 2011


I'm pretty sure it's illegal to make a homemade bomb. An incendiary mortar inside a glass jar would qualify.

Yes, and if they have broken any laws, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of those laws. But you can't say "They were gonna bomb the cops if there was a confrontation!" if you caught them after the confrontation.
posted by KathrynT at 9:42 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Well, we don't know whether it was a firecracker or a pipe bomb, and so speculating either way is futile at the moment.

Agreed. But this was interesting:
The subjects were questioned further about the explosives. Each of them said that they knew the "Ball" canning jar would explode and cause glass shrapnel to fly out and possibly cause injury to anyone close to it.

Salzwedel-Kemp and Patterson [the arrested Occupy Portland demonstrators] described an incident that occurred when they were younger. They put a homemade "Piccolo Pete" explosive inside a beer bottle and detonated it. The resulting explosion caused a shard of glass to fly into Salswedel; lacerating his leg so badly that he required stitches to close the wound.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:43 AM on November 17, 2011


Some bankers are holding signs that say, "get a job." Unemployment is at 10% and they're smug in suits.

You know what? That's a great idea. I'll tell all my unemployed friends that. Then they can use the money from those jobs to buy some cake and eat it.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:43 AM on November 17, 2011 [9 favorites]


"In order to effectually move on city hall we must separate"
posted by The Whelk at 9:44 AM on November 17, 2011


For clarity - what I mean was that not nearly enough is being done to disperse and dissolve this OWS nuisance.
posted by blaneyphoto at 9:49 AM on November 17, 2011


For clarity - what I mean was that not nearly enough is being done to disperse and dissolve this OWS nuisance.

So go out and disperse them. What, are you afraid to get your hands dirty?
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:52 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Maybe he just wants to win a Pulitzer.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:52 AM on November 17, 2011


Salzwedel-Kemp and Patterson [the arrested Occupy Portland demonstrators] described an incident that occurred when they were younger. They put a homemade "Piccolo Pete" explosive inside a beer bottle and detonated it. The resulting explosion caused a shard of glass to fly into Salswedel; lacerating his leg so badly that he required stitches to close the wound.

Ow. These guys sound like assholes. On the other hand, they didn't actually do it. On probably that same hand, lots of legitimate movements have assholes, and using a couple of assholes to condemn an entire movement is disingenuous. If that was your intention, it's kinda dishonest.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:53 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


For clarity - what I mean was that not nearly enough is being done to disperse and dissolve this OWS nuisance.

Obligatory.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:53 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Christ it's fucking groundhog's day all over again and again and again.
posted by symbioid at 9:55 AM on November 17, 2011


Clearly, blaneyphoto's feelings are hurt. Man down!
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 9:55 AM on November 17, 2011




If you pretend that blaneyphoto is in the back of a carriage, wearing a tophat and preceding everything he says with "Driver..." he becomes a delicious bit of satire.
posted by griphus at 10:00 AM on November 17, 2011 [13 favorites]


I heard that some people showed up to counter-protest and they were carrying (but made no use of) firearms! They were wearing blue shirts and protective gear as if they were looking for a fight.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:01 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


@OccupyWallStreetNYC: So many orders 2 @liberatospizza they had 2 hire new chefs

So, for those of you keeping score at home: the people who led a financial collapse that doubled the unemployment rate are shouting "Get a job!" to people who are creating jobs.
posted by kagredon at 10:07 AM on November 17, 2011 [25 favorites]


also made some food cart vendors very happy.
posted by The Whelk at 10:08 AM on November 17, 2011


I know this is total preaching to the choir, but Fox is so full of shit.

Back in 2009, they ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post castigating rival news networks for allegedly refusing to cover the 9/12 Tea Party protests... despite CNN (for one) sending multiple camera crews and reporting on it throughout the day. It turned into a big spat at the time, with former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez calling them liars, etc.

Right now, CNN is covering the ongoing Occupy demonstrations and has been for the last several hours. Aerial shots of crowds, interviews with protestors, reading viewer comments, etc.

On Fox? When I flipped over, they were in the middle of talking to an Americans for Prosperity rep about the Tea Party proposal to cut the deficit. Then a news alert about peanut butter. Then a brief note on crackdowns on protestors... in Syria. Then a piece about why we totally need to build the Keystone oil pipeline to make gas cheaper and create jobs. Absolutely nothing about the massive protests going on in New York and around the country. Heck, right now Megyn Kelly, with the streets of Manhattan in the massive window behind her, is interviewing my craven Alabama senator about how liberals have no ideas about how to solve the national debt and why Kagan should recuse herself from the healthcare case (no mention of Scalia and Thomas dining with the opposition lawyers the other night). Maybe an Occupy contingent should make their way to News Corp headquarters so their signs can wave in the background behind her,
posted by Rhaomi at 10:08 AM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


The OWS people would like nothing more than to go home. Who wants to sit in a park overnight? Who wants to get beat by cops? If any other approach had a chance of working, OWS would do that instead. But all other avenues have been exhausted. There is nothing left to do with these issues but take to the streets.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:11 AM on November 17, 2011 [13 favorites]


...and naturally the segment immediately following my hitting the Post Comment button is about the protests. But it was literally 90 seconds long and full of shots of people being arrested (compared to all-day coverage in multiple cities advertised weeks in advance for the Tea Party protests), so I'm still chalking it into the "full of shit" column.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:12 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I know this is total preaching to the choir, but Fox is so full of shit.

When they let the protesters back in on Tuesday night, there was a Fox News cameraman there. He was immediately surrounded by a huge group of protesters who chanted "Fox News lies!" over and over again.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:19 AM on November 17, 2011


Call Liberatos at (212) 344-3464 and ask for the OccuPie Special. I just did. PIZZA PIE WALL STREET!
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:24 AM on November 17, 2011




Where to Donate food
posted by The Whelk at 10:26 AM on November 17, 2011


Cops kick medical team off 71 Broadway porch. Building manager: "I got no problem with 'em"

The current right-wing spin is that the protest is "stopping people from going to joe interviews"
posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on November 17, 2011


Joe Interviews is the fake name I give to the cops when I'm protesting.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:32 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


job.

i dont know anyone who wants to be joe.
posted by The Whelk at 10:32 AM on November 17, 2011


Yeah! All those reporters are trying to go interview Joe the Plumber, but they can't get through all those protesters! Won't someone think of the right wing media?!
posted by kaibutsu at 10:36 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


McCarthy, Plumber or Scarborough.
posted by symbioid at 10:36 AM on November 17, 2011


police coming into zuccotti http://www.ustream.tv/theother99
posted by desjardins at 10:37 AM on November 17, 2011


police raiding zuccotti with batons drawn
posted by desjardins at 10:38 AM on November 17, 2011


Police have blocked off the park entrance and may be raiding Zuccotti park - helmets on, batons drawn.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:38 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Won't let anyone in or out.
posted by uniq at 10:39 AM on November 17, 2011


and twitter just EXPLODED
posted by The Whelk at 10:40 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


protestors pulling at barricades
posted by The Whelk at 10:40 AM on November 17, 2011


protestors pulling down barricades
posted by desjardins at 10:40 AM on November 17, 2011


"gets our camera over there man!"
"I'm trying I can't get in!"
posted by The Whelk at 10:41 AM on November 17, 2011


"they're hitting people!, For NO REASON!"

"I am now blocked out of the park, no one can get out"
posted by The Whelk at 10:42 AM on November 17, 2011


Fuck that shit! I just ordered a pizza!
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:42 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


"Am I stuck in here?" "Yep."
posted by ChuraChura at 10:42 AM on November 17, 2011


"am I stuck in here?"

Cop: Yep
posted by The Whelk at 10:42 AM on November 17, 2011


So they have kettled the park. Looks like a mass arrest.
posted by yertledaturtle at 10:43 AM on November 17, 2011


Both UStream and Livestream are stuck outside the park.
posted by Brainy at 10:44 AM on November 17, 2011


This is just going to inflame the situation. it is an escalation of force for no apparent purpose or reason.
posted by yertledaturtle at 10:45 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


CBS livestream, unknown location, cops on horseback, barricades
posted by desjardins at 10:46 AM on November 17, 2011


"guy is bleeding all over his face, I got it all on video"
posted by The Whelk at 10:46 AM on November 17, 2011


someone's got a head injury - theother99
posted by desjardins at 10:47 AM on November 17, 2011


All the cops theother99's broadcaster asks "don't know" what's going on.

Like hell they don't.
posted by cmyk at 10:47 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


horses moving in background - cbs feed
posted by desjardins at 10:48 AM on November 17, 2011


Wall Street Bankers and Police have head injuries that impair their social functioning.
posted by symbioid at 10:48 AM on November 17, 2011


NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne tells CNN total number of arrests now stands at about 100
posted by The Whelk at 10:49 AM on November 17, 2011


Mass arrest appears to be happening, unmarked vechials paddy wagons
posted by The Whelk at 10:49 AM on November 17, 2011


overhead view http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
posted by desjardins at 10:49 AM on November 17, 2011


Police with batons running in. Paddy wagons, TheOther99 says it's going to be a mass arrest.
posted by Brainy at 10:49 AM on November 17, 2011


helmets up
posted by The Whelk at 10:50 AM on November 17, 2011


"Police are coming in with smiles on their faces, batons drawn, helmets up."

For being in a public park.
posted by cmyk at 10:50 AM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


global rev switching between overhead and rebroadcast from theother99
posted by desjardins at 10:50 AM on November 17, 2011


The OWS people would like nothing more than to go home. Who wants to sit in a park overnight? Who wants to get beat by cops? If any other approach had a chance of working, OWS would do that instead. But all other avenues have been exhausted. There is nothing left to do with these issues but take to the streets.

Probably for some people, but my friend that's been kind of a spokesman for Occupy DC (and is in NYC today) has been doing this shit since the Seattle riots. He lives for it. The last time I saw him at a party a year or so ago, he had just come back from one of the anti-globalization protests and was talking about the Pittsburgh riots/protests as if they were a Grateful Dead show -- "Tear gas, sound weapons, it was fucking awesome." And he's not the only one. I think there's a lot of anti-globalisation protesters that are forming the core of these things.

The difference with this thing is a younger generation of protestors inspired by the Arab Spring and the union support, and also the mainstream media coverage is more sympathetic because of the general shittiness of the economic situation.
posted by empath at 10:52 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Girl got footage of herself getting thrown to the ground, giving it to Ustream now
posted by The Whelk at 10:53 AM on November 17, 2011


(which Btw, look it's the 21st century, oh man the girl sounds close to tears)
posted by The Whelk at 10:54 AM on November 17, 2011


Shit shit shit.
posted by tr33hggr at 10:55 AM on November 17, 2011


kettled protesters chanting "We Are the 99%!"
posted by The Whelk at 10:58 AM on November 17, 2011


chanting : we are the 99 percent
posted by desjardins at 10:58 AM on November 17, 2011


Looks like THe Whelk got this covered, Imma have some lunch
posted by desjardins at 10:58 AM on November 17, 2011


Possible first arrest - still no way in or out - I'd like lunch too.
posted by The Whelk at 11:00 AM on November 17, 2011


LA had a march today, but apparently the cops are being pretty cool about it. Traffic got rerouted some, but traffic is always fucked downtown. I wonder if the frequent filming permits mean that LA downtown folks are just more used to having their commutes delayed.
posted by klangklangston at 11:00 AM on November 17, 2011


They've pulled a photographer out of the park, have gathered around him, are interrogating him and filming it (according to theother99).

Situations like that make me think the old POW convention of 'name, rank, serial number' would, with some modifications, be entirely appropriate.
posted by cmyk at 11:01 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


people are shouting to guy getitng arrested 'DO NOT CONSENT TO THE SEARCH! HERE IS THE LAWYER'S GUILD NUMBER! WHAT IS YOUR NAME?!"
posted by The Whelk at 11:01 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Looks like the cop pulled the battery from a guy's camera.....not good
posted by The Whelk at 11:02 AM on November 17, 2011


Anonymous, General, 99%
posted by symbioid at 11:03 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


guy may have lost a tooth.
posted by The Whelk at 11:04 AM on November 17, 2011


they have a photo of the man with the head wound.
posted by The Whelk at 11:04 AM on November 17, 2011


that photo is going to be everywhere in like 3 2 1
posted by The Whelk at 11:05 AM on November 17, 2011


Looks bad, hair drenched with blood.
posted by tr33hggr at 11:05 AM on November 17, 2011


that photo is going to be everywhere in like 3 2 1

Can we get a link?
posted by ryanshepard at 11:05 AM on November 17, 2011


Preferably not a Twitter link (I can't get Twitter stuff where I am!).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:07 AM on November 17, 2011


I thought the media were locked out? As far as I can tell, you can't see shit because there are too many news vans blocking it....
posted by schmod at 11:08 AM on November 17, 2011


appear to be letting people back in and out
posted by The Whelk at 11:08 AM on November 17, 2011


People able to get back in and out of the park.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:08 AM on November 17, 2011


Empress - http://yfrog.com/h3xb6pp
posted by desjardins at 11:08 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


the media is making itself very well known, probobly cause of the blackout before. Reporters don't like it when you arrest them.
posted by The Whelk at 11:09 AM on November 17, 2011


http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/united-republic-creative-inc.html
posted by symbioid at 11:10 AM on November 17, 2011


OWS livestream has video of blood on the ground
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:11 AM on November 17, 2011


I know this is total preaching to the choir, but Fox is so full of shit.
[...]
Absolutely nothing about the massive protests going on in New York and around the country.


I saw something interesting in the paper today. It was a group of more than 100 american millionaires who followed in Buffett's footsteps and demanded to be taxed. They have a site at patrioticmillionaires.org. This looked like something I wanted to read MeFi's take on*, but I couldn't find any reference to it at all.

Did I not search the site well enough or did nobody bother to make an FPP? Since their promotional video was reposted on the frontpage of Sweden's biggest newspaper, I figured it would be a big thing over in the US. Was it just not widely covered in your media?

* Yes, I'm disaster-watching from my safe spot in Scandinavia. I hope you don't feel exploited, I am rooting for you.
posted by springload at 11:12 AM on November 17, 2011 [8 favorites]




Why don't you make an FPP? I know I didn't see it... I think that it would be a good one.
posted by symbioid at 11:14 AM on November 17, 2011


what are the lighted stripes on the ground? first time I've seen the ground in Zuccotti
posted by desjardins at 11:16 AM on November 17, 2011


Disorder Control is such an Orwellian kind of word
posted by The Whelk at 11:17 AM on November 17, 2011


Those are the lights in the park, they've been shut off since the occupation started
posted by The Whelk at 11:18 AM on November 17, 2011


My pharmacist had some suggestions for my disorder control.
posted by dhartung at 11:18 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


springload: I though there was an FPP about http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/ that was similar (and a likely place for http://patrioticmillionaires.org/ to have been mentioned before) but only found a couple of comments, possibly it was canned.
posted by titus-g at 11:19 AM on November 17, 2011


Did I not search the site well enough or did nobody bother to make an FPP? Since their promotional video was reposted on the frontpage of Sweden's biggest newspaper, I figured it would be a big thing over in the US. Was it just not widely covered in your media?

I hadn't heard of this at all; so I would say that "it just wasn't widely covered by US media." But since others have reported that the protests themselves also haven't been covered well, this lack of media coverage doesn't surprise me much.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:20 AM on November 17, 2011


the music has stopped...something is happening
posted by The Whelk at 11:21 AM on November 17, 2011


#OWS and #OccupyWallStreet are blocked from Trending topics. But its great to know that twitter lets #MyDickIn3WordsOrLess take first place
posted by The Whelk at 11:22 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Brooklyn Bridge at 3:00.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:22 AM on November 17, 2011


people preping for 3pm Union Sq.
posted by The Whelk at 11:22 AM on November 17, 2011


symboid: It's hard for me to sit over here and make a good FPP about US domestic political debate, perhaps also inappropriate. If you're interested, please go ahead though!
posted by springload at 11:22 AM on November 17, 2011


update our earlier report about a copy with a hand injury: a cop was cut on the left hand by a thrown glass object.
posted by The Whelk at 11:22 AM on November 17, 2011


"Occupies Wall Street" #MyDickIn3WordsOrLess
posted by griphus at 11:23 AM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


"we met some very bad undercover cops who need to go back to acting school."

"we need to march right now, the park is becoming crowded."
posted by The Whelk at 11:24 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


"we met some very bad undercover cops who need to go back to acting school."

Heh - reminds of the time I went to a rave, and this taller older guy with a mustache was wearing a Hawaiian shirt walking around by himself... It was... Yeah. Really? Maybe he was just being hipster before being hipster was cool, I dunno, but I don't think so.
posted by symbioid at 11:26 AM on November 17, 2011


3pm Union Square 5pm Bridge

Police are ignoring NYPD issued press passes
posted by The Whelk at 11:26 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Bunny Ultramod: "Reporters For Right-Wing Publication Daily Caller Beaten By NYPD, Helped By Protesters"

And THAT my dear Block Bloc is what you call Propaganda of the Deed. Not this window smashing bullshit.
posted by symbioid at 11:27 AM on November 17, 2011 [9 favorites]


More than 100 riot cops going up on Brooklyn Bridge. Expecting trouble here


"I got a video of an undercover cop, guy punches me, I filmed him, chasing him, kept asking Police this man just assulted me and he's running behind the cop line"
posted by The Whelk at 11:28 AM on November 17, 2011


"if you see this face, tweet me I want to confront him, he's a cop"
posted by The Whelk at 11:29 AM on November 17, 2011


I though there was an FPP about http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/ that was similar (and a likely place for http://patrioticmillionaires.org/ to have been mentioned before) but only found a couple of comments, possibly it was canned.

There was this thread a while back, but it's over 30 days ago.

It's hard for me to sit over here and make a good FPP about US domestic political debate, perhaps also inappropriate. If you're interested, please go ahead though!

Actually, I would be really interested to learn more about how OWS is being seen outside of the US. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
posted by kagredon at 11:29 AM on November 17, 2011


"I want to confront him, he's a cop"

oh jesus
posted by griphus at 11:29 AM on November 17, 2011


Heh - reminds of the time I went to a rave, and this taller older guy with a mustache was wearing a Hawaiian shirt walking around by himself... It was... Yeah. Really? Maybe he was just being hipster before being hipster was cool, I dunno, but I don't think so.

That was Hunter S Thompson.
posted by notyou at 11:30 AM on November 17, 2011 [7 favorites]


According to other99, a police officer refused to show his badge on request. Is that legal?
posted by maniabug at 11:30 AM on November 17, 2011


Here's the Twitter of the guy who was attacked by the undercover cop.
posted by cmyk at 11:31 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Could be, could be. Were you in bat country?
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 11:31 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm surprised no one will just give this guy gloves.
posted by desjardins at 11:31 AM on November 17, 2011


Is that legal?

No, but because there's no possible recourse, it's standard procedure at times like this.
posted by griphus at 11:32 AM on November 17, 2011


Reporters For Right-Wing Publication Daily Caller Beaten By NYPD, Helped By Protesters

Is it too much to hope that this will be the catalyst for a third-act change of heart where the reporter starts to embrace the movement and completely changes her views on camera?

Yeah, probably. That sort of thing doesn't happen in the real world. Still hopefully it provided her with some small view into the world she has been denigrating.
posted by quin at 11:32 AM on November 17, 2011



Could be, could be. Were you in bat country?


No. We didn't stop there.
posted by The Whelk at 11:33 AM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]






It might be interesting if the protesters started demanding and recording as many badges (and refusals) as they can. A good symbol about lack of accountability.
posted by maniabug at 11:37 AM on November 17, 2011


I've pointed it out earlier in the thread, but I guess I'll want to make it clear again.

This situation is in some ways unique, but it's nothing the NYPD isn't prepared for. Right now, while there's still chaos -- regardless of the fact that they're basically responsible for it -- the NYPD is above the law. The courts can hand down whatever they want, the press can have whatever passes, people can have whatever IDs, but the NYPD currently has carte blanche over the situation. They want to beat you? They will beat you. They want to punch you? They will punch you. The protestors have nowhere to turn and, what's worse, is that any attempt to fight back against the NYPD means you are royally, royally fucked.

Don't ask if what the NYPD is doing is legal or not. It doesn't matter right now when the people who are supposed to upkeep the law see you as the principal lawbreaker they have to put down by any means.
posted by griphus at 11:37 AM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


This is a song about Canadian criminal justice. Here's some words from the ACLU on the American rights when stopped by the cops. In some jurisdictions, you're only allowed to call a landline from jail, so make sure you know what number you want to use for your phone call, and write it on your arm with a sharpie.

If you're occupying wall street clap your hands,
If you're occupying wall street clap your hands,
We should all know our rights
So here's a song we tried to write,
If you're occupying wall street clap your hands.

If you're arrested by the cops, shut your mouth,
If you're arrested by the cops, shut your mouth,
If you really love your friends
Then you gotta understand
If you're arrested by the cops, shut your mouth.

Just your birthday and your name and where you live,
Just your birthday and your name and where you live,
If you're arrested by the pigs
Then that's all you gotta give,
Just your birthday and your name and where you live.

Call a lawyer once they got you in the shop,
Call a lawyer once they got you in the shop,
They say they'll make it stop
But never trust a cop
Call a lawyer once they got you in the shop.

You might have to spend the night but that's okay,
You might have to spend the night but that's okay,
You don't have to sign conditions
It's your freedom you'll be missing,
You might have to spend the night but that's okay.

Have a party with your friends when you get out,
Have a party with your friends when you get out,
You can celebrate release
With a joint or with a feast
Have a party with your friends when you get out.

Learn more about your rights when you can,
Learn more about your rights when you can,
In case you get arrested
You should always have a plan
Learn more about your rights when you can.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:41 AM on November 17, 2011 [18 favorites]


BBC Live Blog
posted by The Whelk at 11:42 AM on November 17, 2011


Look what I help make!
posted by The Whelk at 11:47 AM on November 17, 2011 [11 favorites]


AND ON THE OTHER SIDE

Conservativeind Kimberly Morin
Targets of Jihadists are same as #ows Wall Street; bridges & subways #N17

posted by The Whelk at 11:48 AM on November 17, 2011


Targets of Jihadists are same as #ows bridges & subways

Also: commuters. I've never trusted them, why are they so scared to work where they live, eh, EH? What are they hiding?
posted by titus-g at 11:51 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Targets of Jihadists are same as Wall Street: U.S. financial system
posted by one_bean at 11:52 AM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Targets of Jihadists are same as #ows Wall Street; bridges & subways #N17

Also the targets of businessmen.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 11:52 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


The Rude Pundit: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2011/11/this-is-not-your-fucking-movement-this.html:
The march this morning wasn't going to do anything, despite the hopeful rumors that the stock market opening bell had been delayed (it wasn't). No, the point was, like the rallies for Obama before them, that there is power in numbers. And that power needs to be exhibited and enacted.

When the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United decision, said that corporations are people with First Amendment rights and affirmed that money is the equivalent of speech, it essentially was saying that some people have more speech than others. The wealthy and the corporations can never be matched in terms of the speech effect of their dollars. But they can be matched and overcome by the sheer volume of people. That's why we say we are the 99%.
posted by genehack at 11:54 AM on November 17, 2011 [7 favorites]


nydailynews: Warning: graphic -- photos of #OWS #n17 protester injured during scuffle with cops in Zuccotti Park a short while ago http://t.co/NfHZKtB4
posted by Brainy at 11:54 AM on November 17, 2011


THIS JUST IN, both jihadists and OWS breathe a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:54 AM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


Targets of Jihadists are the same as Targets everywhere: cheap products, haggard employees, subtle smell of Clorox in the air.
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:55 AM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


Call NYPD Headquarters (646) 610-5000 and ask them nicely to please release Philly police Captain Ray Lewis, OWS supporter + career cop.
posted by The Whelk at 11:57 AM on November 17, 2011


Unverified reports on Ustream chat that Romania has died from brain injuries.
posted by tr33hggr at 11:58 AM on November 17, 2011


Ustream chat is basically a font of misinformation
posted by The Whelk at 11:59 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Wow, I hit my hourly usage limit on Twitter! (Not from posting, from refreshing.) That's never happened before. Anyway, I've been making a list of all the Occupy accounts I can find.
posted by desjardins at 11:59 AM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


A kind request that we wait to verify reports of death before posting them.
posted by griphus at 12:00 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


*curling up in withdrawal*
posted by desjardins at 12:00 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Ustream chat says that it comes from MSNBC - there's nothing about it there.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:01 PM on November 17, 2011


Marches taking up both sides of the street as they march up broadway
posted by The Whelk at 12:01 PM on November 17, 2011


march to U Sq. said to be a little over 300
posted by The Whelk at 12:02 PM on November 17, 2011


Right, sorry, overreacted.
posted by tr33hggr at 12:02 PM on November 17, 2011




Romania has a skull fracture
posted by The Whelk at 12:07 PM on November 17, 2011


Video of "Romania" as the police remove him from the park (after he sustained the injury).
posted by defenestration at 12:09 PM on November 17, 2011


People in shops waving and smiling to marchers
posted by The Whelk at 12:10 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


"Out of the office, into the street!"
posted by The Whelk at 12:11 PM on November 17, 2011


lol bbc: "More evidence of clashes of some kind in New York today"
posted by symbioid at 12:12 PM on November 17, 2011


why is he called Romania?
posted by desjardins at 12:13 PM on November 17, 2011


Because he's the ninth largest country in the European Union.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:14 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


He's from Romania.

A video of the protester being bloodied has been uploaded. It's hard to tell exactly what happened, though.
posted by defenestration at 12:14 PM on November 17, 2011


Police have no right to do that to a nation-state
posted by The Whelk at 12:15 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


lots of honking from drivers, cameras out, whoo-ings
posted by The Whelk at 12:17 PM on November 17, 2011


WTF is Damian Albarn doing there?
posted by symbioid at 12:26 PM on November 17, 2011


4 blocks from Union, meeting with larger groups
posted by The Whelk at 12:27 PM on November 17, 2011


Well, sure, defenestration, that looks pretty bad, but you should see what the barricade he was kicking looks like now. The noble police force needed to step in and stop the violence before any more innocent barricades were injured.

Seriously though, that video makes me queazy, and I'm not normally upset by the sight of blood. I think it's the confused expression on his face.
posted by Davidicus at 12:28 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


@ union sq.
posted by The Whelk at 12:32 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


They include a man who threw a star-shaped glass object at an officer at Zuccotti Park, causing lacerations to the officer's hand, and a protester who threw a liquid, possibly vinegar, in the face of four officers in a morning confrontation near the stock exchange, the police said.

The officer with the cut hand was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will hold a news conference at 3:40 p.m. to discuss the officer's injuries.
(source)

So Bloomberg will hold a news conference for every protester who is injured by police, right?
posted by desjardins at 12:36 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


Ahem, union square.
posted by The Whelk at 12:36 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Star shaped glass container of vinegar? Oh god, they're attacking with artiesinal salad dressing!
posted by The Whelk at 12:38 PM on November 17, 2011 [7 favorites]


that is ..a big .....crowd.
posted by The Whelk at 12:39 PM on November 17, 2011


Huuuuggge!
posted by tr33hggr at 12:39 PM on November 17, 2011


Combine that vinegar with some pepper spray and you've got the perfect topper for an avocado salad!
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:39 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


mmmmm...incapacitating.
posted by The Whelk at 12:40 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


.There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." Sproul Hall Steps, December 2, 1964[6]

anyone else here? MeMail me.
posted by modernserf at 12:41 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


There is something inherently charming about a whole square full of people saying "HI!"
posted by The Whelk at 12:43 PM on November 17, 2011


It's heartbreaking to watch this at work and wish nothing more than to be a part of it, right now.... but I can't leave. Alas. Union Square looks packed. Amazing.
posted by good day merlock at 12:44 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]




...that is a lot of people. Good luck, everyone.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:44 PM on November 17, 2011


Apparently some marching Occupy Portlanders inverted the big flag on the flagpole at the insurance company I used to work for.
posted by cortex at 12:44 PM on November 17, 2011


spotted in the wild!
posted by The Whelk at 12:46 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


"50$ to anyone who kicks Tim in the nuts on camera" Oh Ustream chat, never change.
posted by The Whelk at 12:49 PM on November 17, 2011




SOMEBODY PLEASE COPY A COUPLE OF THOSE TWITTER PICS TO NON-TWITTER SITES I CAN'T SEE TWITTER AT WORK AND THE SUSPENCE IS KILLING ME HERE
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:50 PM on November 17, 2011


Fight broke out!

"stop! Stop! You're defeating the process!"

Chants of this is a peaceful protest! and drumming out the fighter
posted by The Whelk at 12:50 PM on November 17, 2011


"50$ to anyone who kicks Tim in the nuts on camera"

Fight broke out!

frysquinting.jpg
posted by griphus at 12:51 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Occupy San Diego calls for moment of silence and solidarity

You realize one guy doesn't represent the entirety of a non-hierarchic, leaderless movement, don't you?
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:53 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


Occupy San Diego calls for moment of silence and solidarity for person arrested for shooting at White House (who was later charged with attempting to assassinate President Obama).

The dip asked for a moment of silence for both the White House and the guy that shot at the White House. Still stupid, but there you go. I don't see how it's any worse than the columnists who responded to the Norway massacre by saying that Breivik still had a point about immigrants.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:53 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


You realize one guy doesn't represent the entirety of a non-hierarchic, leaderless movement, don't you?

You realize that everyone attending observed the moment of silence (with at least one guy taking off his hat and holding to his chest), don't you?
posted by BobbyVan at 12:55 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Argh I have to go pick up my daughter. Hope everyone out there stays safe and warm and fed.
posted by tr33hggr at 12:56 PM on November 17, 2011


And yeah, what Ultramod said. How is one guy at OSD being an idiot any different than someone against OWS being an idiot? According to the logic that that guy must represent OSD in some meaningful way, everyone opposed to OWS has the same exact mentality as the guy who tried to hit Occupy Maine with a chemical attack. Either you have solidarity with THAT guy, or we can all choose freely to not associate with kooks.
posted by Sticherbeast at 12:56 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


You realize that everyone attending observed the moment of silence (with at least one guy taking off his hat and holding to his chest), don't you?

Perhaps they were respecting the moment of silence for the White House, which, incidentally, I noticed you left out of your summary.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:56 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


@NYCMayorsOffice: Mayor Bloomberg & Commissioner Kelly about to address the media about the NYPD officer injured at Zuccotti.

guys I rolled my eyes so hard they're stuck call 911
posted by griphus at 12:57 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


So Bloomberg will hold a news conference for every protester who is injured by police, right?

I think at least some, if not most people in the mayor's office would tell you there is a line somewhere between "protestors" and "rioters," and while reasonable people may disagree about where that line falls, nearly all can agree about which characterizes people throwing glass objects at police (or at anyone, really).
posted by red clover at 12:58 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


SOMEBODY PLEASE COPY A COUPLE OF THOSE TWITTER PICS TO NON-TWITTER SITES I CAN'T SEE TWITTER AT WORK AND THE SUSPENCE IS KILLING ME HERE

Empress, here's The Whelk's picture of Union Square, if you can get to imageshack.

Friend of mine took the train out there, just rolled into Penn Station - any suggestions from folks on the ground there about where a new arrival should head?
posted by mstokes650 at 12:59 PM on November 17, 2011


I think at least some, if not most people in the mayor's office would tell you there is a line somewhere between "protestors" and "rioters," and while reasonable people may disagree about where that line falls, nearly all can agree about which characterizes people throwing glass objects at police (or at anyone, really).

I don't understand how this is an answer to the question you were quoting.
posted by mstokes650 at 1:01 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Oh jeeez. Bobbyvan. Please drop the axe. The guy said a moment of silence for the white house and the shooter and there were like 10 people there. I do not see how that means the whole movement supports that! Meanwhile, in NYC thousands of people are in Union Square peacefully assembling.
posted by yertledaturtle at 1:01 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Union Sq numbers at 2,500
posted by The Whelk at 1:02 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I think at least some, if not most people in the mayor's office would tell you there is a line somewhere between "protestors" and "rioters,"

Absolutely. And I am sure that Bloomberg will reasonably make a distinction between the majority of people who are protesting peacefully and the few rioters so as not to paint all the OWS people as dangerous people who must be stopped.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:02 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Union sq has the biggest mob right now. Zuccotti is almost all cops.
posted by modernserf at 1:03 PM on November 17, 2011


Perhaps they were respecting the moment of silence for the White House, which, incidentally, I noticed you left out of your summary.

That's awfully charitable of you. Here's the full statement from the video:
“I think we should have a moment of silence in solidarity for the person they said was from the Washington, D.C. Occupy. Maybe, why did he feel the need to shoot the White House window today? So I think we should have a moment in solidarity for the White House, and for the guy that shot at the White House today. I don’t know if you heard, but someone shot at the White House window today.”
Maybe we should also have a moment of silence and solidarity for the lunatic who left a bomb along the civil rights parade route in Spokane, and for balance we'll also observe a moment of silence and solidarity for the civil rights marchers themselves. No objections? Great, moment of silence observed...
posted by BobbyVan at 1:03 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]




HE GOT GLOVES
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:03 PM on November 17, 2011


Hold up, are we going somewhere? This is so confusing. The power of chanting is amazing.
posted by modernserf at 1:04 PM on November 17, 2011


That's awfully charitable of you.

Well, I like to give 10 people the befit of the doubt, whereas apparently you like to use it to impugn everybody.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:05 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


“I think we should have a moment of silence in solidarity for the person they said was from the Washington, D.C. Occupy. Maybe, why did he feel the need to shoot the White House window today? So I think we should have a moment in solidarity for the White House, and for the guy that shot at the White House today. I don’t know if you heard, but someone shot at the White House window today.”

Yeah, compassion for crazy people as well as for the innocent, fuck that.
posted by kagredon at 1:07 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I notice the NYTimes is linking directly on its front page to the ustream coverage... good stuff.
posted by modernnomad at 1:08 PM on November 17, 2011


I'ma make a song called "Threadshitter"
posted by symbioid at 1:09 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


It'll be the first hit from our band Bad Faith.
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:10 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


Yeah, compassion for crazy people as well as for the innocent, fuck that.

I think BobbyVan is trying to make it into something bigger than it is, but let's be honest, if the shooter had any ties to the Tea Party none of us would be suggesting we have a moment of silence for him.

This is a fluid movement with a lot of people of varying sensibilities -- one person shouldn't be allowed to tarnish the whole thing, but we shouldn't be afraid to point out when people are fucking up too.
posted by modernnomad at 1:11 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


Oh no, solidarity with lawbreakers!

Last Friday, as the Bronx district attorney indicted 11 police officers for fixing tickets on behalf of other officers’ friends and family, hundreds of police union delegates and trustees noisily rallied at the Bronx courthouse in support of the defendants, in a stunning display of contempt for the law. Some of the protesters jeered the district attorney; a few others tried to interfere with cameramen; many held up signs declaring — incredibly — that fixing tickets was part of “NYPD culture.”
posted by furiousxgeorge at 1:11 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


No one's going to argue that the guy from OSD isn't an idiot. The question is, even if the least charitable interpretation is absolutely true, what does that have to do with OWS? Does this mean that if you have allegiance to any sort of organization, if I can find video of people being stupid at any chapter or iteration of that organization anywhere, then that means you as well are culpable for that stupidity?
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:11 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


3-5k people in the streets, spilling out, marching to Foley
posted by The Whelk at 1:12 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Only vaguely related, but Occupy Tampa reports that TPD is joyriding in their tank.

Flames. Flames on the side of my face.
posted by cmyk at 1:13 PM on November 17, 2011


Michael Bloomberg will never, ever, ever be able to run successfully for President.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:13 PM on November 17, 2011


please don't let this thread become about one commenter, again.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:14 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


Yeah, compassion for crazy people as well as for the innocent, fuck that.

I have a sneaking feeling that if a tea party rally held a moment of "silence in solidarity" for Jared Loughner, and threw in a passing reference to solidarity with Gabby as well, we'd have a 2000+ comment FPP in no time. Let's be honest w/ each other.
posted by BobbyVan at 1:14 PM on November 17, 2011


I totally agree with you stitcherbeast.. but this is one possible problem with a non-heirarchical organization that only grows as the organization itself gets bigger. If no-one can speak for it, then everyone can. That's good in many ways, but it also brings with attendant risks that OWS needs to think about, I think.
posted by modernnomad at 1:15 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Jersey barriers going up, thousands of protestors vs. only a few dozen police
posted by The Whelk at 1:15 PM on November 17, 2011


MAN IN MASK KNOCKING OVER BARRIERS
posted by The Whelk at 1:16 PM on November 17, 2011


Let's be honest w/ each other.

OK. You're trying to derail this thread.
posted by dhartung at 1:16 PM on November 17, 2011 [15 favorites]


...many held up signs declaring — incredibly — that fixing tickets was part of “NYPD culture."

No, no, that is, in fact, quite credible and very well documented.
posted by griphus at 1:16 PM on November 17, 2011


Please don't feed the troll, guys.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:16 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Fuck the barriers!!
posted by Skygazer at 1:16 PM on November 17, 2011


He got tackled.

"YOU GOT FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE I DON'T THINK YOU CAN STOP US"
posted by The Whelk at 1:16 PM on November 17, 2011


Let's be honest w/ each other.

When that hypothetical comes true, we can address it.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:17 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Barriers just breaking all over
posted by The Whelk at 1:18 PM on November 17, 2011


is that the audio weapon or his bad mic?
posted by The Whelk at 1:19 PM on November 17, 2011


I think BobbyVan is trying to make it into something bigger than it is, but let's be honest, if the shooter had any ties to the Tea Party none of us would be suggesting we have a moment of silence for him.

I read "Maybe, why did he feel the need to shoot the White House window today?" as a "this guy seems like he was in a pretty dark place, and even though doesn't excuse his actions, we should have some compassion for that", but I haven't actually watched the video, so I can definitely see that interpretation.

(I did have a friend-of-a-friend Facebook acquaintance who posted something gross along the lines of "When will random acts cease to be random? This is your chance to leave." after that guy crashed his plane into an IRS building; the other clear memory I have of that incident is the Metafilter thread where several people expressed "This was a dude who clearly needed help, and though he did a terrible and inexcusable thing, it's still tragic that he didn't get help before then." So I have a maybe weird idea on where to draw the line between empathizing with the aggressor versus sympathizing with his deeds.
posted by kagredon at 1:19 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


(Oh and more horn tooting)
posted by The Whelk at 1:19 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


papers raining on crowd "THIS IS AN OCCUPIED BUILDING, JOIN US"
posted by The Whelk at 1:20 PM on November 17, 2011


Does this mean that if you have allegiance to any sort of organization, if I can find video of people being stupid at any chapter or iteration of that organization anywhere, then that means you as well are culpable for that stupidity?

We had FPP's like this grar'ing and mocking the Tea Party for having a few nuts in their ranks. How quickly would a similar thread mocking OWS be deleted?

At least Tea Party organizers went to great lengths to distance themselves from racists who tended to show up at their rallies, but the charge stuck in the mainstream press and on Metafilter... quite unfairly in my view given the condemnations heard from across the Tea Party leadership.

We can take this to MeTa if necessary, but don't call people threadshitters or trolls simply because they don't want to join your particular populist bandwagon.
posted by BobbyVan at 1:20 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


VEHICLE CLIMBING
posted by The Whelk at 1:21 PM on November 17, 2011


I'ma make a song called "Threadshitter"

I will spouse the person who writes the best Gold Digger parody on the above theme.
posted by KathrynT at 1:21 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


We can take this to MeTa if necessary, but don't call people threadshitters or trolls simply because they don't want to join your particular populist bandwagon.

Or perhaps you can start a thread on the Tea Party.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:21 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Which building is the "occupied building?" One of the New School buildings?
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:22 PM on November 17, 2011


"it's safe to say we have civil unrest here in new York"
posted by The Whelk at 1:22 PM on November 17, 2011


How quickly would a similar thread mocking OWS be deleted?

I don't know, how soon will OWS have a bunch of openly-armed assholes in their ranks holding up signs preaching hate, racism and misogyny? So far I haven't seen any to the Tea Party's plenty.
posted by griphus at 1:22 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


We had FPP's like this grar'ing and mocking the Tea Party for having a few nuts in their ranks.

And those threads are stupid. This is a very Fox News or Conservapedia type reaction, in which the remedy for "bias" is not fairness...it's your own version of bias.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 1:23 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


Gold Digger parody

Goldfinger surely? "Thrrrrrrrrrr-EAD-Shi-tah!"
posted by The Whelk at 1:23 PM on November 17, 2011 [11 favorites]


Am home right now after being at the protest since 7. Got personal experience with police aggression and am home nursing an injured hip thanks to being thrown by a cop. Can hear my husband's drums in background. This is awful. Can't get in touch with him.
posted by stagewhisper at 1:24 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


Well, good job NYPD and Bloomberg. Now you have an urban riot on your hands. I hope you're happy.

I'm not one to go into hysterics over these things, and find OWS a touch melodramatic. However, I do think that it's time to start calling for the mayor's resignation. He's proven himself completely incompetent and out-of-touch while managing these protests.
posted by schmod at 1:24 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


it looks like they're pouring out
posted by The Whelk at 1:25 PM on November 17, 2011


Does this mean that if you have allegiance to any sort of organization, if I can find video of people being stupid at any chapter or iteration of that organization anywhere, then that means you as well are culpable for that stupidity?

To be fair, I am currently judging all Tea Party linkspammers in this thread by BobbyVan's actions.
posted by running order squabble fest at 1:25 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Well, good job NYPD and Bloomberg. Now you have an urban riot on your hands. I hope you're happy.
Don't kick a sleeping dog!
posted by Jumpin Jack Flash at 1:26 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


*taking a page from OWS*

Bunny! Bobby! stop! You're defeating the process!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:27 PM on November 17, 2011


Just got this email:

In case you're not aware, Occupy Seattle rally and march that has the potential for creating major delays on all arterials during the afternoon commute today.

The rally is scheduled to take place between 3:00 and 4:00 PM on the University of Washington campus and then is expected to march west on NE Pacific Street to the University Bridge at roughly 4:30 PM. The demonstrators plan to block the bridge during the afternoon rush hour, so their presence will likely cause traffic delays throughout the afternoon commute – until after 6:30 or 7:00 PM. Demonstrators may also block the Montlake Bridge during that time frame.
posted by chaff at 1:27 PM on November 17, 2011


There's a really interesting chant polyrhythm going on right now.
posted by modernserf at 1:27 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


(to clarify- can hear his drums on this livestream feed and it's horrifying watching possible police brutality.
posted by stagewhisper at 1:27 PM on November 17, 2011


(Seriously, though, guys -- MeTa is over *there.*)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:27 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


All right. No more interaction with Bobby.

MIC CHECK.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:27 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


"we are seeing a desperate response from the police. The officers look visibly shaken - they've been routed...back to Union Square"
posted by The Whelk at 1:28 PM on November 17, 2011


Now you have an urban riot on your hands.

Admittedly all I'm going by is this thread, but this doesn't sound like a riot: no property damage, no looting, no organized attacks on the police, and there's a general lack of violence by the protestors. These are all good things. The city could probably put down an actual riot in Manhattan pretty quick, and it'll be ugly.
posted by griphus at 1:28 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


"I think at least some, if not most people in the mayor's office would tell you there is a line somewhere between "protestors" and "rioters," and while reasonable people may disagree about where that line falls, nearly all can agree about which characterizes people throwing glass objects at police (or at anyone, really)."

Right, so the mayor's office will be honoring all the protestors — not rioters — who were injured by the police today?
posted by klangklangston at 1:28 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


possible Black Bloc agents in crowd, look alive people
posted by The Whelk at 1:29 PM on November 17, 2011


griphus: "How quickly would a similar thread mocking OWS be deleted?

I don't know, how soon will OWS have a bunch of openly-armed assholes in their ranks holding up signs preaching hate, racism and misogyny? So far I haven't seen any to the Tea Party's plenty.
"

Maybe it's just because I'm somewhat lukewarm on OWS, but I do think that the "professional rioters" mentioned upthread can and should be called out. For OWS to be successful, nothing about it should be beyond reproach. It's especially important that they don't appoint any batshit crazy people as leaders, and treat whatever they say as canon.

A populist movement is all well and good, but they are not all created equally. I wouldn't mind if OWS were seen as a pseudo-legitimate voice in American politics that was taken seriously by the legislature. I would, however mind if it turned into a misguided stewpot of anti-intellectualism.
posted by schmod at 1:31 PM on November 17, 2011 [7 favorites]


Huge mass of people marching down broadway, so I guess the containment isn't working
posted by The Whelk at 1:32 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


"they warned us about you you're always recording."
posted by The Whelk at 1:33 PM on November 17, 2011


DC's Key Bridge live coverage.
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:34 PM on November 17, 2011


Admittedly all I'm going by is this thread, but this doesn't sound like a riot: no property damage, no looting, no organized attacks on the police, and there's a general lack of violence by the protestors.

Agreed. Right now this just sounds like "a fuck of a lot of people in a spontaneous protest."

Mind you, the potential for panic if any of the police or the protestors start to tussle could be another thing entirely.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:34 PM on November 17, 2011


stagewhisper, ice up, and get to urgent care if you have trouble walking. Thanks for being out there.
posted by ignignokt at 1:34 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Surely now Bloomberg will comment on the injury to Romania, right?
posted by jaduncan at 1:35 PM on November 17, 2011


huge police response, but the drums are at the front and the march is moving
posted by The Whelk at 1:35 PM on November 17, 2011


My only complaint with Ustream is that I keep expecting the Cloverfield monster to appear.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:37 PM on November 17, 2011 [9 favorites]


AND IT'S IN SOILDARITY
posted by The Whelk at 1:37 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]




Holy shit guys we got Catwoman.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:41 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I bet Bloomberg is sounding increasingly nasal and petulant at the moment, wherever he is.
posted by angrycat at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Unmarked vehicles. Covered up badges. Shame indeed.
posted by deanklear at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011


BREAKING: ALL OF OWS WAS ORCHESTRATED TO SET UP THE SEQUEL TO ELLA ENCHANTED
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


Yeah that's mr. stagewhisper you are hearing on the drums Whelk.
posted by stagewhisper at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


She makes a derail in my RSS feed
Yeah she's a triflin' MeFite indeed
Oh she's a threadshitter, droppin' comments that are brown
Putting the GRAR in me
posted by argonauta at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Surely a threadshitter song should be a parody of Pat Benetar's "Heart Breaker". At least it is in my head.
posted by X-Himy at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011


the police are blocking the streets and pushing the march onto the sidewalks...
posted by The Whelk at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011


Holy shit guys we got Catwoman.

Julie Newmar?
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:42 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Eartha Kitt!
posted by orrnyereg at 1:44 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


It's so weird seeing smiling faces in the honking cars.
posted by modernserf at 1:44 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


30 FOOT TALL EARTHA KITT EMERGES FROM THE HUDSON, SUPPORTS OWS
posted by The Whelk at 1:45 PM on November 17, 2011 [15 favorites]


Send my congrats to mr. Stagewhisper for keeping the energy up!
posted by The Whelk at 1:47 PM on November 17, 2011


(They brought some fireworks)
Well I ain't sayin' he's a threadshitter
(Violent indeed)
But he ain't postin' 'bout The Whelk's Twitter
Quiet down, kid, you're not concerned (I gotta say)
Quiet down, kid, you're not concerned (I gotta say)
Quiet down, kid, you're not concerned (I gotta say)
posted by shakespeherian at 1:47 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


In my script, at precisely 5pm the entire protest melts away suddenly into the surrounding streets with everyone going home from the office ... leaving the mayor, the media and the cops completely baffled. And tomorrow morning at 9am twice as many people materialize out of nowhere.... freshly rested and ready for ANOTHER DAY AT WORK.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:48 PM on November 17, 2011 [13 favorites]


Reports that Foley square is already full
posted by The Whelk at 1:49 PM on November 17, 2011


You know, I don't think I actually know anyone who works exactly 9AM - 5PM. My old hours were 8:30 - 5, now I work 9 - 5:30.
posted by griphus at 1:50 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Reports that crowd is just getting bigger....
posted by The Whelk at 1:51 PM on November 17, 2011


(I work 9AM to 5PM...officially. In reality, it's longer.)
posted by zerbinetta at 1:51 PM on November 17, 2011


report of an entire branch of the march still stuck on 5th Ave
posted by The Whelk at 1:53 PM on November 17, 2011


9-5? When do you eat lunch?
posted by shakespeherian at 1:53 PM on November 17, 2011




I imagine it will get bigger as those with a day job they couldn't leave can get away and join.
posted by Defenestrator at 1:55 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I want Henry The Legal Aide's glasses SO BADLY.
posted by The Whelk at 1:56 PM on November 17, 2011


OH MAN THEY ARE SINGING MY SPIRIT ANIMAL SONG
posted by The Whelk at 1:56 PM on November 17, 2011


I like how Henry is a recurring character who just pops up every once in a while.
posted by Skygazer at 1:57 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


9-5? When do you eat lunch?

I wasn't the person who said this, but my hunch is "at my desk when I get five minutes to run and get a sandwich, or -- on really crazy days -- a bag of chips from the vending machine."

This is how a lot of office people live.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:57 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


9-5? When do you eat lunch?

I subsist entirely on the pride of a job well done and also stolen office supplies.
posted by griphus at 1:58 PM on November 17, 2011 [10 favorites]


schmod: ": " I would, however mind if it turned into a misguided stewpot of anti-intellectualism."

Well thank god that they're trying to get the library back up and going - if you're looking for anti-intellectualism - it's with the party that's destroying the books, not the ones who made a library for their movement.
posted by symbioid at 1:58 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


My office is 8-5 so's there's an hour to eat. I always sort of thought the 9-5er thing didn't make sense.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:59 PM on November 17, 2011


THE MARCHES ARE MERGING
posted by The Whelk at 1:59 PM on November 17, 2011


(shakespeherian, I get an hour lunch, so it's basically 7 hours a day, but a full-time salary job. I sometimes eat at my desk, but am always being told by my managers that I should take my hour break.)
posted by zerbinetta at 2:00 PM on November 17, 2011


9-5? When do you eat lunch?

At my 9-5 workplace, we only get paid for 7 hours a day, with a free hour for lunch. Sometimes we take that hour, sometimes we don't, depending on how busy we are.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:00 PM on November 17, 2011


MY ILLUSIONS OF THE 8-HOUR WORKDAY ARE CRUMBLING
posted by shakespeherian at 2:01 PM on November 17, 2011


it's with the party that's destroying the books, not the ones who made a library for their movement.

This disingenuous meme needs to end. The library was part of OWS's illegal encampment in Zuccotti Park, and was removed with the tents, the commissary, and the piles of moldy laundry. Why not support the real people's library?
posted by BobbyVan at 2:02 PM on November 17, 2011


this is the best movie you guys
posted by The Whelk at 2:03 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


It was an illegal library, you see.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 2:03 PM on November 17, 2011 [13 favorites]


Whelk, thanks again for your awesome updates. I am verklempt and missing NYC for the first time in years.
posted by emjaybee at 2:03 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Considering one needs to surrender most human and Constitutional rights at the workplace, I suppose we should feel lucky people get to eat at all.
posted by Skygazer at 2:05 PM on November 17, 2011


Man do I wish there was a mute button.
posted by desjardins at 2:05 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


overhead cam
posted by The Whelk at 2:05 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Oh man, rumor is that Butcher Bill, his gang of Nativists, the 40 Thieves, the Daybreak Boys, the Shirt Tails, and the Broadway Mob is all gathering at Five Points and are planning a regular rowdy dow.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 2:06 PM on November 17, 2011 [13 favorites]


Why not support the real people's library?

Public libraries do not accept donated books. The Zucotti Park and Occupy Libraries do.

Why not support BOTH types of People's Libraries? Why not support ALL kinds of libraries? All of them are "real" libraries. No one kind of library is any more or less "real."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:06 PM on November 17, 2011 [20 favorites]


actually, helicopter looks like, possibly the one you can hear in the ustream

I'm getting a disturbing Mr. Universe feeling now
posted by The Whelk at 2:06 PM on November 17, 2011


massive sirens
posted by desjardins at 2:07 PM on November 17, 2011


This is truly amazing to watch unfold.
posted by defenestration at 2:07 PM on November 17, 2011


What stream are you guys on?
posted by deanklear at 2:07 PM on November 17, 2011


I'm getting a disturbing Mr. Universe feeling now

(flexes muscles)
posted by Sticherbeast at 2:08 PM on November 17, 2011


Seeing a lot of cops in riot gear now.
posted by modernserf at 2:08 PM on November 17, 2011




So I'm in Brooklyn and I sure am getting some "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" feelings here. OH WELL BACK TO MY PDFS AND SPREADSHEETS TAPPA TAPPA TAPPA
posted by griphus at 2:09 PM on November 17, 2011 [12 favorites]


I'm up on the 50's and 6th Ave, about to leave work -- just heard sirens going by. Am about to get on the subway and head home, directly underneath all of this. I have to pick something up in Brooklyn (can't avoid that) but may stay up; I live just on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge from this. Something tells me to stay up for a while tonight.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:09 PM on November 17, 2011


'Where were you the walls came down, Grandpa?'

'Oh, you know, bullshitting on the internet.'
posted by shakespeherian at 2:10 PM on November 17, 2011 [13 favorites]


You provided information and entertainment to the primate Thought Sphere Net.
posted by The Whelk at 2:10 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Yikes, EmpressCallipygos. I just can't stop thinking how scary it'd be if a flaming homeless guy came running out at you.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 2:11 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


nypd asking us to vacate the airspace so we're going to lose the shot
posted by nomisxid at 2:11 PM on November 17, 2011


OMIGOD I AM GOING TO BUY EVERYONE ON USTREAM A STEADICAM
posted by shakespeherian at 2:12 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


So I'm in Brooklyn and I sure am getting some "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" feelings here. OH WELL BACK TO MY PDFS AND SPREADSHEETS TAPPA TAPPA TAPPA

Been feeling like this all week.
posted by good day merlock at 2:12 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Chopper 4 just told by NYPD to move -- they are closing airspace over protests
posted by The Whelk at 2:12 PM on November 17, 2011


And moral support to those of who are able to be there!
posted by stagewhisper at 2:13 PM on November 17, 2011


OMENS
posted by The Whelk at 2:13 PM on November 17, 2011


"Bloomberg: beware. Zuccotti Park is everywhere."
posted by defenestration at 2:13 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


Why not support BOTH types of People's Libraries? Why not support ALL kinds of libraries? All of them are "real" libraries. No one kind of library is any more or less "real."

It's not like the only alternative to the NYPL is a raggedy bookshelf in a public-access park. There are plenty of other places to share leftist/activist literature. Don't pretend like the police are coming after the books you read just because your stack of reading material got swept up with the rest of your urban bivouac.
posted by BobbyVan at 2:13 PM on November 17, 2011


So- able to talk to the Mr. He's now at Foley so that's a different drummer on the stream now. He say Foley is absolutely packed. No room at the inn.
posted by stagewhisper at 2:14 PM on November 17, 2011


Overhead helicopter showing a huge truck placed diagonally on Lafayette and Canal streets to get the crowd out of the street and diffuse it as it heads to Foley Square. it's re-drecting the march to Centre street.
posted by Skygazer at 2:14 PM on November 17, 2011


Closing airspace so they can fly their own cop choppers in there and blanket the area with teargas from above no doubt. Probably also put up a few multi-kilowatt cell scramblers too. Since it's dark now the cops are going to feel a lot more free to cut loose. "I've got a bad feeling about this..."
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:15 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


When everyone is packed into the square Bloomberg will unleash MECHA BANKER.
posted by The Whelk at 2:15 PM on November 17, 2011 [12 favorites]


and then Spider-man will save us
posted by The Whelk at 2:16 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


and then Spider-man will save us

I've been reading Joshreads too long to think Spider-man can save anyone.
posted by drezdn at 2:17 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


griphus: So I'm in Brooklyn and I sure am getting some "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?"

There isn't just the Human Mic, there's the Cyber-Human Mic (which would be us), sometimes the echo is larger than the explosion.
posted by titus-g at 2:17 PM on November 17, 2011


MeTa'd
posted by symbioid at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I've been reading Joshreads too long to think Spider-man can save anyone.

Then 30-foot Eartha Kitt will have to do it.
posted by orrnyereg at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Interestingly, CBS's helicopter feed hasn't been banished yet.
posted by nomisxid at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2011


From Twitter:

NBCNewYork NBC New York
Chopper 4 just told by NYPD to move -- they are closing airspace over protests. #OWS #N17

Stay safe, Whelk, all.
posted by emjaybee at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


...blanket the area with teargas from above...

Considering how tightly-packed everything is down there, I doubt they'll be doing that. Way, way too many bystanders and businesses to worry about. Plus, if tear gas gets into the intake valves on the larger buildings, they'll have to evacuate them, which gets the FDNY mixed up in all this and then there will be hell to pay.
posted by griphus at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


One of the things that "Rescue Me" got right is the feelings firefighters harbor towards cops.
posted by wintermind at 2:20 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


teargassing an area as dense as downtown Manhattan would cross the line into cartoonish supervilliany
posted by The Whelk at 2:20 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


I wonder if tonight is another night of the long knives for King Bloomberg and his DHS experts and Wall Street Mafia to suppress the news people and arrest as many marchers as possible.
posted by Skygazer at 2:20 PM on November 17, 2011


Occupy synthesizers.
posted by modernserf at 2:21 PM on November 17, 2011


Speaking of DHS -- is it confirmed that they were involved in the conference call between the cities about police assaults on the OWS camps?
posted by inigo2 at 2:21 PM on November 17, 2011




Closing the airspace above the protest? Disgusting.
posted by jokeefe at 2:23 PM on November 17, 2011


inigo2, if it did happen, all of that has been deemed classified as a national security issue, so we'll never know.
posted by deanklear at 2:24 PM on November 17, 2011


Just want to pop in and mention... the whole point of 99%, as near as I figure, is that you're part of it just by virtue of how much money you make vis a vis the 1%. As satisfying as it can be to compare and contrast the OWS movement with the Tea Party movement, the truth is, for better or worse, nearly all of them are very much part of the 99%. Not the folks funding them, to be sure, but the Tea Partier racist in a tricorne hat hooked up to a paid-for-by-medicaire oxygen tank is just as oppressed by the 1% as the rest of us. The 53% are almost all, to a person, subsumed within the 99%.

In fact, they are in an arguably more tragic situation because they don't realize how screwed they are. There is a certain freedom to act that comes from the recognition that you're screwed.

It is in the interest of the 1% to keep us divided into 99%ers, OWSers, 52%, Tea Partiers, or what have you. Yes, there are huge issues that distinguish us from each other. But there are also huge issues that effect all of us.

Let's get economic justice together and then take out the proverbial knives over the other issues. Every time we get sucked into "us against the tea party" or "us against the police," the message about how Wall Street has committed major crimes that have screwed up the entire world gets buried a little. The fact that the government has been working in collusion with the CEOs to make sure they get a pat on the wrist and the right to screw us all again gets buried a little. The fact that the government, right now, is working to screw the middle and lower class to preserve tax cuts for corporate jets gets buried a little.

Some people won't be able to be persuaded by facts or reality and, in fact, won't get out of the boiling water until they've turned into tasty soup for the 1%. If they've made that choice, no amount of us standing around yelling at them for being a moron is going to fix the problem. The best we can do for them is to ignore them and go for the hand that's turning up the heat.

I guess what I'm saying is feel compassion for people who don't realize they're getting screwed, but don't let them distract us from focusing on the very real problems that we're all facing.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:24 PM on November 17, 2011 [30 favorites]


Not sure if this was posted in my absence, but a reporter for the right wing Daily Caller is on record as saying the police assaulted her and the protesters helped her.
posted by stagewhisper at 2:25 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


For those of us not intimately familiar with downtown NYC - what's the circular thing in the middle of Foley Square? It was previously empty, but people are starting to get into it now.
posted by LionIndex at 2:25 PM on November 17, 2011


"Corporate or student ID" to get on Wall Street, apparently.

well, that's unlawful
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 2:26 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I wonder if tonight is another night of the long knives

Oh come on. A little bit of perspective, please.
posted by empath at 2:27 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


This is what downtown manhattan looked like today
posted by The Whelk at 5:22 PM on November 17 [+] [!]


Those photos are amazing.
posted by winna at 2:28 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Those photos need to be all over the television.
posted by wintermind at 2:29 PM on November 17, 2011


Scooter cops and police vans filling intersection on NE corner of Foley Square:
posted by The Whelk at 2:31 PM on November 17, 2011


The problem with the Occupy movement is that the police are unable to enumerate any clear or realistic demands, and their ranks have been polluted by aggressive young men who mistakenly believe they can use violence to effect social change.
posted by compartment at 2:32 PM on November 17, 2011 [20 favorites]


I'm about 4 people to the right out of the frame of the first photo, and linking arms out of the frame to the left in the fifth photo. Those were taken at our soft linked arm blockade at Broad and Beaver.
posted by stagewhisper at 2:33 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


"whoa whoa whoa...sorry to break off...Foley Square is shoulder to shoulder"
posted by The Whelk at 2:33 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


DHS denies role in OWS evictions.

I don't buy it. Look at the similarity in tactics and how closely together they all took place. Also, there is word that the men in plainclothes with bright yellow vest are DHS consultants. And I definitely saw figures like that at Zuccotti the night after the eviction, making adjustments to the crowd control and police presence. Supposedly, if you ask them if they're DHS, they must identify themselves.
posted by Skygazer at 2:33 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


"the unions are here"
posted by The Whelk at 2:34 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


"Easily ten thousand ..this is amazing"
posted by The Whelk at 2:34 PM on November 17, 2011


The whole reality-documentary thing that http://www.ustream.tv/theother99 has going on is wonderful.

If you watch even watch one insurrection this year, watch this one, NOW!
posted by titus-g at 2:36 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


Compartment: The problem with the Occupy movement is that the police are unable to enumerate any clear or realistic demands, and their ranks have been polluted by aggressive young men who mistakenly believe they can use violence to effect social change.

Well gee, that doesn't sound scripted at all. AT ALL.

Along with being false and part of the winger spin....
posted by Skygazer at 2:37 PM on November 17, 2011


this way better then that star trek insurrection
posted by The Whelk at 2:37 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


they have amplification at Foley
posted by The Whelk at 2:38 PM on November 17, 2011


thinking back to January when I was following egyptian livestreams through back-doored al-jazeera internet feeds via my linux command line... This one's a lot easier to watch!
posted by kaibutsu at 2:39 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Historic: Lower Manhattan now has an excuse for its insane traffic snarl.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:39 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Supposedly, if you ask them if they're DHS, they must identify themselves.

Supposedly that's true of undercover cops as well, but it's definitely not true, so I'd take that with a shaker of salt.
posted by flaterik at 2:39 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Skygazer: I think he had a hamburger in his mouth when he said that...
posted by titus-g at 2:40 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Along with being false and part of the winger spin....

I think you missed an important noun in Compartment's sentence, there:

The problem with the Occupy movement is that the police are unable to enumerate any clear or realistic demands

posted by mstokes650 at 2:41 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


@NBCNewYork: CORRECTION: Chopper 4 pilot misunderstood directions from the tower. He was NOT ordered out of airspace over protests. #OWS #N17
posted by griphus at 2:41 PM on November 17, 2011


Helicopter over Foley HUGE CROWD
posted by The Whelk at 2:41 PM on November 17, 2011


What flaterik said. Plus, they're not vampires. There isn't some law of nature forcing them to identify themselves. Even if such a rule officially existed, dudes would just lie.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:41 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Supposedly, if you ask them if they're DHS, they must identify themselves.

Supposedly that's true of undercover cops as well, but it's definitely not true, so I'd take that with a shaker of salt.


Yeah, given there's been lots of episodes involving taping over names and numbers, disclosure seems unlikely.
posted by stagewhisper at 2:42 PM on November 17, 2011


Plus, they're not vampires. There isn't some law of nature forcing them to identify themselves.

You also don't have to invite them in before they break into your house.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:43 PM on November 17, 2011 [8 favorites]


Man, this is like the Indie Media revolution finally hit prime time. Took about ten years and a few massive technological leaps since its original inception, but here we are...
posted by kaibutsu at 2:44 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


What's the circular thing in the middle of Foley Square?

Triumph of the Human Spirit. A monument by Lorenzo Pace commemorating the African Burial Ground that was excavated during construction nearby.
posted by dhartung at 2:44 PM on November 17, 2011


Oh man I want vampire cops now.
posted by The Whelk at 2:45 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Vampires are not part of the 99% you guys! NO BLOOD FOR BLOOD!
posted by emjaybee at 2:46 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


kids from the children's brigade on the occupynyc live feed.

you can't stop us

because we are the kids

and when you try to push us down

we're gonna fight fight fight
posted by Wuggie Norple at 2:47 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Be careful of what you wish for, The Whelk-y.
posted by Skygazer at 2:47 PM on November 17, 2011


1% of the Vampires bite 99% of the necks
posted by The Whelk at 2:47 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Hey, Whelk, would you settle for Zombie cops? (best song evar, btw)
posted by kaibutsu at 2:47 PM on November 17, 2011


they're still mic checking but with ...mics. Old habits die hard I guess
posted by The Whelk at 2:48 PM on November 17, 2011


sorry, coming in late. Is someone going to be speaking? anyone in particular? What are the crowd estimates?
posted by Think_Long at 2:49 PM on November 17, 2011


Zombie-o, zombie (Zombie-o, zombie)Zombie-o, zombie (Zombie-o, zombie)
Zombie no go go, unless you tell him to go (Zombie)
Zombie no go stop, unless you tell him to stop (Zombie)
Zombie no go turn, unless you tell him to turn (Zombie)
Zombie no go think, unless you tell him to think (Zombie)
Tell him to go straight
A joro, jara, joro
No break, no job, no sense
A joro, jara, joro
Tell him to go kill
A joro, jara, joro
No break, no job, no sense
A joro, jara, joro
Tell am to go quench
A joro, jara, joro
No break, no job, no sense
A joro, jara, joro
Go and kill! (Joro, jaro, joro)
Go and die! (Joro, jaro, joro)
posted by kaibutsu at 2:49 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I don't buy it. Look at the similarity in tactics and how closely together they all took place. Also, there is word that the men in plainclothes with bright yellow vest are DHS consultants. And I definitely saw figures like that at Zuccotti the night after the eviction, making adjustments to the crowd control and police presence. Supposedly, if you ask them if they're DHS, they must identify themselves.

Uh, what DHS agency would even be involved? What agency would even have jurisdiction?

these are the law enforcement agencies of DHS:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Infrastructure Protection and Security Directorate (Federal Protective Service, protects buildings and Federal employees)
Transportation Security Administration
Federal Air Marshals Service
U.S. Coast Guard
U.S. Secret Service.

None of these components have an ounce of jurisdiction to enforce local law on these issues. Not to mention that the Administration wants nothing to do with dealing with this matter at all, one way or another.

As for the tactics, you do know that police have a whole set of professional standards that most larger police forces use, right?

Focus needs to be on what OWS can continue to do for the country.
posted by Ironmouth at 2:50 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Whoa. I can see the blue tent on the CBS feed where the Ustream guy is standing. Mindblown.
posted by Big_B at 2:50 PM on November 17, 2011


Chopper 4 just told by NYPD to move -- they are closing airspace over protests.

Airspace is within the FAA's jurisdiction. But the NYPD has shown that it doesn't care about the law except when it can use it to beat you over the head.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 2:50 PM on November 17, 2011


NBCNewYork: CORRECTION: Chopper 4 pilot misunderstood directions from the tower. He was NOT ordered out of airspace over protests. #OWS #N17
posted by Brainy at 2:52 PM on November 17, 2011


(also, I hope you're doing ok stagewhisper and that mr. stagewhisper is all right as well. as well as, uh, thousands of people.)
posted by Wuggie Norple at 2:52 PM on November 17, 2011


Whoa. I can see the blue tent on the CBS feed where the Ustream guy is standing. Mindblown.

This will come is really handy when we edit the music video.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:53 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I think you missed an important noun in Compartment's sentence, there:

The problem with the Occupy movement is that the police are unable to enumerate any clear or realistic demands


Ah, my mistake then, Compartment in thinking you were referring to the marchers.

But taking you comment the other way, I think most of the young cops in blue, probably have misgivings about this sort of police behavior. It really seems to be the old white shirt bulls, who seem especially eager about employing aggressive violence, almost as if they were eager to impress the mayor and Wall Street, and as we've learned, the White Shirts have very close and financially lucrative special ties to Wall Street through the Paid Detail Units which can be hired by Wall Street.

Giving them the air of a private army for Bloomberg as well.
posted by Skygazer at 2:54 PM on November 17, 2011


Who was it denying the Other99 access?

I've kinda run into the anti-photography crowd before... not a fan (to put it mildly).
posted by titus-g at 2:55 PM on November 17, 2011


None of these components have an ounce of jurisdiction to enforce local law on these issues.

I agree 100%; that's why I asked my question, after reports that DHS was a participant in the conference call the other day.
posted by inigo2 at 2:55 PM on November 17, 2011


teargassing an area as dense as downtown Manhattan would cross the line into cartoonish supervilliany


Specifically, Jack Nicholson as The Joker in the Tim Burton Batman.
posted by running order squabble fest at 2:56 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Not even DA Billy Dee Williams can stop them.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:58 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


cbs skycam is down?
posted by Think_Long at 3:00 PM on November 17, 2011


I gotta give it to DC's NBC 4. Along with the live feed I linked to above, they led with Occupy DC, and emphasized how orderly and peaceful it all was.
posted by MrMoonPie at 3:00 PM on November 17, 2011


Can't catch up on all these comments and daughter wants to play Busytown, of all things.

Can someone tell me if there are any reports on Romania, and what is Blak Bloc?
posted by tr33hggr at 3:01 PM on November 17, 2011


Crowd is on the move to the bridge?
posted by Big_B at 3:02 PM on November 17, 2011


@stagewhisper where are you in the crowd now? I'm running out of battery but I want to keep up with this thread.
posted by modernserf at 3:02 PM on November 17, 2011


For CBS: When it goes down, refresh (using the button below the video). This is so confusing without sound.
posted by good day merlock at 3:04 PM on November 17, 2011


It looks like most of the interrupts on the CBS feed are between the chopper and the ground, not ustream and me, YMMV.
posted by nomisxid at 3:06 PM on November 17, 2011


20,000 people?!

Uh, what DHS agency would even be involved? What agency would even have jurisdiction

Ironmouth, DHS oversees a massive apparatus, and a great deal of it surveills domestically, coordinates hundreds of different local and federal agencies and has agencies other than the ones you listed for domestic action.

There was a great FRONTLINE on this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/are-we-safer/
Washington Post's Dana Priest reports on the sprawling post-9/11 terrorism-industrial complex — and its growing reach into the lives of ordinary Americans.

Hundreds of billions of dollars that must be justified, somehow.
posted by Skygazer at 3:06 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


The ad gets longer every time you refresh, by the way—as far as I can tell.
posted by good day merlock at 3:06 PM on November 17, 2011


You can hear the choppers overhead on the Other99 live feed, scary.

Wonder how many police are used in Times Square on New Year's Eve?
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:08 PM on November 17, 2011


Sorry, I'm still getting caught up. Is this a march to somewhere, or a rally in Zucotti?
posted by Think_Long at 3:09 PM on November 17, 2011


Concept seems to be rally in Foley Square, followed by marching to bridges. There is a lot of stuff going on, and it isn't really coordinated per se. Individual groups seem to be self-directed.
posted by dhartung at 3:11 PM on November 17, 2011


Think they're marching to the brooklyn bridge
posted by kaibutsu at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2011


Thanks for the link, Skygazer. I think there is evidence, at least in NYC, to suggest that some of the police brutality is coming from the top down. On the whole, though, I think police forces are far too tolerant of brutality. That culture of tolerance needs to change. I apologize if this was linked upthread, but I think this is relevant:


posted by compartment at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2011


The guy on the Other 99 Ustream says they're going to the Brooklyn Bridge.
posted by deborah at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2011


Think_Long, I think everyone is trying to get to Foley Sq but the crowd is so huge, it's spilling out. Something about trying to get to the Brooklyn Bridge?
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2011


Ironmouth, I personally saw DHS members (yes, they have Homeland Security emblazoned on their jackets as well as police vehicles with Homeland Security written on their sides at Broadway and Wall street around 7:30 a.m. and also at Zuccotti.
posted by stagewhisper at 3:12 PM on November 17, 2011 [8 favorites]


protest spills into the streets, shouting on the live cam "keep going! keep going!"
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:14 PM on November 17, 2011


They were trying to get to the Brooklyn Bridge, they were deterred once and are circling around south, I believe, via City Hall.

via @BreakingNews: @nydailynews reports police blocking protesters as they attempt to access Brooklyn Bridge bit.ly/uqBY4i
posted by good day merlock at 3:15 PM on November 17, 2011


Wrong link for the bit.ly: correct
posted by good day merlock at 3:15 PM on November 17, 2011


modernserf no I am home now icing my cop-induced injury and watching the livestream. Mr. stagewhisper is still there.
posted by stagewhisper at 3:16 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


For those that don't know - the Foley Square rally was permitted and put on by United New York.
posted by Big_B at 3:18 PM on November 17, 2011


Yeah, you don't need to be in "FEMA camps!" territory to believe that DHS can easily justify jurisdiction here, particularly in Lower Manhattan with its plethora of federal facilities. The role that DHS plays in training and coordinating with local law enforcement also morphs pretty easily into consulting on tactics.
posted by dhartung at 3:18 PM on November 17, 2011


Liveblogging from nydailynews is a bit bigger picture than the ustream.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:20 PM on November 17, 2011


Massive line of NYPD cars coming down west side highway. At 14th St.
posted by spitbull at 3:21 PM on November 17, 2011


In my script, at precisely 5pm the entire protest melts away suddenly into the surrounding streets with everyone going home from the office ... leaving the mayor, the media and the cops completely baffled. And tomorrow morning at 9am twice as many people materialize out of nowhere.... freshly rested and ready for ANOTHER DAY AT WORK.

Possible dialog for said script:

Cop: Mornin' Ralph

Single Protester: Mornin' Sam
All protesters: MORNIN' SAM
posted by formless at 3:21 PM on November 17, 2011 [31 favorites]




Sign on Brooklyn Bridge: "PEDS ON ROADWAY / SUBJECT TO ARREST" #ows #N17
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:26 PM on November 17, 2011


The CBS cam has just been hovering over the cops on the Brooklyn Bridge for a while. Where is the march?
posted by good day merlock at 3:28 PM on November 17, 2011


I don't understand how Luke Rutowski can support the Yankees like that.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:28 PM on November 17, 2011


I like the experienced and tough quality the union members give the crowd now! There is NO WAY IN HELL Bloomberg the despot will allow these folks from Unite, SEIU/1199, UAW, etc etc...get arrested or gassed.


I hope.

But who knows, the fumes from El Bloombito's fleet of private jet's are clearly deteriorating his brain and bringing out his small-man-with-a-bazillion-dollars / Neopolean complex.


Midget 1% judge-shopping Fucker.

posted by Skygazer at 3:30 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


It looks like everyone is headed to the bridge, good day merlock, which is probably why they're focused on that.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:30 PM on November 17, 2011


Just trying to figure out how close they're getting—hard to tell context in this grainy box. Nick Pinto from the Village Voice (I think?) helping out @macfathom: March stalled at entrance to bridge. Bottleneck, though, not blockage. #OWS #n17
posted by good day merlock at 3:33 PM on November 17, 2011


Nothing at all is keeping the police from making lawful arrests for outrageous fraud in the banking sector. What exactly is the holdup?

Heh.

There is an answer, though: arresting someone for white-collar crime typically involves a significant amount of time and expense, as everything is buried behind facades and reams of paper; often, even if you have a clear case that a crime has been committed, you can't identify the victim, or the victim does not even realize a crime has occurred.

By comparison, arresting someone for being violent to another human being is an easy-to-identify crime, one easily dealt with.

That's why it is so important to stop doing business with the kinds of companies that perpetrate white collar crime, from the companies that use sweatshops to the banks that break laws in the name of additional profits. The law enforcement agencies can't do much, and the motivator for these crimes is typically simple greed, so if these companies can't make money, they will fold. It is everyone else's money they want, so it takes everyone else withholding their money to solve that problem.

Unfortunately, even that can be difficult, because that does not describe all companies or all banks. So we have the same difficulty in making those judgements for ourselves as law enforcement agencies do in enforcing laws against white-collar crime.
posted by davejay at 3:34 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Unions at the front of the march. All colors and ages here. "this is what democracy looks like."
posted by modernserf at 3:35 PM on November 17, 2011


The Other Other 99.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:35 PM on November 17, 2011


60 arrests at the foot of the bridge, councilman arrested. Not the first time a councilperson's gotten injured or arrested.
posted by good day merlock at 3:35 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm on the fountain in Foley Square. It looks like the march is at a standstill. I can't see from here if the cops have blocked it or if it's going so slow bc they're actually using the narrow pedestrian walkway.
posted by Mavri at 3:36 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


and note that one thing police are good at, and trained in, is blue-collar crime. right now, from their perspective, OWS is blue-collar crime, and yet it isn't, and on some level they know it, so a lot of that training is going out the window and a lot of terrible things are happening. I'm not excusing the terrible behavior, just pointing out that we have not really set up a society that is good at handling this sort of thing.
posted by davejay at 3:36 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]




Why is the goal to cross the bridge? I feel like they should have picked a destination that wouldn't end up with everyone getting stalled like they are now.
posted by Defenestrator at 3:36 PM on November 17, 2011


Not sure. Symbolic? It's where the first mass arrests were in NYC, I think.... I know there's a crowd in Brooklyn, too, maybe marching from the other side?

I guess they skipped the subway portion of the evening, or did I miss that?
posted by good day merlock at 3:39 PM on November 17, 2011


The two streamers meet!
posted by defenestration at 3:41 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


From occupywallst.org: "Afterwards we will march to our bridges. Let's make it as musical a march as possible - bring your songs, your voice, your spirit! Our "Musical" on the bridge will culminate in a festival of light as we mark the two-month anniversary of the #occupy movement, and our commitment to shining light into our broken economic and political system."

at first I wondered if they had gotten a fireworks permit. It would be a hilarious and shining example of NYC's odd bureaucracy that they would be able to get a fireworks permit, while still being the NYPD's #1 most wanted.
posted by good day merlock at 3:42 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


massive cheering as a 99% bat signal is projected on a building.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:46 PM on November 17, 2011 [9 favorites]


DaveJay: There is an answer, though: arresting someone for white-collar crime typically involves a significant amount of time and expense, as everything is buried behind facades and reams of paper; often, even if you have a clear case that a crime has been committed, you can't identify the victim, or the victim does not even realize a crime has occurred.

I can see how difficult it can be, but if you have the right people in place, and the right funding and the correct methods and (most importantly) the political will, it can be done, and it can be done effectively.

IT MUST BE DONE. THERE'S NO CHOICE IN THE MATTER. WALL STREET IS INCREDIBLY BROKEN AND DANGEROUS TO THE ECONOMIC FUTURE.
posted by Skygazer at 3:48 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Another bat signal.
posted by Defenestrator at 3:48 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


@NYTMetro: Bloodied Zuccotti protester, Brandon Watts, charged with attempted assault and larceny. #OWS
posted by defenestration at 3:53 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


@NYTMetro: Bloodied Zuccotti protester, Brandon Watts, charged with attempted assault and larceny. #OWS

He tried to steal a policeman's baton with his head, clearly.
posted by Jehan at 3:54 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


This is Brandon Watts earlier today.
posted by Skygazer at 3:55 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


@amNewYork NYPD just told us that 242 people have been arrested total today; reports say about 60 more arrests at B'klyn Bridge
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:55 PM on November 17, 2011


But Bloomberg says "less than a thousand" in the protest. So he's saying that fully 1/4th of the protesters have been arrested? Sure.
posted by Errant at 3:58 PM on November 17, 2011


The doctor on the other99 right now is my new hero.
posted by penduluum at 3:58 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


"I had a patient who came in with a broken leg.... he told me to do the bare minimum, I cannot afford this." - doctor on Other99 livestream, holding a sign "I want to provide health care, not wealth care"
posted by Wuggie Norple at 3:58 PM on November 17, 2011 [9 favorites]


I can see how difficult it can be, but if you have the right people in place, and the right funding and the correct methods and (most importantly) the political will, it can be done, and it can be done effectively.

I hear ya. The missing word, though, is "efficiently". It is very easy to see a blue-collar crime and say "cop, arrest that guy!" but (as you say) having the right people in place, the right funding and the correct methods...we don't have any of that, not right now, anyway.

This isn't me saying we shouldn't; just that we don't, and that's why such things are allowed to continue.
posted by davejay at 4:01 PM on November 17, 2011




Seriously. Grand larceny. A hat. Are they made of gold?
posted by good day merlock at 4:02 PM on November 17, 2011


Might as well collect useful live links:

Video: http://www.ustream.tv/theother99
Video: http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99channel2

(Most other streams)
http://www.occupystreams.org/

Twitter: TheOther99 , IwillOccupy
posted by ZeusHumms at 4:04 PM on November 17, 2011


from chat on other99 channel 2: " NYPD police scanner: Police have an estimate of 32,650 protesters on the ground"
posted by yertledaturtle at 4:05 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


You know, it's not funny, that kid got smashed up and shouldn't have thrown a battery, if he did.

But I can't help it. Taking an inspector's hat. Oh man that's funny. "You can't arrest me! I have your hat! Now I'm the inspector!"
posted by Errant at 4:05 PM on November 17, 2011 [13 favorites]


So, if I had any interest in joining up after I got off work (...if I ever get off work...), does anyone know where they're headed? Is there a General Assembly tonight?
posted by good day merlock at 4:09 PM on November 17, 2011


Andrew Reiner says, "If the Occupy arrests keep going at this rate, New York may need to adopt the Arkham City prison formula to house all of the inmates."
posted by Servo5678 at 4:15 PM on November 17, 2011


The cbs helicopter pilot just pondered that same thing,

"What are they going to do when they cross the bridge? Disperse or rampage through brooklyn"
posted by nomisxid at 4:15 PM on November 17, 2011


Other occupy video teams are apparently on the bridge.
posted by ZeusHumms at 4:16 PM on November 17, 2011


Somebody said some building was occupied and there was going to be a GA but not sure where or anything.
posted by symbioid at 4:16 PM on November 17, 2011


Seriously. Grand larceny. A hat. Are they made of gold?

The New York Penal Code:
§ 155.30 Grand Larceny in the fourth degree.
A person is guilty of grand larceny in the fourth degree when he
steals property and when:
1. The value of the property exceeds one thousand dollars; or
...
5. The property, regardless of its nature and value, is taken from the
person of another; or
...
Grand larceny in the fourth degree is a class E felony.
posted by Jahaza at 4:21 PM on November 17, 2011


The taking of an officer's hat is an arrestable offense!
posted by The Whelk at 4:24 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


The New Republic: Mike Bloomberg Wears Thin

I'll say...
posted by Skygazer at 4:25 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


I can see how difficult it can be, but if you have the right people in place, and the right funding and the correct methods and (most importantly) the political will, it can be done, and it can be done effectively.

It would help if the regulators were not destroying the evidence.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:27 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


And they answer the question: @OWS_Tactical: #GeneralAssembly coming back to #Liberty at 7:30 @OccupyWallSt @LibertySqGA #ows #N17

Except it's 7:29 now so... that leaves them 1 minute to get back over the bridge?
posted by good day merlock at 4:29 PM on November 17, 2011


They're starting to congregate by the war memorial.
posted by modernserf at 4:32 PM on November 17, 2011


I left FS after the fun part ended. (OWS people left the park cleaner than they'd found it.) I decided to approach the march from the west on side streets. On Rector, I was able to walk right up to my friends marching with the UAW contingent. Cops everywhere, just watching. One offered to move the barricade to let a woman out of the march. At Chambers, NYPD has set up a really tight bottleneck, which is how they're keeping the march on the ped walkway. It's the slowest march ever, but they're marching. Lots of bored cops in riot gear everywhere. Easy overtime money.
posted by Mavri at 4:34 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Anyone have a link to a site with good live blog coverage of sorts?
posted by -t at 4:34 PM on November 17, 2011


What were not good enough?
posted by wheelieman at 4:38 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


-t, you could try here.

More seriously, the NY Times live blog hasn't been bad.
posted by Jahaza at 4:38 PM on November 17, 2011


Thanks!
posted by -t at 4:43 PM on November 17, 2011


I am sorry -t
posted by wheelieman at 4:47 PM on November 17, 2011


Looks like they're carting off the arrested in NYPD buses; protesters chanting "Bloomberg, fuck you!"
posted by indubitable at 4:59 PM on November 17, 2011


A different day's version was linked upthread, but the Guardian liveblog has some very decent reporting.
posted by RogerB at 4:59 PM on November 17, 2011


The taking of an officer's hat is an arrestable offense!

Yeah, but also pure slapstick. Plus, once you heal from your crack skull, you're pretty much the biggest badass, with the best story, anywhere you go.
posted by Skygazer at 5:05 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Midget 1% judge-shopping Fucker.

Bllomberg: Midget tyrant 1% catastra-fuck of a third termer tit-wank troll Mayor...


His physical stature is immaterial.

I mean, christ, what are you, Randy Newman? Go love L.A.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:13 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Meant to italicize those small bits.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:14 PM on November 17, 2011




I thought people only stole policemens' hats on Boat Race Night.
posted by orrnyereg at 5:23 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


"Short People" being the only irony-drenched Randy Newman song where he carefully spells out the intent of the song for you, with a little bit in the bridge about how "all men are brothers until the day they die." But ... carry on.
posted by raysmj at 5:27 PM on November 17, 2011




It's a wonderful world.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:30 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Why is the top story on my Google News home page right now, "On 2-month anniversary, 400 Occupiers arrested." Geeze.

Watching things unfold live for this Occupy stuff (something I hadn't really done beforehand) has really illustrated how the mainstream media focuses on the negative. I mean I knew it beforehand but seeing it illustrated firsthand is frustrating.
posted by Defenestrator at 5:32 PM on November 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


collection of occupy bat signals on the Verizon building

There's something brazenly cinematic about the projections.
posted by The Whelk at 5:43 PM on November 17, 2011


Ustream down or just me? And those bat signals are fuckin' beautiful!
posted by tr33hggr at 5:45 PM on November 17, 2011


TheOther99 is down, but trying to get back up.
posted by swift at 5:48 PM on November 17, 2011


Whew. Just back. What a thrilling experience. This is what democracy looks like, indeed.



By the way, folks, cabbies make money if they have a fare while stopped in traffic. They have no problem with a jam while the meter is running.
posted by spitbull at 5:52 PM on November 17, 2011


Tim from Other99 is at Korgasm. There are some ads on that channel.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 5:56 PM on November 17, 2011


Is anyone still at Brooklyn Bridge? I was about to go out and join them (can't go all the way to the park, but wanted to venture to the bridge).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:59 PM on November 17, 2011


Well, that's quite a picture.
posted by MrMoonPie at 6:03 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


Watching things unfold live for this Occupy stuff (something I hadn't really done beforehand) has really illustrated how the mainstream media focuses on the negative. I mean I knew it beforehand but seeing it illustrated firsthand is frustrating.

Case in point. This is the top story on Google News now.

A large chunk of this article focuses on the "177" people that were arrested. If the NYPD estimates of ~35k demonstrators is correct then less than a half of a percent of all of the demonstrators were causing trouble (arguments of whether they needed to be arrested aside). Why do they get the majority of this news article?

It doesn't even look like they included an estimate of peaceful protestors.
posted by Defenestrator at 6:06 PM on November 17, 2011


MrMoonPie: "Well, that's quite a picture"

What is going on in that picture?
posted by dejah420 at 6:06 PM on November 17, 2011


The woman protester is getting a full dose of pepper spray right in the face.
posted by Errant at 6:06 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Oh man I want vampire cops now.

Done
posted by empath at 6:08 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Holy fuck, really? Are you sure? None of the other protesters are reacting like they're near pepper spray.
posted by dejah420 at 6:09 PM on November 17, 2011




Not a New Yorker, but it'd be awesome if OWS got some full blown guerrilla cinema now that they've seeded the idea with the Bat Signals.
posted by indubitable at 6:12 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


That's certainly what it looks like. In the picture it appears to have just been fired off; you can sort of see a rebound pattern just around the top of her head. The post just below that one on the posterous site is a picture "post-pepper spraying".
posted by Errant at 6:14 PM on November 17, 2011


I knew that would be Forever Knight

Spitbull: By the way, folks, cabbies make money if they have a fare while stopped in traffic. They have no problem with a jam while the meter is running.


Pedant's corner, but... generally, New York taxis add three distinct charges together during a full journey - the drop charge (the base charge for any journey), the distance charge and the time charge. Add to that the tip and you have the revenue for the journey.

Depending on whether a taxi is going above or below the crossover speed (12mph), the charge is either accumulated by distance or time. So, if you're standing in traffic, or moving slowly, you're being billed by time passed, and if you are moving at above the crossover speed you're being billed by distance travelled.

So, a cabbie is earning money while stopped in traffic, or in slow-moving traffic. But they would be earning money faster if they were driving at more than the crossover speed (at 24mph, which admittedly seems an insane speed in Manhattan, twice as fast). And if they were moving they would also be closer to the end of the journey, and thus the tip, and to the next pickup, and thus the next drop charge.

So, a cabbie is earning money while standing in traffic with a fare in the back seat, but they might also not be entirely happy - especially if the same conditions will then leave them stuck in traffic while getting back to the main routes to pick up fares.
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:14 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


"Lights on - guerrilla video... turn that shit up"
posted by symbioid at 6:14 PM on November 17, 2011



Not a New Yorker, but it'd be awesome if OWS got some full blown guerrilla cinema now that they've seeded the idea with the Bat Signals.


I was thinking on-message text art videos thrown on to the walls like Now What?
posted by The Whelk at 6:15 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


live feeds having a lot of issues on the ground, I think network problems? OccupyNYC seems to be live but no audio.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:21 PM on November 17, 2011


In the pepper spray in progress picture that MrMoonPie linked to, what is the pole that the cop in the lower right corner of the picture holding?
posted by Flunkie at 6:24 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Bat Signal Video
posted by The Whelk at 6:31 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


From The Consumerist, the campout local news is covering instead of Occupy Wall Street:
While thousands of people her age are busy camping out in various Occupy movements around the country, a Florida woman decided last night to occupy the sidewalk outside her local Best Buy in order to be the first person to be disappointed by the Black Friday offerings on Nov. 25.

"You can't beat some of the deals they have on plasmas, flat screens and laptops," the young woman, who has coordinated her camp-out with three other families, tells Tampa's NBC affiliate. "We're all students; you've got to pinch a penny; it's affordable right now."
posted by grouse at 6:32 PM on November 17, 2011


His physical stature is immaterial.

I will not rest until I come up with a nickname that will follow him into his next act running for Governor or President.

I like the sound of "Midget Mayor Mike" or "Mayor Mike the Midget" or, Oh I know: Mini-Mayor Mikey.

MC Bloomy midget. Mighty mini-mayor twatface. The Mini-mikey bloomberg: Master of mace and mayhem and mincing. Mini-Mikey midget mayor, the manservant to 1% morality and money...

Work with me here, people.
posted by Skygazer at 6:36 PM on November 17, 2011


The Bloombergular
posted by schyler523 at 6:38 PM on November 17, 2011 [10 favorites]


"HALP! I've been Bloomburgled!"
posted by symbioid at 6:41 PM on November 17, 2011 [10 favorites]


HALP! I've been BLoomburgled, and I can't get up!"
posted by Skygazer at 6:51 PM on November 17, 2011


ground livestream up at wolly-mammoth, GA happening but not sure where?
posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:51 PM on November 17, 2011


Skygazer: "His physical stature is immaterial.

I will not rest until I come up with a nickname that will follow him into his next act running for Governor or President.

I like the sound of "Midget Mayor Mike" or "Mayor Mike the Midget" or, Oh I know: Mini-Mayor Mikey.

MC Bloomy midget. Mighty mini-mayor twatface. The Mini-mikey bloomberg: Master of mace and mayhem and mincing. Mini-Mikey midget mayor, the manservant to 1% morality and money...
"

Hows about That Little Jagoff?
posted by dancestoblue at 6:53 PM on November 17, 2011


at the GA a person with the Kitchen has said they've spent five hours checking every photo of the kitchen on Flickr, making a list of every kitchen item, before going to the storage garage on 57th to make sure they have every single item is there - if it's not all there, they're filing a complaint.
posted by The Whelk at 6:56 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


http://www.ustream.tv/occupycolleges is in Zuccotti Park, was just touring a makeshift kitchen. They're saying another's people's mic is happening at the Brooklyn Bridge.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 7:03 PM on November 17, 2011


(arrrrghhh, mah edit window. :( They just announced at occupycolleges that they have to power down and recharge batteries for 20-30 min.)
posted by Wuggie Norple at 7:06 PM on November 17, 2011


theother99 is back up.
posted by Errant at 7:10 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


back up now: http://www.ustream.tv/theother99
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:10 PM on November 17, 2011


He's got Mikealomania, clearly.

(and is, as is apparent from the press conferences, a bit of a liar)
posted by jaduncan at 7:12 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


and we have our first meme
posted by The Whelk at 7:17 PM on November 17, 2011 [12 favorites]


Stopped by post-work, not much going on that I could see on the Manhattan side of the park. Sadly, I live in Queens, and wasn't up for spending the later evening in Brooklyn. Next time there's a historical revolutionary march, maybe I won't be stuck on the late shift at work.

Never seen more cops in my life.
posted by good day merlock at 7:22 PM on November 17, 2011


By "park" I, obviously, mean bridge.
posted by good day merlock at 7:22 PM on November 17, 2011


"LIVESTREAM FACEOFF!"

if you peer into the camera filming the camera we are peering through you can see the other half of the internet peering back.
posted by nicebookrack at 7:45 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


It's not a good idea to let the (live)streams converge ...

(multiple streamers in the same spot in the park)
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:46 PM on November 17, 2011


you know, New Yorkers really do have the best winter hats.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 7:48 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Maybe this is a derail (I don't now if this is the general OWS thread or not...but it has...umm...quite a few comments, so I'm treating it as such), but there's one thing that really depresses me about Occupy Wall Street, the public perception of it, and the media coverage of it, and that is this:

People who ASSUREDLY are part of the 99% look at the Occupy Wall Street protests as being a protest of bums, rioters, anarchists and/or socialists (yes, both at the same time), pillagers and rapists, mess maker, public defecators, urinators. The dregs of human society.

Maybe it's because I live in a conservative college town in Texas, but that's all people see, and that's depressing.
posted by subversiveasset at 7:49 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Just a little reminder that what is happening, what we are watching , is history. The kind of history that out children and their grandchildren will learn about in school for hundreds of years. More than likely this is probably just the very beginning of something which will not resolve for many years but it is history. I think the 99% protests and that which follows will be remembered for a long time.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 7:50 PM on November 17, 2011 [9 favorites]


Just got back from Foley Square and the Brooklyn Bridge and Grimaldi's, because hey I was in Brooklyn . What an incredible experience. I have a hard time gauging numbers in a crowd like that, but it seemed like a major sporting event's worth, so the police estimate of 32,000 sounds about right--if anything, probably on the low side. Lots of chanting and sign-waving, and a pretty solid row of cops in riot gear (plus some on horseback) lining the route the whole way onto the bridge. I'd say the mood was generally festive, tinged with a little apprehension that at any time they might bust out the pepper spray and nets. Saw a couple of buses go by with arrested protesters in them, to massive cheers.

The funniest part: when we crossed into Brooklyn, all of a sudden the cops were super friendly--talking and joking with the protesters. I saw one woman run up and give a cop a hug; then she hugged another cop who picked her up and spun her around in the air. Just a gentle reminder that not all of NYC is the fascist police state that lower Manhattan has become.
posted by albrecht at 7:56 PM on November 17, 2011 [21 favorites]


subversiveasset - Maybe it's because I live in a conservative college town in Texas, but that's all people see, and that's depressing.

It's definitely your location. I'm in Southern California (Long Beach) and the perception is generally the opposite among those I've spoken to. There are some who share that sentiment but for the most part it's positive.

That doesn't mean it's any less disappointing that there are some who can't see past the negative media stories and consider the real issues (or have and don't agree). The thing is, while Occupy may be perceived negatively among large swaths of the public, I'm not entirely sure that that means that those people entirely disagree with the underlying sentiments.
posted by Defenestrator at 7:59 PM on November 17, 2011


I was dismayed to see that opinion of Occupy Seattle's rush-hour march today was pretty negative among my left-leaning Seattle friends. (And worse still in the neighborhood blog.)
posted by grouse at 8:01 PM on November 17, 2011


albrecht - The funniest part: when we crossed into Brooklyn, all of a sudden the cops were super friendly--talking and joking with the protesters. I saw one woman run up and give a cop a hug; then she hugged another cop who picked her up and spun her around in the air. Just a gentle reminder that not all of NYC is the fascist police state that lower Manhattan has become.

That's really nice to hear. I wonder why that is.
posted by Defenestrator at 8:02 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


TheOther99 is going off the air for the evening.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:05 PM on November 17, 2011


Maybe it's because I live in a conservative college town in Texas, but that's all people see, and that's depressing.

That's all people IS TOLD THERE IS.

Accordingly, tell them I am their new God and they don't know I exists, but I do.
posted by elpapacito at 8:10 PM on November 17, 2011


Is that Tony Baloney @ 3:53 in this clip?
posted by symbioid at 8:17 PM on November 17, 2011


That's really nice to hear. I wonder why that is.

I don't know for sure, but I think it mostly has to Manhattan been seen as the center of the universe and Brooklyn just being a place (that by itself would be the third largest city in the U.S., but whatever). Also, it may stem from Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz being a hilarious and generally affable guy; there was a story that during the 2005 transit strike, he went out to the Brooklyn Bridge with a megaphone to welcome the inconvenienced Brooklynites back home and offer them free coffee. I don't know anything else really about his decisions as borough president, but that kind of attitude might trickle down to the rest of the city employees. I'm sure there are plenty of thuggish cops everywhere, though...
posted by albrecht at 8:20 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I wonder if this will be for USTREAM what the Arab Spring was for Al Jazeera. I remember back during the Egyptian protests everyone I knew and followed on Twitter was linking to the Al Jazeera live streams. Now it seems USTREAM has taken over that role in OWS.
posted by formless at 8:22 PM on November 17, 2011


Isn't a rush hour match a great idea if you announce it well in advance though, grouse? Anybody sane should just go home early.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:31 PM on November 17, 2011


Well, they did, and then they changed the location from the Montlake Bridge to the University Bridge at the last minute. I'm not sure if it would be a great idea, regardless.
posted by grouse at 8:33 PM on November 17, 2011


I've been as horrified with the images of police brutality that I've seen in OWS pics as everyone else, but I do have to say that in eight years in Brooklyn I've had good experiences with police overall. I know that's not universal, but I don't think they're universally bad at all either. It's complicated.
posted by sweetkid at 8:38 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Interview w/Tom Morello talks about the strength of the Occupy movement and mentions Madison and some of the disappointments that I have about it (i.e. recall/"politics as usual" --which is nice, but not nearly enough)...
posted by symbioid at 8:44 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


you know, New Yorkers really do have the best winter hats.

And boots. I never knew what a good pair of winter boots was like till I moved there, and saw so many fabulous and comfortable ones.

/fashion update
posted by emjaybee at 8:47 PM on November 17, 2011


People who ASSUREDLY are part of the 99% look at the Occupy Wall Street protests as being a protest of bums, rioters, anarchists and/or socialists (yes, both at the same time), pillagers and rapists, mess maker, public defecators, urinators. The dregs of human society.

Maybe it's because I live in a conservative college town in Texas, but that's all people see, and that's depressing.


Why? Why is it depressing? I mean, yeah, it's kind of frustrating, and maybe occasionally uncomfortable if you decide to take on the role of OWS defender, but depressing?

There's this idea that OWS is trying to be or has to be all things to all people in order to succeed. I don't really know where it came from (though I suspect it was a convenient adjunct to the "They have no goals" attack), but it's become so internalized by so many people that most of the time, no one even comments on it; it's taken as given.

But it's not true.

The people in your town: maybe they don't like OWS, maybe they say that they don't agree with OWS, but I guarantee you that at least some of them are starting to think about the ideas that OWS has raised. And OWS doesn't "win" by being liked, or by reaching some threshold of support: it wins by getting those ideas out there, by having people start realizing and talking about the effect that Wall Street has on their life, and on trying to reduce that effect.

The other reason that it's not true is that OWS isn't just a series of protests. Look at loquacious's comment. It's building a community. It's bringing a bunch of people, from all walks of life, together in common cause, allowing them to exchange ideas, and training them in methods of activism and democratic discussion. It's an incubator that's going to launch a thousand new progressive movements. Right now, there's some college kid who just got a fantastic idea while talking to a group of union guys twice her age, who's going to call up those two visiting protestors she met yesterday and start building up support for a new organization. Imagine some variation on that, repeating a few hundred times, and even if your conservative neighbor thinks OWS is just a bunch of bums who need jobs, he isn't going to be able to dismiss every one of those new movements so easily.
posted by kagredon at 8:57 PM on November 17, 2011 [18 favorites]


There's this idea that OWS is trying to be or has to be all things to all people in order to succeed.

While I agree with you, I think it's probably not unreasonable for people to think that Occupy is trying to encapsulate all things to all people, or at least most things to most people, when they chant "We are the 99%" all the time. Justified or not, it's easy to see that as a claim to be speaking for nearly everyone, and that usually rubs a good number of people the wrong way.
posted by Errant at 9:17 PM on November 17, 2011


albrecht - Also, it may stem from Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz being a hilarious and generally affable guy...that kind of attitude might trickle down to the rest of the city employees.

Didn't realize the boroughs were separated like that. Does Manhattan really have enough officers on its own to have the presence they've been having? I remember when Oakland had the port occupation the live stream guy was going through all of the officers from various other cities that had to be called in to help.
posted by Defenestrator at 9:35 PM on November 17, 2011


There's about 35,000 police officers in New York City, so yeah probably it could have just been cops from Manhattan.
posted by one_bean at 9:39 PM on November 17, 2011


35000 of 8 million NYers is about 0.4%. There's a long way to go before the OWS can truly claim power.

If 10% of the population could be ared to show a day of solidarity,then things might get serious. Get 800000 people occupying the streets and the 1%ers might start worrying.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:53 PM on November 17, 2011


There is actually a greater significance to bridges, grouse, expect more rush hour bridge occupations.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:02 PM on November 17, 2011


If 10% of the population could be ared to show a day of solidarity,then things might get serious. Get 800000 people occupying the streets and the 1%ers might start worrying.

I agree that more people would be great, but I don't think 10% could ever happen. I don't think it needs to happen though. For example, MLK's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was 200k to 300k and that was a nationwide march (as nationwide as it could be in the 60s) that is agreed to have been a great instigator for change. There are of course a million differences between OWS and the civil rights movement but I merely compare them here to illustrate that it doesn't take a huge percentage of the population in a demonstration to make things happen.

Remember that for every person out there demonstrating and being active there are a multitude more that are extremely supportive but can't or don't want to go march around.
posted by Defenestrator at 10:05 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


600000+ millionaires in NYC.

The radical change required to reclaim a great society is going to require convincing a large population of high net worth individuals that it is in their best interest to play more fairly.

It's a shame more non-HNW people will be buying big screen TVs next Friday, than will be non-violently demonstrating support for their fellow 99%.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:11 PM on November 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


The radical change required to reclaim a great society is going to require convincing a large population of high net worth individuals that it is in their best interest to play more fairly.

Too true. At some point, we have to flip from being a movement of the 99% to a movement of 'We The People', where everyone puts something in and gets something out.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:13 PM on November 17, 2011


Also Occupy NYC Liberty Plaza is keeping vigil with the overnighters at the plaza.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:15 PM on November 17, 2011


600000+ millionaires in NYC.
The New York metropolitan area, not NYC. The metropolitan area has nearly three times the population of NYC itself.
posted by Flunkie at 10:15 PM on November 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


The radical change required to reclaim a great society is going to require convincing a large population of high net worth individuals that it is in their best interest to play more fairly.

All we have to do is convince a simple majority of people that sane economic policies are better for everyone. We can't convince greedy self-righteous assholes to be better people, but we can damn sure make them pay their fair share of taxes, and obey the same laws as everyone else.

They want the infrastructure, the workforce, and the security provided by the United States, but when the check comes they pretend like they don't have the money. Let me be the first to say: Fuck. That. Noise.
posted by deanklear at 11:33 PM on November 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Captain Ray Lewis gives perspective and advice to others in OWS. Presumably, prior to his arrest today.
posted by garlic at 11:34 PM on November 17, 2011 [5 favorites]


Meanwhile in London
posted by Acey at 4:51 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Was just coming to post that, Acey. Here's the Beeb's take.
posted by Abiezer at 4:53 AM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


Glad to see they are covering it at last.
posted by Acey at 5:23 AM on November 18, 2011


albrecht - The funniest part: when we crossed into Brooklyn, all of a sudden the cops were super friendly--talking and joking with the protesters.

defenestrator - That's really nice to hear. I wonder why that is.


It's because Brooklyn is awesome.

Didn't realize the boroughs were separated like that. Does Manhattan really have enough officers on its own to have the presence they've been having?

Not sure. But the precincts and legal systems are kind of separated -- the boroughs are to the city overall as each of the state governments are to the Federal government, say. There is collaboration going on, but there is also a separation.

And the liberal in me would be remiss if I neglected to point out that while Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn's borough president, has done great things for Brooklyn, he's also done some controversial things as well....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:27 AM on November 18, 2011


I've never bought into criticisms about the main stream media. I have a generally positive feeling about people and trust that most people are doing their best. That goes along with trusting that people in the media are truly trying to present an honest picture of events. But I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday watching theother99's livestream, seeing the huge number of people who spent the day and evening in the cold and the rain trying to peacefully stand up together for their cause. It was amazing and inspirational. I wasn't around in the evening, so I pulled up some web sites this morning to find out what happened. CNN, MSNBC, & CBS all describe the story in terms of how many people were arrested. Fox News unsurprisingly chose to go with "Cops injured" instead. ABC News' top OWS story is about how much the protests are costing cities, although lower on the page there is a video titled "Occupy Movement Recharged in NYC." Only the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal have neutral headlines ("Occupy Protesters Mark Two-Month Milestone" and "Thousands of protesters massed") but then refer to the arrests in the first sentence. None of them have a picture on the front page of anything but scuffles with police. I was hoping to find an estimate of how many people were there, or a picture of the crowds at Foley Square. Nothing.

No wonder so many people think of the protestors as nothing but a bunch of 'lazy, entitled kids' and 'filthy hippies' who need to get a damn job and quit causing trouble. I am officially disgusted.
posted by Dojie at 5:58 AM on November 18, 2011 [17 favorites]


The reason the cops in Brooklyn were friendly, I'll bet, is because the police leadership treats them well and makes it clear that they expect beat cops to protect and to serve, not to just kick ass.

Just like the issue of integrating open gays in to the military, it is all about leadership.
posted by QIbHom at 5:59 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]




I'm surprised they didn't add (D) to his name.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:27 AM on November 18, 2011 [8 favorites]


Just saw the covers of the Daily News and the Post today. I don't remember which is which but one (the Post, probably, what with it being Murdoch-owned) has 3/4 of the front page devoted to a picture of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore looking sad and a headline about them breaking up, and 1/4 of the page devoted to the word "JOBBED!" (no picture) and a subheadline stating some variation of "OWS keeps people from getting to work."

The other paper has most of the front page with a photo of a severely bloodied protestor with a cop in full riot gear behind him. The head line is "Cops and OWS clash causing nuisance for city" sending the most mixed message possible.
posted by griphus at 6:31 AM on November 18, 2011


Interview with Mark Read, creator of last night's awesome bat-signal.
posted by swift at 6:33 AM on November 18, 2011 [8 favorites]


(Oops -- link is to the "more" section, scroll up for the full interview.)
posted by swift at 6:35 AM on November 18, 2011




Fox Falsely Dubs Alleged White House Attacker As "'Occupy' Shooter."

I knew that was going to happen! Knew it.
posted by sweetkid at 6:39 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


stupid preview...
posted by garlic at 6:39 AM on November 18, 2011


Dojie, it is really interesting to observe the media's behavior. Here's my theory. OWS is dealing with issues that their audience isn't uniformly ready to contemplate. Like politicians, the media tends to follow rather than lead public attitudes.

It's important for OWS to raise awareness and promote discussion by confronting Wall Street, the police, and the media—but to effect change they need to speak directly and persuasively to the individual citizens that make up the 99%. All the rallying isn't going to make any difference until regular people, in all their cultural diversity, stop doing the things that put the 1% in power.

Obviously it will be an easier sell to some parts of the 99 than other parts. I hope OWS proves itself up to having that awkward conversation with the upper 99: the ones who believe they're on their way to the top, the most obnoxiously vocal of the "I've got mine" sector (even if it's not true).

The move your money campaign is a decent start, but it's among the easier things American households must be called upon to do. What about subtracting a vehicle from the garage? Hoo boy, I hear doors slamming upstairs already ...

The media knows the average audience is in denial about our overall predicament. The top mandate for a media corporation is to avoid alienating the audience and keep that ad revenue flowing in.
posted by maniabug at 6:43 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


It's important for OWS to raise awareness and promote discussion by confronting Wall Street, the police, and the media—but to effect change they need to speak directly and persuasively to the individual citizens that make up the 99%. All the rallying isn't going to make any difference until regular people, in all their cultural diversity, stop doing the things that put the 1% in power.

QFFT. Minds must be changed. Only then can the chokehold of our Two-Headed Uni-Party be broken. (Though I disagree that the rallying makes no difference... but certainly nowhere near enough to effect the needed change by itself.)
posted by AugieAugustus at 6:50 AM on November 18, 2011


Minds must be changed, yes, but what needs changing more than anything else is the laws. That's the focus of corporations and that should be the focus of any body challenging their dominance.
posted by stinkycheese at 6:53 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Another small heart-warming story from last night (via Occupy Judaism):
To end the amazing marches to Foley Sq, then to BK bridge today/tonight, SOMETHING AMAZING HAPPENED AT G.A IN ZUCCOTI PARK, couple friendly police officers started talking to me with some hebrew, one needed to say Kaddish, we ended up assembling about 15 various Jewish/protestors/ ppl walking by, and he had the minyan (quorom of ten) for kaddish. A beautiful thing I saw was one of the Jewish protesters who was one of the first to join the minyan, was holding up a sign "NYPD: GET THEM OUT!" standing right next to the officer saying Kaddish with him!!
That's one story you probably won't hear on Fox.
posted by albrecht at 7:03 AM on November 18, 2011 [10 favorites]


You're right AugieAugustus, that should read "enough" or "any lasting" difference where I wrote "any".

The problem is complex and exists at multiple time scales, so a variety of tactics need to operate in concert. It's about parenting, even, because some of our worst mistakes are handed down by generation. Mistake of being complicit in social wrongs because we're too comfortable to object, I'm looking at you.
posted by maniabug at 7:17 AM on November 18, 2011


I had kind of a disturbing conversation with mr. desjardins last night. To set the stage, let me tell you a little about us. We're definitely in the 99%, but we're very fortunate to be in the upper 20% (based on income, not wealth - we have a bunch of debt and don't own property). Anyway, we don't look like the stereotypical occupiers; we're kind of a yuppy stereotype in that we drive BMWs, listen to NPR, drink Starbucks, etc. He even wears khakis to work, and I have a couple of Brooks Brothers shirts.

BUT - we are both squarely behind the beliefs of OWS. The difference between us is that I'm intimately tied to social media, and he gets most of his news from mainstream sources (web, not TV). So, last night he's like, "But what are their talking points? What do they want?" which troubled me because it's pretty obvious to me. He said "Why don't they organize? Why don't they have meetings? Web sites? Take donations?" I explained that they did have all of those things, in abundance. He said that if they met at Panera or something that he'd consider going to a meeting, but he wasn't going to risk getting arrested at a protest or encampment (our bosses are conservatives and if he lost his job we're screwed).

He wants a leftist Tea Party, with polished spokespeople, really simple talking points, and an organized push to get members elected to local offices. I explained that the movement is only two months old (!) and that there was no corporate/political sponsorship like the Tea Party had. The conversation kind of sputtered out from there into "but they should..." and "but they are or will..."

The OWS message is not reaching the people who 1) already agree, don't have to be convinced and 2) are willing and able to do something. People who aren't glued to Twitter/Tumblr/mefi don't know what's going on, and that has to change.
posted by desjardins at 7:18 AM on November 18, 2011 [21 favorites]


@NYCMayorsOffice: As a parting gift, Mayor Bloomberg presents Regis w/ the Key to the City #morningswontbethe… #RegisFarewell @Regis_and_Kelly

PRIORITIES.
posted by griphus at 7:22 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


OCCUPY LIVE WITH REGIS OR WHOEVER AND KATHIE LEE OR WHOEVER
posted by AugieAugustus at 7:24 AM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


To be fair, Regis has been using the extra key from the planter for some time now.
posted by swift at 7:26 AM on November 18, 2011 [5 favorites]


Desjardins, I think dissonance like this comes from the wide array of underlying assumptions people carry below their OWS opinions.

How does the Mr. hope or expect to see the world change in the next decade or so? Less unemployment, prosecuted CEOs, and cheaper health care, but everything else basically the same? What does he think of some of the larger trends of which the economic disparity issue is one component? Global politics? Peak oil? The long term sustainability of credit-based economies and transport-intensive settlement patterns? Does he believe innovative technology will spare the world from a major economic contraction?

I can't help but present what probably appear as leading questions pointing back toward my own world view. But hopefully this is of some help.
posted by maniabug at 7:26 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


That's Kelly Ripa you ignorant peon.

She's the one who shouts out "LET'S HEAR IT FOR NINE INCH NAILS WOO!" at the end of the "Head Like A Hole" maxi-single.
posted by griphus at 7:28 AM on November 18, 2011 [5 favorites]


The OWS message is not reaching the people who 1) already agree, don't have to be convinced and 2) are willing and able to do something. People who aren't glued to Twitter/Tumblr/mefi don't know what's going on, and that has to change.

Even worse than that, several of my coworkers were completely unaware that anything was going on in New York (let alone anywhere else). When I sent them some photos of the size of the crowds, they were amazed that this wasn't being talked about more on the news.

So it isn't just that people who aware of it aren't getting the full impact of the protest, there are a lot of people who would agree, who are completely oblivious to the fact that this is even happening. I can point them to twitter, mefi, and several other sources, but unless the media starts doing more with this, there are a lot of folks who just won't know that this is a thing.
posted by quin at 7:39 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


desjardins your story makes me sad :(
quin, even more so.
"liberal"/socialist media my ass.
posted by symbioid at 7:45 AM on November 18, 2011


(Thank you Metafilter, I love how the older story keeps suggesting that OWS is smooth, stretchy, waterproof... especially during the rainy moments.)
posted by maniabug at 7:45 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Part of the problem is that our local movement borders on ridiculous. They closed down a bridge yesterday* in one of the poorest areas of the city. I guarantee you there were no 1% or even 20% driving by. I didn't go yesterday because I was having trouble with asthma and it was cold, but I sure wouldn't go down there without a crowd of people and/or cops. I find myself agreeing with the city police chief FFS. "If they're angry about the economy, go to Wall Street. There's 35% unemployment in this neighborhood. Who are they disrupting?"

*Reading the comments on that site is only for masochists.
posted by desjardins at 7:55 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]




He said that if they met at Panera or something that he'd consider going to a meeting, but he wasn't going to risk getting arrested at a protest or encampment (our bosses are conservatives and if he lost his job we're screwed).

It's scary, relying so much on the will of the top 1% conservatives for our lives. And the fear of getting arrested is a large part of the reason the NYPD is being so aggressive. It's a long-term goal of their tactics. I know several people who are apprehensive about joining the movement and participating because of this.

Maybe the best message for people like your husband is to let them know the 99% and Occupy is there for them now, and will be there after they have lost their jobs. It doesn't matter how much you make. OWS is the the social net our government should be providing for us.
posted by formless at 8:23 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Amy Goodman: "... we were there watching as the sanitation workers trashed almost every physical item in the park, dumping them into dump trucks. And when we asked them where they were taking the property that had been completely trashed and was put into garbage trucks, they said, 'To the dump.'"

Sanitation Issues Protocols to Claim Collected Personal Property from Zuccotti Park
posted by BobbyVan at 8:26 AM on November 18, 2011


You will be asked to fill out a claim form regarding your property and provide any proof you may have that the items you are claiming should be returned to you. If you are able to locate the item you claim immediately, and DSNY determines that the item should be returned to you, DSNY will return it to you immediately. If DSNY is not able to determine immediately that it should be returned to you, the item will be put aside for a determination to be made later - for instance, DSNY may wait to see if others claim the item.

Good luck finding/proving you own anything piled up over there, everyone!
posted by griphus at 8:33 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Maybe the best message for people like your husband is to let them know the 99% and Occupy is there for them now, and will be there after they have lost their jobs. It doesn't matter how much you make. OWS is the the social net our government should be providing for us.

I don't understand what you mean by this. OWS is not going to pay our bills if we lose our jobs.
posted by desjardins at 8:33 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Last night in the space of three minutes I exchanged high fives and kind words with a well dressed young mother with three children in tow, a middle-aged African American male nurse, and a lovely elderly woman dressed in her sunday best. All were marching across the bridge. The crowd was very diverse, all ages and races and class levels present and accounted for. Mostly it was middle class-looking folks.

It is not at all bums and anarchists. If you are not seeing the face of America in the TV coverage of last night's march, the media *are* lying to you.
posted by spitbull at 8:40 AM on November 18, 2011 [9 favorites]




I *think* formless might be getting more into the idea I expressed about above - the "Propaganda of the Deed" being that we need to go out into our communities in a way that expresses solidarity with them...

Offer to pick up groceries for a busy person. How do you do that to build trust? I don't know - i.e. who pays? who trusts someone to be paid back? How do we know they won't run off with the money? Ugh. Money.

Just asking someone if they need help with something - without pay. Of course -again - how do you have them trust you in the sense that we're trained to distrust "what do they want" - are they trying to case my house?

Maybe an "Occupy Car Wash" with no donations - just free car wash.

Something social and visible - I know that's not necessarily helpful but it's a way to say "we're here for the community". Maybe pick up trash in the name of occupy. I dunno.

I remember seeing a couple of the dirty hippies from Rainbow Gathering in Madison picking up trash on WYOU and later on it turned out that the same folks were hitching a ride so I ended up picking them up and going outta my way to take them an hour away.

I dunno. But I hope that's what formless is getting at.

It does help reach across the spectrum in the "left/right" divide, because when I talk about "Green" values (local control, etc...) my moderate Republican boss's wife could appreciate that. I think that's part of where our power lies. REAL grass roots, away from a machine - away from the power centers. Showing this - building community. Not an organization that's a slick oiled greased up hyper-commodified thing that asks for money but just. Us.
posted by symbioid at 8:42 AM on November 18, 2011


I don't understand what you mean by this. OWS is not going to pay our bills if we lose our jobs.

They'll feed you and give you a place to crash out if you really hit rock bottom though.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 8:43 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


You will be asked to fill out a claim form regarding your property and provide any proof you may have that the items you are claiming should be returned to you. If you are able to locate the item you claim immediately, and DSNY determines that the item should be returned to you, DSNY will return it to you immediately. If DSNY is not able to determine immediately that it should be returned to you, the item will be put aside for a determination to be made later - for instance, DSNY may wait to see if others claim the item.

Good luck finding/proving you own anything piled up over there, everyone!


And good luck finding it in its original condition instead of trashed by the police.
posted by tr33hggr at 8:48 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


There is some symbolism to occupying bridges, desjardins. I'd agree that rush hour bridge occupations should target bridges used by wealthier people, ideally force some bank execs into taking the subway like everybody else.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:48 AM on November 18, 2011




Part of the problem is that our local movement borders on ridiculous. They closed down a bridge yesterday* in one of the poorest areas of the city. I guarantee you there were no 1% or even 20% driving by. I didn't go yesterday because I was having trouble with asthma and it was cold, but I sure wouldn't go down there without a crowd of people and/or cops. I find myself agreeing with the city police chief FFS. "If they're angry about the economy, go to Wall Street. There's 35% unemployment in this neighborhood. Who are they disrupting?"

Yesterday, I stood on a bridge, holding signs with dozens of other Occupants. We decided we would not block traffic. Hundreds of commuters honked and gave us thumbs up.

And despite our difference in tactics, I support the blockage of that bridge in Milwaukee. How are poor people supposed to get to Wall Street so their voices can be heard? They can only make their voices known in their own neighborhoods, by their actions. For now, they are little but sand in the gears of the great economic machine that serves the 1%. But their influence is growing.

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
-Mario Savio
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:06 AM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


Bobby Van, I am not complaining about your participation here in the talk thread because I don't like the idea of silencing dissenting opinions. However. That "gotcha" letter you just posted from sanitation has already been debunked and discussed a day or two ago either in this thread or another ows thread. People going to sanitation have documented the fact that their belongings were either destroyed, heavily damaged, or completely missing. The entire library was missing with the exception of a small number of books, most of those damaged, and the library's 4 laptops were destroyed beyond all repair. I'd write more about this but it's already adding to a derail to do so.
posted by stagewhisper at 9:07 AM on November 18, 2011 [7 favorites]


AFAIK, that's the first that the letter had been posted. A tweet from the Mayor's office had gone out with a photo of undamaged books, but the letter adds more detail on the pickup procedures. It's helpful information, and a pretty far thing from a derail.
posted by BobbyVan at 9:18 AM on November 18, 2011


Regarding the aforementioned "starting conversations with individual members of the 99%" thing:
Commondreams.org on whether the Occupiers should stay or go
posted by AugieAugustus at 9:21 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Symbioid you're going in a good direction here. To follow, people need to drop the binary thinking, and think in terms of continuum. Life is a mix. All but those in the most inhospitable communities do give and receive outside the monetary realm, but we need to do a lot more. One of the 1%'s biggest accomplishments has been to monetize and move into the global market things that used to be in the home economy or in-kind exchanges within small communities.

Two years ago when I moved to my current home in a small town, I joined the volunteer fire department (not in keeping with my upbringing), got to know my neighbors, and made it clear that our door is open. I have received much assistance, loaned tools, hand me down clothes for my kids, gifts, food, gossip, and friendly entertainment. I consistently dedicate some time and effort doing things for my peers, and overall it is reciprocated.

Some communities will be more or less oriented toward this sort of thing, but it seems to sprout up pretty much anywhere at the slightest cultivation. This is the alternative economy sitting right under our noses. I make a quarter what I did when I lived in NYC but in terms of involvement in a healthy community, I feel like one of the top 1%.

So, will a community pay your bills? Outside an exceptional fundraising effort for someone in particularly dire straits (it does happen), the answer to that is no. But reframe your concept of economy to include more than notes and coins, and the whole picture starts to shift.

Before the explosion of suburban consumerism in the middle of the last century, many households maintained a kitchen garden, even in urban areas. Who was lamenting the slump in that economy as the global industrial economy blew up into the bubble we have today? A few voices, but not many. Bringing the conversation back there should be a major priority for OWS and its progeny.

Also relevant, a recent Mefi thread about system D.
posted by maniabug at 9:42 AM on November 18, 2011 [6 favorites]


I don't understand what you mean by this. OWS is not going to pay our bills if we lose our jobs.
They'll feed you and give you a place to crash out if you really hit rock bottom though.
Is that actually true?

I could easily be misremembering, but I seem to remember a bunch of complaints from various OWS people about homeless people -- i.e. people who really have hit rock bottom -- moving into Zucotti Park.

Am I misremembering?

Of course, I understand that OWS is not monolithic.
posted by Flunkie at 9:55 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


AFAIK, that's the first that the letter had been posted. A tweet from the Mayor's office had gone out with a photo of undamaged books, but the letter adds more detail on the pickup procedures. It's helpful information, and a pretty far thing from a derail.
The People's Library says that that photo represents a small proportion of the books that they had, most of which are just gone. And some that are not just gone are not undamaged.
posted by Flunkie at 9:59 AM on November 18, 2011


This is awesome -- from The First Draft: There's a Crack In Everything, some background on staging of the '99% batsignal':
I told her what I wanted to do, and she was enthused. The more I described, the more excited she got.

Her parting words were, "let's do this."

She wouldn't take my money. That was the day of the eviction of Zuccotti, the same day. And she'd been listening to the news all day, she saw everything that had happened.

"I can't charge you money, this is for the people," she said.
posted by genehack at 10:01 AM on November 18, 2011 [7 favorites]


All were marching across the bridge. The crowd was very diverse, all ages and races and class levels present and accounted for. Mostly it was middle class-looking folks.

As I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, one anti-OWS guy shouted from his car, "WHY DONT YOU OCCUPY A DESK" and I was like, "Damn, I just came here from eight hours at my desk in a cubicle"

For the most part, though, the car commuters were very supportive, honking and waving and such.
posted by JingleButt_HiRes_REAL.gif at 10:07 AM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


I could easily be misremembering, but I seem to remember a bunch of complaints from various OWS people about homeless people -- i.e. people who really have hit rock bottom -- moving into Zucotti Park.

See that's the thing, there's different sorts of homeless people in NYC. And there's a sort of homeless person who will empty out an entire subway car once they get on it. And I don't mean at 2AM, I meant at 5:30 PM rush-hour and coming into Grand Central Station. OWS is a populist movement, sure, but holy shit would that sort of homeless person finding themselves in a densely-packed campsite be a perfectly legitimate reason to complain.
posted by griphus at 10:08 AM on November 18, 2011




My wife and I have spent some time at the DC camp, and have donated a bunch of stuff. Like others who've written here, I'm not super optimistic about this movement making any huge, systemic changes, but I do hope it can spread some awareness. Mostly, we're pitching in to show these energetic young folks that some of us old farts give a damn, too. Maybe this movement will fizzle out, but our hope is that these kids will return to wherever they came from knowing that other people care about these issues, that other folks do pitch in when needed. Maybe when they're in their 40s they'll help out some kids who are protesting, or who need jobs or a hot meal or something.

I also have a 16-year-old daughter, and the whole affair has given me many valuable education opportunities. Oh, we've talked about economic inequalities and police brutality and the need for strong court systems and such, but mostly she's seen lots of folks, not just me, putting their money where their mouths are, camping out in the cold and rain, risking arrest and injury (or just spending actual money on the cause).

The most priceless moment was when I noted that some folks were jeering about donations going to feed, clothe, and shelter homeless people. Her mock-alarmed "NOOOOOOOO!" showed me she got it. The desjardinses would certainly be welcome to pitch a tent, get fed, stay warm, and even visit the medical station.
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:36 AM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


The Banks and New York City and the Media by Choire Sicha
posted by dhartung at 10:48 AM on November 18, 2011


I could easily be misremembering, but I seem to remember a bunch of complaints from various OWS people about homeless people -- i.e. people who really have hit rock bottom -- moving into Zucotti Park.

IDK about OWS, but our crew here has 5 or 6 homeless guys that sleep in our tents and share food. We spend time making sure they follow the rules, but we haven't had any incidents yet and people are glad to have them.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 10:57 AM on November 18, 2011


New Mexico House Votes 65-0 To Move State's Money To Credit Unions, Community Banks The bill has been in the works for months, but may have gained political traction thanks to a mention in the HuffPo "Move Your Money" campaign.
posted by dhartung at 11:00 AM on November 18, 2011 [11 favorites]


Same in Tampa. We have a couple of homeless folks who come and go. I think they're happy for the company, if nothing else, because we talk to them the same as we would anyone else and don't try to get rid of them. And, there's food and drinks for anyone who wants them.

Last Saturday one of our homeless guys offered me a bag of cookies as I was walking by. That's an inversion I could stand to see more of.
posted by cmyk at 11:01 AM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


I also have a 16-year-old daughter, and the whole affair has given me many valuable education opportunities.

I have a three year old, and OWS has given us more opportunities than we were prepared for.

After watching news coverage of the October 15 protest in Times Square, (the one that prompted this from Shamar Thomas) he observed: "Those policemen are very angry, and they don't like brown people."

First lesson: don't watch the news before the kids go to bed.
posted by ambrosia at 11:01 AM on November 18, 2011 [7 favorites]


Tea Party Members Meet With Occupy Memphis, Praise Efforts Of Protesters
By the end, the Occupy Memphis members and their audience – made up mostly of whites over 40 years old – reached common ground on some issues, such as their perception that the government and politicians no longer listen to and serve the people they represent.

They also found some agreement in their stances against taxpayer-sponsored government bailouts and "crony capitalism," the idea that close ties between lobbyists, businesses, and other self-serving interests can influence government officials and the exercise of capitalism.

"We all want the same form of government, which is one that listens to its constituents," said Tran, a business and American history student who said he served in Iraq in 2009 and 2010 with the Army.

But some disagreements also emerged. Tea party members expressed frustration with big, intrusive government, while the Occupy Memphis speakers opposed what they perceive as the corporate world's manipulative influence on government policy. Some tea party members noted that each of their protests were one-day events and they cleaned up after themselves, while the Occupy movement calls for long-term encampment at sites officials say have become unsanitary.

Tea party members praised themselves for using the power of the vote to bring about the change they desired, and that the Occupy movement won't be successful until it does the same.
posted by BobbyVan at 11:05 AM on November 18, 2011 [5 favorites]


There weren't complaints about the homeless, exactly. From earlier upthread, it was part of the discussion of the perception of the movement and what the cops might be doing to subvert that.

Here.
posted by wells at 11:06 AM on November 18, 2011


When I was at Occupy Seattle, one of the discussion circles was specifically identifying ways in which the camps could include and support the homeless population. I helped to collate a bunch of foot care kits, for example. I know that NYC has a homeless population that includes elements that are. . . unusually difficult to accommodate, though. But the idea that the Occupy movements are hostile to the homeless in general is absolutely not one that I've seen.
posted by KathrynT at 11:08 AM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


I found one of the hardest things about being homeless was that people didn't see me. Let alone talk with me.
posted by QIbHom at 11:17 AM on November 18, 2011 [13 favorites]


We're definitely in the 99%, but we're very fortunate to be in the upper 20% (based on income, not wealth - we have a bunch of debt and don't own property). Anyway, we don't look like the stereotypical occupiers; we're kind of a yuppy stereotype in that we drive BMWs, listen to NPR, drink Starbucks, etc. He even wears khakis to work, and I have a couple of Brooks Brothers shirts.

I get what you're saying here, but I think it's worth asking yourself why you're saying it. The things that you buy do not define you. The only thing these stereotypes do is separate people into different classes based on consumer choice. But that's really not how this country works. The 1% isn't successful because they look or dress a certain way or drive a certain car. Guess what - aside from the Beemer, I have/listen to/drink all of those things and I'm in the lower 20% of income.

If you ran into trouble with your business, and you thought to yourself, "I know exactly who to call to fix this," and you knew that person would return your call, you're in the 1%. If not, it really doesn't matter what you look like. You don't have power in this country.
posted by one_bean at 11:22 AM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


Which is why I said we're in the 99%. My point about the clothes etc. was to indicate a certain demographic. It's obviously not exclusive of other income brackets. But we don't look like the stereotypical "dirty hippie" OWS protester and that privilege , rightly or wrongly, gives us more sway with others who would dismiss the movement.

-- sent from my iPhone
posted by desjardins at 11:42 AM on November 18, 2011


But we don't look like the stereotypical "dirty hippie" OWS protester and that privilege , rightly or wrongly, gives us more sway with others who would dismiss the movement.

Yeah and I'm saying it's weird that you keep perpetuating this stereotype because that's not what we actually look like.
posted by one_bean at 11:45 AM on November 18, 2011 [7 favorites]


New Mexico House Votes 65-0 To Move State's Money To Credit Unions, Community Banks

This wasn't Occupy-related, as it's a February 2010 story. And unfortunately, the bill died in the state senate not long after.
posted by parudox at 12:05 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Arundhati Roy speaks eloquently.
posted by mareli at 12:07 PM on November 18, 2011


A video of police used metal barriers as weapons against protesters. I'm the dirty hippy in grey in the screenshot. Tonight when I have time I'll write up a longish comment about my experience yesterday and post it if anyone is interested and if this thread hasn't already suffocated under its own weight by then.
posted by stagewhisper at 12:07 PM on November 18, 2011 [9 favorites]




stagewhisper - I'm interested, so if nobody else is you can memail me.
posted by sandraregina at 12:17 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Sorry about the spurious NM story -- I obviously misread my feed.
posted by dhartung at 12:22 PM on November 18, 2011


Just to clarify some of the Brooklyn versus Manhattan comments with respect to NYPD – 

The NYPD is divided into a number of different patrol boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens have two each (North and South), and Bronx and SI each have one. They're all part of the same organizational structure, though, and cops get reassigned among different patrol boroughs pretty freely. Also, for any large detail (parades, protests, etc.) there will inevitably be cops from commands all over the city assigned. Your random cop at OWS is more likely to be from Brooklyn or the Bronx (or Harlem, Washington Heights, etc. for that matter) than from a downtown precinct.

I would suspect any different treatment you get in Brooklyn than Manhattan during OWS has to do with the cops being able to relax and let loose a bit. Scary as they look, those guys in Foley Square in riot gear are human beings, who are under a ton of stress and are getting it from all sides. Just food for thought.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 12:26 PM on November 18, 2011 [5 favorites]


NYPD cop pushes New York Supreme Court Justice into wall.

Reminder that this is a trial court judge. NY has different naming conventions for its judiciary.
posted by dhartung at 12:26 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Do please write that comment, stagewhisper!
posted by solotoro at 12:32 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Ditto stagewhisper. We need all the stories we can find.

But man this thread is huge. It takes like 30-45 seconds to refresh for me.
posted by tr33hggr at 12:35 PM on November 18, 2011


Here's an Occupy Portland protester, facing off against riot-gear clad police and heckling them while holding a young child in front of him.
posted by BobbyVan at 12:40 PM on November 18, 2011


tr33hggr: But man this thread is huge. It takes like 30-45 seconds to refresh for me.
Yah, I know- if only there were some kind of optional pagination or "start from comment #N" parameter in the URL you could use to just load the latest comments. It would save time, Metafilter bandwidth, and make these types of threads much more readable on a mobile device. But alas...
posted by hincandenza at 12:43 PM on November 18, 2011


Here's an Occupy Portland protester, facing off against riot-gear clad police and heckling them while holding a young child in front of him.

How dare that man hold his child in a public park? He should know better.

Guess we'll have to mace em both
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 12:45 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


Here's an Occupy Portland protester, facing off against riot-gear clad police and heckling them while holding a young child in front of him

BobbyVan, I hardly think that qualifies as a human shield. I don't think I'm being an OWS apologist by arguing that someone just holding a kid during a rally is using him as a shield.
posted by Think_Long at 12:45 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Here's an Occupy Portland protester, facing off against riot-gear clad police and heckling them while holding a young child in front of him.

Do you really think this is the most neutral presentation of this event? I know there is a discussion going on elsewhere about your participation, but I might point out that your use of extremely loaded language is doing you all sorts of disservices here.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 12:46 PM on November 18, 2011 [6 favorites]


BobbyVan: Here's an Occupy Portland protester, facing off against riot-gear clad police and heckling them while holding a young child in front of him
Or as the certainly impartial youtube user LaughingAtLiberals put it, an "infant shield"?

Besides, I herd that baby had homemade explosives in its diaper. Not so innocent now, is he, eh?
posted by hincandenza at 12:46 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


NYPD cop pushes New York Supreme Court Justice into wall.

As incredibly grim as it sounds, I'm really kind of happy that this is happing (for a pretty specific value of "happy", that is.) The NYPD is in full on berserker mode here, not paying any attention to who they are pacifying; Justices, councilmen, right wing press, priests, pregnant women, all seem to be fair game. And this is probably one of the best things that can happen with regard to forcing some sort of culpability on them for their actions. In the past, they could have hid behind each other.

If they keep this up, I really don't think that'll be quite the option it has in the past. Because it isn't just photos and videos anymore, it is also the word of people that other people listen to. And it isn't matching up with what the cops are saying.
posted by quin at 12:47 PM on November 18, 2011


Here's an Occupy Portland protester, facing off against riot-gear clad police and heckling them while holding a young child in front of him.

Chanting "Take a vacation! Help the population!" is heckling now?

Data point: I was taken to anti-Vietnam war protests as a wee child.
posted by rtha at 12:49 PM on November 18, 2011 [8 favorites]


stagewhisper, I'm also interested in your account. This thread is already an invaluable resource and I hope someone is making an archive of it and most directly linked material.
posted by hat_eater at 12:50 PM on November 18, 2011


As far as that NYS judge getting "pushed against the wall." I don't know, man. It sounds pretty plausible that she was interfering with an arrest.

I really just don't like the turn this is all taking toward anti-NYPD sentiment. There have been some instances of egregious behavior over the last couple of months, no doubt about it, but by and large the things people are complaining about are pretty much by the book. According to their training and guidelines, cops are very likely justified in "pushing you against the wall" if you're getting in the way while they're trying to arrest someone. The devil is in the details, of course, but a "push" standing alone is hardly misconduct.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 12:53 PM on November 18, 2011


Implying that the child is a shield recognizes the possibility that speaking ones mind to a police officer could result in violence to the one who is speaking. It says more about how violent the police have become in our society than it does about the morals of the protester in the video. I also cannot help but notice the language being used to frame the video here and how similar it is to how right wing reactionaries accuse muslims of using their children as human shields. This is a way of reframing the debate to make the victims of the violence of police violence look immoral and to exonerate the police from moral culpability for their actions.
posted by yertledaturtle at 12:57 PM on November 18, 2011 [18 favorites]


tr33hggr: But man this thread is huge. It takes like 30-45 seconds to refresh for me.

hincadenza: if only there were some kind of optional pagination or "start from comment #N" parameter in the URL you could use to just load the latest comments. It would save time, Metafilter bandwidth, and make these types of threads much more readable on a mobile device. But alas...


It's a pretty big problem actually, especially cos a lot of these HUGE threads (EG: Irena, these OWS events) are time and location sensitive and require people posting from a phone, and my phone just will not load up an entire thread that hits 1000 or 1500 comments, and I can't be alone in that, and honestly having to wait to get on a laptop becomes a problem. I know the powers that be are aware of this, so it seems excessive to whine about it "pony-request-wise" on MeTa.


I may not be up to date on this though...
posted by Skygazer at 12:58 PM on November 18, 2011


As far as that NYS judge getting "pushed against the wall." I don't know, man. It sounds pretty plausible that she was interfering with an arrest.

I really just don't like the turn this is all taking toward anti-NYPD sentiment. There have been some instances of egregious behavior over the last couple of months, no doubt about it, but by and large the things people are complaining about are pretty much by the book. According to their training and guidelines, cops are very likely justified in "pushing you against the wall" if you're getting in the way while they're trying to arrest someone. The devil is in the details, of course, but a "push" standing alone is hardly misconduct.


The police had just pushed another person to the ground and started hitting them in the head. That's not an arrest, and it ain't by the book.
posted by Jehan at 1:01 PM on November 18, 2011 [8 favorites]


Do you really think this is the most neutral presentation of this event?

Must we all be neutral in this thread? If so, you should be calling out lots more people around here... As for my "loaded" language: he's literally "facing off" the police, kneeling before a row of jackboots. And he's heckling them individually, saying they "should have called in sick."

I didn't use the expression "human shield." The video did. I'd prefer to let people come to their own conclusion here.

Personally, I think it's irresponsible to bring a young vulnerable child to the frontline of a demonstration against police clad in riot-gear, especially when there may be protesters (and perhaps a few rogue police) itching for a fight.
posted by BobbyVan at 1:05 PM on November 18, 2011


Dixie, great point a bit further up. Being a cop is one of the most stressful jobs there is, and I have tons of respect for any cop who genuinely attempts to do the job with integrity. Which most do, even if they're not prepared to be overtly friendly. Maybe the tough talk about protesters is often a defense mechanism, spoken by people whose families depend on this work. As with many soldiers, without this job a lot of them would drop down quite a few notches on the socio-economic scale, far enough to face greater hardship than being deprived of luxuries. Is that part of the problem? Definitely. Just when it comes to the individuals, best to temper the stereotyping and remain compassionate as best as we can.

On preview: Yertle, yes, none of the above exonerates cops doing wrong things. They are not above ordinary human responsibility because of their power, in fact they have MORE responsibility by dint of their training and authority.
posted by maniabug at 1:05 PM on November 18, 2011


Guys, the best thing to do if you think someone is starting to really make over-the-line posts is to just flag them.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:07 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Bobby, personally I think it's irresponsible to opt out of sticking up for what you believe is right just because you have kids. Perhaps, especially if you have kids. (No I'm not on WS with my kids. Three months old is too young.)
posted by maniabug at 1:09 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Guys, the best thing to do if you think someone is starting to really make over-the-line posts is to just flag them.

That's not the sort of thing that needs to be flagged, or should be. What would I flag it as -- "not neutral"? "Bad interpretation"?

I understand wanting to ignore Bobby. But if he's here in good faith, as he claims he is, and he's going to contribute, as he obviously will, I will on occasion engage him, as will others.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:11 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


According to their training and guidelines, cops are very likely justified in "pushing you against the wall"

I humbly submit that if the training protocol calls for pushing a woman against the wall when she tries to stop one or more officers from holding another woman on the ground and striking her in the head, then the guidelines are wrong, and needs to be fucking reevaluated.
posted by quin at 1:11 PM on November 18, 2011 [8 favorites]


Guys, the best thing to do if you think someone is starting to really make over-the-line posts is to just flag them.

That's not the sort of thing that needs to be flagged, or should be. What would I flag it as -- "not neutral"? "Bad interpretation"?


This kind of conversation should probably be moved to the open MeTa thread.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:14 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


If you ran into trouble with your business, and you thought to yourself, "I know exactly who to call to fix this," and you knew that person would return your call, you're in the 1%.

I may not be parsing this sentence as intended. What if you are just really active in your community and have a wide enough network to call upon to help you fix it? Wasn't this mentioned above?

Two years ago when I moved to my current home in a small town, [...] . I have received much assistance, loaned tools, hand me down clothes for my kids, gifts, food, gossip, and friendly entertainment. [...]
This is the alternative economy sitting right under our noses. I make a quarter what I did when I lived in NYC but in terms of involvement in a healthy community, I feel like one of the top 1%.


so is making connections something that makes you feel like someone in the top 1%? Does this make you part of the 1%? Is this sort of discussion or labeling unhelpful to the overall message?

I may be conflating two very different ideas here.
posted by Queen Sabium at 1:14 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


to add: I know the first quote is more related to a business while the second is more related to communities, but in many place, the lines get blurry for small business owners who are active in their community.
posted by Queen Sabium at 1:17 PM on November 18, 2011


Thank you Queen Sabium, you are directly on point. The post you quoted was thinking in terms of the power and money dynamics the 1% would like us to believe has replaced real communities. They are wrong!
posted by maniabug at 1:18 PM on November 18, 2011


I may not be parsing this sentence as intended. What if you are just really active in your community and have a wide enough network to call upon to help you fix it? Wasn't this mentioned above?

I was speaking very loosely. People in the 1% are there because they can force political decisions in their favor with money, not because they shop at Brooks Brothers.
posted by one_bean at 1:21 PM on November 18, 2011


There's no business like show business! Business is whatever keeps you busy. For some, it's trashing the planet, and for others, it's protecting the planet. With a wide range in between.
posted by maniabug at 1:22 PM on November 18, 2011


Here's an Occupy Portland protester, facing off against riot-gear clad police and heckling them while holding a young child in front of him.
I'm actually astounded that you would describe that video that way. First, it's just a guy sitting on the ground holding his kid in his lap; it's not like he was holding him up as a shield (which the video's title says even more directly than your seeming implication).

Second, and more astoundingly, it seems almost as if you think "That guy is such a coward for holding his kid up to prevent the cops from delivering his rightful ass-whupping".

WTF, man. Why is this apparently viewed by you, and certainly by the video's poster, as a situation in which a shield (of whatever sort) is needed? Because the guy spoke in a disapproving manner to a cop? Seriously? You think that that calls for the guy to need to physically defend himself (which you think he then did, albeit in a cowardly manner)? Presumably because the cop would attack him? Because he spoke to the cop in a disapproving manner? Again, WTF?

I'm sorry if I misread your intentions with that post; if I did, I apologize. But Jesus, it sure seems like a really weird take on events.
posted by Flunkie at 1:32 PM on November 18, 2011 [7 favorites]


Ok. I will write something up late this evening. One dirty hippy who joined our line was 87 year old Frances Goldin .
posted by stagewhisper at 1:34 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


Yeah and I'm saying it's weird that you keep perpetuating this stereotype because that's not what we actually look like.

Which is why it's a stereotype. Look, I have been to Occupy Madison, I know people from Occupy Milwaukee, and I'm in touch with other people around the country. But people like my dad - and to some extent, mr. desjardins - still think that OWS is dirty hippies. They're wrong. But that is still the stereotype. The fact that we don't look like that lends credibility to what we say to people like my dad. That's wrong. But it's still true.

I feel like you're being obtuse here. I am not putting anyone down.
posted by desjardins at 1:38 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


One reason I've been reluctant to attend any Occupy Baltimore rallies is because I actually do look like a dirty hippie, and I don't want to lower the level of discourse. :(
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:40 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


Flunkie, preview is your friend. I explained my views on the video above. For the record, the guy doesn't deserve an "ass whupping," but as a father of a young child myself, I certainly wouldn't bring my kid into a situation where things could escalate quickly and unexpectedly...
posted by BobbyVan at 1:44 PM on November 18, 2011


Bobby, all organisms are born into the situation you describe.
posted by maniabug at 1:48 PM on November 18, 2011 [5 favorites]


Wow, how impressive of you.
posted by Flunkie at 1:48 PM on November 18, 2011


but as a father of a young child myself, I certainly wouldn't bring my kid into a situation where things could escalate quickly and unexpectedly...

I agree with you there, but that's a lot different than saying someone is using their kid as a 'human shield'. That has a very specific connotation.
posted by Think_Long at 1:57 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


[Milwaukee] Police Chief Edward Flynn on Friday explained his decision not to arrest more than 150 protesters who occupied the North Ave. bridge on Thursday night, saying "arrest is not a tool to further political agendas."
posted by dhartung at 1:58 PM on November 18, 2011 [8 favorites]


dhartung: While I disagree with his dismissive attitude, I definitely prefer his sit-back-and-let-the-protest-burn-out approach to NYPD's lets-crack-some-skulls approach. All this violence is completely unnecessary and Flynn proves it. (He probably also knows that protests won't last long as winter wears on, so it's better to wait them out.)
posted by desjardins at 2:15 PM on November 18, 2011


Bobby did not say the kid in the video was used as a human shield in the video clip he posted. But let's not split hairs here. He's suggesting the very people with the biggest stake in this conflict—those whose kids are the next generation that will have to swallow the garbage created by today's politicians and CEOs—should shrink back from this conflict to "protect" their kids? It sounds to me like someone is using other peoples' kids as a shield.
posted by maniabug at 2:15 PM on November 18, 2011 [4 favorites]


There were lots of kids in Foley Square last night.

My mom started taking me to anti-war rallies and farmworkers' rights rallies when I was a little boy in the late 60s and early 70s. I am ever so grateful for that experience. Now she's in her 70s and still a radical, and I'm proud to say she and have been to Zucotti together twice, and on countless anti-war marches together. Yesterday she marched in her suburban town's small OWS demo, and she just moved a significant amount of money (from her retirement savings) out of BoA and into a credit union.

She's a deeply Christian hospice nurse (who says she'll never retire because her work is too important to the people she helps) who lives an ascetic life out of faith, and who actually tithes her church. How's that for a dirty fucking hippie?
posted by spitbull at 2:17 PM on November 18, 2011 [17 favorites]


Watched the video again w/ the kid in Portland... and it's kind of a bullshit critique. Yeah it's sort of lousy to hold your kid in front of you while you heckle cops, but I'll admit that this isn't the strongest of cases against OWS tactics. Carry on everyone.
posted by BobbyVan at 2:18 PM on November 18, 2011 [5 favorites]


I agree with desjardins's point/clarification

Just because you don't like or agree with a particular viewpoint doesn't make that viewpoint non-existent.

Like it or not, there is a somewhat negative ( or sometimes at best neutral) connotation of OWS in the mainstream. Those of us following along the play-by-play here on metafilter have a good feel for what's going on, even if we don't all agree on everything, but that's a far cry from trying to elucidate friends and family who may be (understandably) confused on what the big deal is.

How do you effectively deal with this? What is a reasonable plan of action to make progress?
posted by Queen Sabium at 2:24 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


As far as that NYS judge getting "pushed against the wall." I don't know, man. It sounds pretty plausible that she was interfering with an arrest.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, a state supreme court judge was aware of the legality of her actions, and the legality of the actions of the officer who was bludgeoning the woman with a club. Call me crazy.
posted by mullingitover at 2:25 PM on November 18, 2011 [13 favorites]


Oh, activist judges, that's what they call them, right? You just *know* that's what Fox is gonna tarnish her with. *gag*
posted by symbioid at 2:26 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


I actually think there might be some mileage in an "activist police" critique. Who says batons and chokeholds are protected speech?
posted by RogerB at 2:28 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


But people like my dad - and to some extent, mr. desjardins - still think that OWS is dirty hippies. They're wrong. But that is still the stereotype. The fact that we don't look like that lends credibility to what we say to people like my dad. That's wrong. But it's still true.

I totally understand your point. You made a really interesting post about how social media is driving the coverage of this thing, which makes some people who might be / are sympathetic with the movement disconnected from it. But you started it with some "stage-setting" about how you don't look like dirty hippies, and you drive BMWs. That part just seemed incongruous.
posted by one_bean at 2:29 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


As far as that NYS judge getting "pushed against the wall." I don't know, man. It sounds pretty plausible that she was interfering with an arrest.

As of yesterday, the officer could also be guilty of a Class C felony for assaulting a judge. Why don't we arrest the suspect and let the courts figure it out?
posted by ryoshu at 2:46 PM on November 18, 2011 [7 favorites]


How do you effectively deal with this? What is a reasonable plan of action to make progress?

Well, we had my dad and stepmom over for dinner recently. My father is relatively conservative but doesn't talk about it much. My stepmom is just a few steps left of Palin and asked for her book for Xmas. OWS didn't come up directly, but the income inequality did. We gently pointed out that things have gotten much worse, the gap has gotten larger, and taxes on the rich have gone down. We got her to see that we weren't talking about people like her brother, who owned a thriving manufacturing business, but about people who don't make anything, don't create value for the economy. And those folks have a greater share of political power than we do, or than her brother does.

Okay, I'm preaching to the choir here. Bottom line: we simplified it, we got her to think in terms of real people that we both know, and we laid out some what-if scenarios. For example, I have health problems. If we lose our jobs, we're up shit creek.
posted by desjardins at 2:48 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, a state supreme court judge was aware of the legality of her actions, and the legality of the actions of the officer who was bludgeoning the woman with a club. Call me crazy.

People are notoriously bad at figuring out what is going on, on the fly, with police behavior. The fact that she is a judge doesn't change the cognitive aspects of observing a police-civilian encounter, nor do I find it likely that she was making an informed, on-the-fly legal determination about the officer's tactics here. Her narrative of these events, put differently, is essentially: I saw a distraught woman demanding to be let into a restricted area. The police tried to push her back. Suddenly, out of nowhere ["out of nowhere" is frequently code for "I didn't see what happened immediately beforehand"], the police were striking her. I walked over, as the police were hitting her, and told them to stop. The police told me to back up and I informed them I had authority to be there. Then they pushed me back.

As far as witness statements go about these sorts of things this is really not terribly compelling to me. Let's not use the fact that she's a judge to give her credibility she doesn't deserve vis a vis whether she was able to tell what was happening here. I have found an Occam's razor approach to be a pretty good guide in guessing what probably motivates police officers, and our options here are that either this cop started whaling on this distraught woman's head for no apparent reason, or, the cop decided there was probable cause for an arrest and began to make that arrest. If it's the latter, judge or not, the proper time to object to that determination is not as the police are putting someone under arrest.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 3:15 PM on November 18, 2011


I have found an Occam's razor approach to be a pretty good guide in guessing what probably motivates police officers, and our options here are that either this cop started whaling on this distraught woman's head for no apparent reason, or, the cop decided there was probable cause for an arrest and began to make that arrest.

Or the cop was having a bad day and was looking for a any excuse to take it out on someone.
posted by empath at 3:19 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Anyway this is really all by way of saying that, again, I think the narrative shifting toward, "NYC is a military police state!" is kind of uninformed and counterproductive. There have been a few bad incidents but honestly, the cops I think are not doing a terrible job, and every time I see some video posted titled POLICE BRUTALITY AT OWS and it's a video of the cops cuffing someone on the ground and carrying them to a police car because they went limp, it just further diminishes the term.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 3:20 PM on November 18, 2011


> "the police were striking her. "

This is the thing that requires a really, really, really good reason. And I'd expect a judge would be more than qualified to spot such a reason, e.g., a weapon in the attacked woman's hand, perhaps.
posted by Space Coyote at 3:20 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Occam's Razor would also indicate that police officers, being people, are also at least sometimes notoriously bad at figuring out what's happening on the fly, and react without thinking about the repercussions of their actions, or whether the actions they're engaging in are the actions they *should* be engaging in.
posted by rtha at 3:22 PM on November 18, 2011 [6 favorites]


consequences of a citizen misreading what is happening and acting in a confrontational manner: high

consequences of a police officer misreading what is happening and acting in a confrontational manner: low to non-existent

Seriously, the dude who maced young women in the face got off with a slap on the wrist. But if you throw a AA battery at a cop? You get a cracked skull (graphic)
posted by desjardins at 3:27 PM on November 18, 2011 [4 favorites]


Yeah, on further reflection I would probably retreat from my stance on this somewhat. I just had a visceral reaction to the "Cop Pushes Supreme Court Justice" thing, because I really think it is a total who-gives-a-shit red herring that this woman who got shoved in the midst of a protest is a judge. If it's "Cop Hits Mom In Head" then I'm all ears.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 3:28 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]




OWS isn't going to have to look for suits in the near future...

Big Banks Laying off 75k Workers
Mid-to-late November is typically the season for layoffs, as banks want to avoid making cuts during the holidays in December. By doing it before year-end, these employees aren't eligible for bonuses.
Wall Street really knows how to celebrate the holidays, don't they?
posted by deanklear at 3:31 PM on November 18, 2011 [5 favorites]


Anyway this is really all by way of saying that, again, I think the narrative shifting toward, "NYC is a military police state!" is kind of uninformed and counterproductive. There have been a few bad incidents but honestly, the cops I think are not doing a terrible job, and every time I see some video posted titled POLICE BRUTALITY AT OWS and it's a video of the cops cuffing someone on the ground and carrying them to a police car because they went limp, it just further diminishes the term.

Can someone with more time provide dixiecupdrinking with a more robust list of videos please?
posted by stagewhisper at 3:37 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


desjardins: "Okay, I'm preaching to the choir here. Bottom line: we simplified it, we got her to think in terms of real people that we both know, and we laid out some what-if scenarios. For example, I have health problems. If we lose our jobs, we're up shit creek."

I think Palin is just another one of the corporate toadies, but (some) of her rhetoric matches it. Use the term "Crony Capitalism" - that's their terminology, and Lawrence Lessig used it when speaking to Occupy.

Here's part of her speech in Iowa:
They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.
If she pushes that term and people can grok it, then ok, let's use it, too. We mean the same thing on that end of it... I prefer the term plutocracy, oligarchy or kleptocracy, but sure, call it crony capitalism. At least they're not saying "Fascism" or "Socialism" anymore.
posted by symbioid at 3:42 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


The extraordinary Jesse LaGreca is on the Ed Show (MSNBC) right now. If we need a spokesman, this is the guy. Check it out.
posted by spitbull at 5:12 PM on November 18, 2011


Thanksgiving with my (extremely conservative, authoritarian) family is going to be interesting this year.
posted by LordSludge at 5:17 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


I agree with a poster above (sorry, thread is so cumbersome and my daughter is watching a show about magical jellybeans and wanting to ask me questions about it and it's all making me distracted) that the interview with the judge being pushed against a wall is good coverage. That's why I posted it. It's time people realize the machine does not discriminate. And it's not the police. I imagine most of them are good folks. They are just taking orders. It's those who are giving orders, and those above them, who are the problem.

And BobbyVan - what is your point exactly? I see two options - you are hoping to engage in meaningful discourse and hope to change minds and get them to think, or you are being an ass.

Given the passion and solidarity to Occupy in this thread, I doubt you are changing anyone's mind. And given the fact you continue to single out cases where you feel single individuals are engaging in morally reprehensible behavior, implying that a single person (or a handful) is representative of a crowd, rather than engaging in meaningful discussion about the principles the Occupy movement endorses, I can only assume the latter. If that is a correct assumption, please cease, because you are not changing anyone's mind.
posted by tr33hggr at 5:26 PM on November 18, 2011


I have found an Occam's razor approach to be a pretty good guide in guessing what probably motivates police officers, and our options here are that either this cop started whaling on this distraught woman's head for no apparent reason, or, the cop decided there was probable cause for an arrest and began to make that arrest.

This is a fundamentally flawed way of understanding this sort of situation. I usually try to avoid strong language like that, but that's what it is. There is an overwhelming body of psychological literature showing that humans do not do very well in situations where they have a lot of power and the responsibility to ensure certain forms of behavior. Milgram Experiments, Stanford Prison Experiment, etc. There is also a considerable body of literature showing that human beings are not very good at figuring out what the best thing to do will be, when emotions are high and things are happening very fast. You mix this together, and what you get are a lot of police officers in a situation that makes it very, very hard for them to do the right thing.

I believe that the vast majority of police officers in NYC are fundamentally decent human beings. I believe that Tony Bologna himself is probably a very good person, who attempts to do good, who tries to use his position of power to help rather than hurt. However, even fundamentally decent, good people can (and do) do horrible, terrible things, in the right sorts of circumstances. And the circumstances that the NYPD officers charged with ensuring order currently are in are the sorts of circumstances nearly perfectly created to lead fundamentally decent, good people to do horrible, terrible things. It is likely that whatever officer was involved in that particular altercation did not intend to inappropriately harm a woman, and he probably interpreted his circumstances as ones in which is force was warranted or perhaps even necessary. But, he was unfortunately in the sort of circumstances where it is psychologically more likely that one will be mistaken about what one is warranted (or perhaps required) to do.

We need to be able to separate out discussions of the moral worth of any particular police officer -- his particular internal virtue or vice -- from the moral and legal appropriateness of those police officer's actions. We can judge their actions as morally inappropriate and legally questionable without saying we know anything about their internal worth as human beings. Were I in their shoes, I know I would be just as likely to behave in such morally inappropriate and legally questionable ways -- there but for the Grace of God go I. I pity those police officers, who are currently caught in a terrible social trap. I pity them, and I assume they (or at least some of them) go home, look back on their actions, and feel the sickening feel of regret and shame. It's sad. It's terrible. It is not that the OWS protesters are victims and the cops are terrible perpetrators -- instead, both groups are victims of terrible, psychologically-warping social circumstances.
posted by meese at 5:30 PM on November 18, 2011 [25 favorites]


I believe that Tony Bologna himself is probably a very good person, who attempts to do good, who tries to use his position of power to help rather than hurt.

And who also bears deep, painful emotional scars stemming from a lifetime of people making fun of his ridiculous name.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:36 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


I thought WalMart accounted for 70% of American jobs.

Occupy Wednesday! It'll make for a more interesting Thanksgiving dinner. Imagine what your wingnut Uncle would have to say if a quarter-million people Occupied Wall Street, if his own city's turnout was 10x larger than normal?

Imagine if you rounded up your coworkers and headed out at lunch or immediately after work.

Imagine if you got the boss on-side! They're 99%ers, too. Doesn't this OWS thing deserve a little visit, what with claiming to represent everyone in the building?

Let's get down there as co-workers, find out what OWS is, and then go off to Thanksgiving with something interesting to share. Your crazy uncle won't know what to make of everyone in the office doing such a thing!
posted by five fresh fish at 5:36 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


They are just taking orders.

They're not just taking orders; they're also obeying those orders, entirely of their own volition.

And I'm willing to bet they're calling their own shots a lot of the time, i.e. when to bludgeon people for saying certain things, and how hard. But, hey, maybe there's a skull fracture quota.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:41 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


I believe that Tony Bologna himself is probably a very good person, who attempts to do good, who tries to use his position of power to help rather than hurt.

No, he's a sociopathic prick. A lot of them are drawn to police work and, once on the force, rise easily, as he did.
posted by spitbull at 6:02 PM on November 18, 2011 [7 favorites]


Agree Sys Rq, but I think the Occupy folks have more to gain in winning the police over rather than demonizing them.
posted by tr33hggr at 6:05 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Amen! Yes, Tony Bologna is an authoritarian sociopath pure and simple, who needs to be locked up in Rikers.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:06 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Here's another Occupy Tampa update --

We have an exact record of the expenditures of the aviation unit (the helicopter) since the beginning of September. The day after our largest march on the 6th of October, The TPD purchased a brand new gyrocam for the low price of $133,000. Coincidence? Or no? That's for you to decide.

Total expenditures from 10/1/11 until 11/15/11 reach $162,701.43, including $24,836.58 in fuel. The TPD does regular flyovers at low altitudes, sometimes hovering in place for extended periods and/or shining their spotlight on us - even when there are less than 20 people visible on the public sidewalk. Assistant Police Chief John Bennett was quoted stating that he estimated operating costs to be $600/hour.


All of this to keep an eye on about twenty people in 120 feet of sidewalk. Really, guys? Maybe they're practicing for the RNC.
posted by cmyk at 6:40 PM on November 18, 2011 [6 favorites]


You mix this together, and what you get are a lot of police officers in a situation that makes it very, very hard for them to do the right thing.

I don't think that's really the right characterization of the influence of the situation. Situational pressures can be very strong and are definitely an important component of the police behavior. But if individual attitudes didn't matter, we would see most cops acting badly when given the chance. From what I can tell, that's not the case even for NYPD. The situation does not lead cops like Tony Bologna to act the way they do, at least not nearly to the extent that Milgram's experiment leads to compliance.

But - the situation allows them to act that way, which is I think the bigger influence. There is little legal accountability, little fear of physical retaliation, and excess force is a norm for these police. Fellow cops do not feel it part of their duty to ensure other cops are not acting badly, or they know that they may face organizational punishment for such self-policing. And there are a number of bad apples who take advantage of that (in multiple situations, even) -- it isn't just those with poor judgment in the heat of the moment.

Basically: if you're going to pity police as victims, pity the majority who are not acting badly but can't really do anything about the ones that are. There's a good parallel to be found in there.
posted by parudox at 7:32 PM on November 18, 2011 [9 favorites]


You know who else was just following orders? I mean, seriously, I can't believe that anyone would use that line. I don't know what you do for a living, but if your boss said "here's a truncheon, beat that guy or you'll lose your job," you would do it because you were ordered to? Come on. I hope the vast majority of the people in this thread would walk off the job if that were the case.
posted by desjardins at 8:06 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]


Graphic video of police spraying peaceful, seated UC Davis protesters with pepper spray about an hour ago.
posted by stagewhisper at 8:13 PM on November 18, 2011 [9 favorites]


Occupy Philly Occupies Wells Fargo

TheOther99 is saying 14 were arrested
posted by Defenestrator at 8:25 PM on November 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Graphic video yt of police spraying peaceful, seated UC Davis protesters with pepper spray about an hour ago.

Now that's some bullshit right there.
posted by BobbyVan at 8:42 PM on November 18, 2011 [10 favorites]


"They are just taking orders."

Dude, as Americans, our police should never say that.
posted by klangklangston at 8:48 PM on November 18, 2011 [4 favorites]


You can hope that, desjardins, but Milgram tells us that most of us wouldn't. I choose to think of that as a reminder that I don't possess any special purity and that doing the right thing is an everyday struggle.
posted by Errant at 8:53 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Just taking orders.
posted by Defenestrator at 8:57 PM on November 18, 2011


Do you think the cops were told explicitly to beat up protestors, Errant? Cops are trained for avoiding violence. Any that grossly violate that should be imprisoned. If they were ordered, whoever gave that order should be imprisoned, and the cops should be demoted for obeying said orders.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:58 PM on November 18, 2011


whoever gave that order should be imprisoned

They are just giving orders!
posted by klue at 9:00 PM on November 18, 2011 [6 favorites]


I was responding to the idea that most moral people wouldn't follow orders to some degree. I was not making any claim about the current situation.
posted by Errant at 9:03 PM on November 18, 2011


Do you think the cops were told explicitly to beat up protestors, Errant?

I think Errant was responding to the "what would you do if your boss told you to beat someone" hypothetical.
posted by sweetkid at 9:04 PM on November 18, 2011


Reporters from conservative paper the Daily Caller assaulted by NYPD during OWS eviction, but supposedly many commenters there remained unsympathetic.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:21 PM on November 18, 2011


Having now watched the video in question, yes, the inhumanity is palpable. That looks entirely like premeditated aggravated assault.

I wonder if there is a lawyer that can put this into context for me: this is a finding by the Ninth Circuit Court that, if I'm reading it right, holds that use of pepper spray on nonviolent demonstrators violates their Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizure. Is that accurate? Has that finding been overturned or disputed?
posted by Errant at 9:22 PM on November 18, 2011


Graphic video of police spraying peaceful, seated UC Davis protesters with pepper spray about an hour ago.

This photo conveys the cold and methodical brutality. There is also powerful longer video of this, in which it looks like the police were literally shamed out of UC Davis following the pepper spraying and several arrests.
posted by parudox at 9:52 PM on November 18, 2011 [15 favorites]


Cops are trained for avoiding violence. Any that grossly violate that should be imprisoned.

Yes, they should be.

But they rarely are.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:03 PM on November 18, 2011 [4 favorites]


Errant, that was merely one step in the case and only concerned whether the defendants (the county) had qualified immunity. The final jury verdict -- in the third (!) trial -- was a victory for the plaintiffs; in the appeals phase, however, the plaintiffs and defendants settled, so the precedential value of the verdict is in question. IANAL.
posted by dhartung at 10:59 PM on November 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


stagewhisper: Graphic video yt of police spraying peaceful, seated UC Davis protesters with pepper spray about an hour ago.
BobbyVan: Now that's some bullshit right there
It would be only fair to point out that it's nice to see that as much as we lambasted BobbyVan, we should remember can find common ground, and he's not some inhumane automaton. It's that good point in a discussion where you realize you actually agree that there is a line, or some principle you mutually agree upon... but you've just been disagreeing on exactly where to find it. That's a good place to get to, as a start!

Coolness.
posted by hincandenza at 12:08 AM on November 19, 2011 [7 favorites]


I lived in Davis the last five years, just moved away a couple months ago. I'm proud to say that at least one of my friends, an extremely active community member, working on some really stellar projects, was one of those pepper sprayed in that video.

From a letter to the chancellor:
"Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood."
I'm disgusted by the actions of the UC Davis police force, but not particularly surprised, following a couple encounters with the police during protests at the university over the last couple years.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:57 AM on November 19, 2011 [12 favorites]


There is also powerful longer video of this, in which it looks like the police were literally shamed out of UC Davis following the pepper spraying and several arrests.

Wow, that video is incredible. About 8 mins long, but worth watching all of it. You won't want to miss how it ends. Thanks for posting that parudox!
posted by marsha56 at 1:40 AM on November 19, 2011


Blood boils. Davis police are sociopathic cowards of the worst kind. Sorry to Godwin, but that's some Nazi-assed shit right there.
posted by spitbull at 3:22 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


dixiecupdrinking, I'm wondering how many real life encounters with NYPD you've had.

I encounter them regularly, and I'd be overjoyed if one of the end results of OWS was the NYPD's often illegal, almost always unjust bully tactics were exposed to and acknowledged by the wider world.
To my mind, their MO is the same as the banking industy; they have virtually unchecked power to do whatever they want to get whatever end result they desire, regardless of the legality or fairness of it, and with little fear of repercussion.
posted by newpotato at 5:31 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


newpotato is exactly right. NYPD use bullying tactics in nearly every encounter with citizens I've seen.

They are a bunch of bullies and sociopaths who delight in intimidating anyone they please.
posted by spitbull at 5:35 AM on November 19, 2011


I wonder if there is a lawyer that can put this into context for me: this is a finding by the Ninth Circuit Court that, if I'm reading it right, holds that use of pepper spray on nonviolent demonstrators violates their Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizure. Is that accurate? Has that finding been overturned or disputed?

There's also Forrester v. City of San Diego, in which the 9th circuit held that police could use pain compliance measures against non-violent anti-abortion protesters, inflicting pain on them until they walked to be arrested... even though the use of force there was severe enough to break one protester's wrist.

At least some police departments (for instance pg. 17 here.) see the use of OC spray as being at roughly the same level as pain control techniques.
posted by Jahaza at 5:52 AM on November 19, 2011


@fivethirtyeight:
"That the police officer in this photo has not been fired yet is profoundly embarrassing"
posted by Rhaomi at 6:12 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


The univ needs to confront the police at the institutional level.
posted by maniabug at 6:39 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


pain compliance measures

I always wondered how to say "torture" in newspeak.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 6:51 AM on November 19, 2011 [17 favorites]


I'd like to congratulate the 1% for successfully turning the discussion away from political and economic inequity and onto clashes with the police. Because as long as everyone is focused on DIRTY HIPPIES vs. THE PIGS, nothing will change and the actual people in power get to continue business as usual.
posted by Dojie at 7:04 AM on November 19, 2011 [11 favorites]


Is there a reason all UC Davis students aren't withdrawing from school today? They are paying for that police force with their tuition dollars. This isn't good customer service, it's not a good return on their investment, and I don't think this institution is teaching them the lessons that should be taught. The Chancellor may need time to think about whether or not it's ok to forcefully spray pepper spray down her customers' throats, if she has no customers to worry about then she might come to the right conclusions faster.
posted by Houstonian at 7:07 AM on November 19, 2011 [7 favorites]


I always wondered how to say "torture" in newspeak.

Don't forget "enhanced interrogation techniques." If something is evil and illegal, instead of avoiding that behavior we reclassify it as technically legal and act like there's no problem with it. Reading the accounts of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo is horrifying... they drew an imaginary line on what torture was, and then walked right on it.

I'll say again that our police forces nationwide need to be demilitarized. If they're so quick to use pepper spray, beanbag shotguns, and tear gas against citizens, how are they going to act if one lunatic fires a shot from the protest side? Open fire on the whole crowd and claim it was a legitimate use of force?
posted by deanklear at 7:17 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


How can the UC Davis police be so oblivious to the fact that their every action is being documented from every angle? Until the enforcers recognize that they are the stars of a fascinating new reality show and develop the self-consciousness needed to police their own behavior, we're going to see more of these scenes of outrage. What we as a society do with these images is where it gets interesting. Fun as it is to type "Tony Boloney," simply shaming one or two thuggish officers by name is not, I think, the best possible use of this moment. Can it lead to a systemic change in policy? Maybe no citizen should be permitted to carry in public a pepper spray unit the size of a small fire extinguisher? How many people watching this video even knew such devices existed and were standard issue for University police during protests? They know it now.
posted by Scram at 7:18 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'd like to congratulate the 1% for successfully turning the discussion away from political and economic inequity and onto clashes with the police. Because as long as everyone is focused on DIRTY HIPPIES vs. THE PIGS, nothing will change and the actual people in power get to continue business as usual.

Google "Bull Connor".

The mainstream media has already been painting OWS as a bunch of dirty hippies, and as desjardins has already explained, many people who are getting their news that way are buying into their viewpoints. It's going to take some police brutality to wake people up. By focusing on police actions, we should start asking as the protester in the video chanted "Who are you serving? Who are you protecting?"

The effects of the 1% are visible all around us, but their most of their actions are invisible. Police brutality against protesters is the hand of the 1% made visible.
posted by marsha56 at 7:21 AM on November 19, 2011 [6 favorites]




If they're so quick to use pepper spray, beanbag shotguns, and tear gas against citizens, how are they going to act if one lunatic fires a shot from the protest side? Open fire on the whole crowd and claim it was a legitimate use of force?

That's how it always worked in the past, no reason to think things would go differently this time. I just hope I'm not in the crowd being fired into.
posted by fuq at 7:41 AM on November 19, 2011


Please, somebody... make a hot link of this.
http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/19/8884405-lobbying-firms-memo-spells-out-plan-to-undermine-occupy-wall-street
posted by Jumpin Jack Flash at 7:54 AM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


Here is a form to contact UC Davis Chancellor Linda P. B. Ketehi. Write politely, and it will have more effect.
posted by spitbull at 8:02 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Sorry, that's Linda P. B. K*a*tehi.

The "P.B." probably stands for "Police Brutality."
posted by spitbull at 8:04 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


as long as everyone is focused on DIRTY HIPPIES vs. THE PIGS, nothing will change and the actual people in power get to continue business as usual.

Same as it ever was.

Or at least, as it was in the 60s.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:19 AM on November 19, 2011


Lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford's memo (pdf) spells out plan to undermine Occupy Wall Street. (Per JJF's request)

The memo identifies vulnerable anti-Wall St. Democrats in FL, PA, VA, WI, OH, NC, NV, and NM, but clarifies that Democratic victories should not be the ABA’s biggest concern, with the bigger threat being that Republicans might no longer defend Wall Street companies.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:25 AM on November 19, 2011 [9 favorites]




"Shortly before 4 p.m., about 35 officers from UC Davis and other UC campuses as well as the city of Davis responded to the protest, said Annette Spicuzza, UC Davis police chief. They were wearing protective gear and some held batons.

The protest initially involved about 50 students, Spicuzza said, but swelled to about 200 as the confrontation with police escalated.

She said officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them. They used a sweeping motion on the group, per procedure, to avoid injury, she said.

The students were informed repeatedly ahead of time that if they didn't move, force would be used, she said.

"There was no way out of that circle," Spicuzza said. "They were cutting the officers off from their support. It's a very volatile situation."

You know what's a really bad idea? Making shit up when there's video showing that what you're saying is a big fat lie.
posted by rtha at 8:44 AM on November 19, 2011 [24 favorites]




You know, if I wrote a memo as a parody to point out things the OWS is protesting, I could not do better than that real memo.

1. Company I've never heard of, but apparently with high-flying customers such as Koch and Bloomberg.

2. Proposal that they investigate the OWS leaders, apparently missing the main complaint heard that there is no leadership and it is a horizontal organization of people.

3. Continued proposal that they find the source of funding, because it is inconceivable that little people would give the spare dollars found here and there to make their voices heard.

4. Fear-mongering statements about how the protesters are effective at working the media, as seen by all the positive and supportive press they've been receiving.

5. Reading twitter feeds is "targeted social media monitoring."

6. TARP was a "perceived bailout."

7. The punchline at the end: "The cost of the deliverables identified above is $850,000."
posted by Houstonian at 8:49 AM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


Business email address for Annette M. Spicuzza, Chief of UC Davis Police:

amspicuzza@ucdavis.edu
posted by spitbull at 8:50 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


considering how freaking long this thread is, is the memo itself FPP material?
posted by The Whelk at 8:51 AM on November 19, 2011 [6 favorites]


Spicuzza: "“This was a tough scene to walk into,” she said. “This was 50 people and before you knew it, it probably grew close to 200. When you encircle a group of officers that are just trying to do their jobs, it’s kinda scary, but they did a great job. I don’t believe any of our officers were hurt, and I hope none of the students were injured.”

Pike's pay: "Lt. Pike has received a salary in excess of $100,000 from the people of California each of the last three years. More than 40% of his 2010 salary came from student fees."
posted by Houstonian at 8:54 AM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


Chancellor Katehi's direct business email address:

chancellor@ucdavis.edu
posted by spitbull at 8:56 AM on November 19, 2011


Lt. Pike has received a salary in excess of $100,000

That's rich. Most faculty members at UC Davis earn less than that.
posted by spitbull at 8:58 AM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


Come on, guys. I'm almost sure that the police office didn't recognise that they were seated and non-violent.
posted by running order squabble fest at 8:59 AM on November 19, 2011




Suit looses it, rants at occupiers, grabs signs

That was absolutely fascinating. It was like the evolution of my local Occupation's Peacekeeping force over the course of a month, summarized in a few minutes.

My local Occupation is in a park at the crossroads of the town, the place where students walk between their homes and the bars. On weekend nights, drunken students try to confront the Peacekeepers as they walk through the park. At first, everyone wanted to engage them, they wanted confrontations. Those people lost interest gradually, since the students didn't really want confrontations, they just wanted to get a rise out of the Occupants. Then Peacekeepers tried responding with yells "we love you" and that really didn't work either. Then everyone gradually got clued in that these people were trolls, ignore them and you deny them what they want: a reaction.

Then I went to a nonviolent peacekeeping training by the Michigan Peace Team. They suggested a technique that allegedly originated with the Quakers to resolve disagreements, the "CLARA method." It was simple:
C: Calm, center yourself so you're nonreactive
L: Listen actively. Look them in the eyes
A: Acknowledge, affirm them. Try to find a common ground to show agreement
R: Respond. Show that you're engaged in their issue and are taking them seriously.
A: Add information. Try to redirect the discussion away from confrontation.

At the end of the video, one guy seems to be using this technique (whether intentionally or not, I don't know). He stands in front of the drunk guy, with a nonaggressive stance but not confrontationally. The guy gets in his face, yelling at him from inches away. The Occupier does not flinch. The drunk guy starts to run out of steam, since he was being listened to. Then the Occupier answers, we can't hear what he says, but he appears to be acknowledging the guy's issue. He talks for a few moments, and the drunk guy calms down and goes away. Perfect.

Now these peacekeeping techniques don't always work. I actually tried one on a fellow occupant who deliberately annoys me by blowing a brass horn near my ears. I asked him to stop because it hurt my ears and made me deaf, but that seemed to make him enjoy taunting me and then blowing the horn even more. He attended the same peacekeeping training as I did, so I asked him to be open to a technique we learned, "I Statements." The format is simple, "I feel ___ when you ___ because ___ so I would like ____." I said to him, "I feel physical pain when you blow the brass horn near me because I have hearing damage and had surgery on my ear, and loud noises like the horn cause me to lose what little hearing I have left. So I would like you to stop blowing that horn." Now this young kid is a Rainbow Family person, so he immediately accused me of infringing on his freedom, he enjoyed playing the horn and I was being a buzzkill. I told him that famous statement, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" and then things went downhill from there. He had a goddam hissy fit. This is one of the problems with leaderless organizations, there is a power structure implicit in anything, and leadership tends to go to whoever can throw the biggest fits. It's a horrible way to bully people, especially coming from people who consider themselves "enlightened" and free from societal power trips.

After this fiasco, I prepared some printouts so I could make my argument to banish the horn at our next GA. I printed my latest hearing test and made a full page printout of the graph, showing my serious hearing damage. I found and printed a spectral analysis of that type of horn, showing how energetic it was at the very frequencies that would damage my hearing the most. Then I found specific language in our permit from the city that prohibits amplified sound, and legal definitions in our city code that would classify the horn as an amplified sound device. I was prepared to make 3 arguments, personal (he was deliberately antagonizing me), moral (we had no right to annoy our neighbors with the horn), and legal (it was prohibited).

Before the GA, I saw a friend who is active in hearing and deafness issues (she's studying Sign Language in college) and I thought I'd run this argument past her privately before going public. She looked at my audiology graphs and the horn spectral analysis with the gravest look on her face. I described what Rainbow Guy was doing, and made my quick 3 arguments in a few sentences. She said, "I'll talk to him, I can take care of this." That evening, the horn disappeared. Rainbow Guy accused me of stealing it. I denied it. He threw another fit, and then left on a weekend trip. He was pissed off because he wanted to take the horn with him on the trip to another Occupation.

The next day, I saw my friend, and described how Rainbow Guy had a hissy fit and then left, and accused me of stealing the horn. She said, "well that's why I wanted to talk to him before he left, I hid the horn. It's not his property, he had no right to take it with him, it was donated to the Occupation." LOL. Rainbow Guy came back from his weekend trip, I guess my friend talked to him because the horn is gone and nothing more has ever been said about it.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:13 AM on November 19, 2011 [21 favorites]


flagged as fantastic
posted by The Whelk at 9:19 AM on November 19, 2011


When I was in college in the 80s, the big issue on campus was divestment. I went to a SLAC; the campus police, if I'm remembering right, were not allowed to touch students unless the student was an immediate danger to others (or themselves). We took over the president's office twice (once when he was in the middle of lunching with a reporter from the NYT); we occupied the administration building for several days; we took over the bell tower. We built shanties on the Green, we blocked access to college cuildings, we disrupted business as usual during trustee meetings, we raised as much ruckus as possible. We never got pepper-sprayed or batoned by either the campus po or the town cops. We faced college disciplinary action for what we did; I was brought before the Committee on Standards two or three times - not county judges, not town or state cops.

We got a lot of training in civil disobedience from area community activists who had been doing that kind of thing since the Vietnam War and earlier. I'm still grateful to them.

I don't even know what the point of this is, except maybe goddamn, this shit is fucked up.
posted by rtha at 9:20 AM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]


Regarding the references to the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments mentioned above:

Just because it's been shown that many people will turn into sociopathic fucks given the appropriate level of power does not mean that we should accept that. We should actively work against it and hold the police accountable for their actions.

I can't say with 100% certainty what I would do in a given situation, but I absolutely know that I don't want to act like those police officers, and if I did I should suffer the consequences. No one gets a free pass because of Milgram and Stanford.
posted by desjardins at 9:21 AM on November 19, 2011 [12 favorites]


When you encircle a group of officers that are just trying to do their jobs, it’s kinda scary.

I mean, why? Are the college kids going to start murdering cops in the street? Beating them to death with their cameras?
posted by furiousxgeorge at 9:22 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Holy shit -- that UC Davis video is enraging! There is no way that officer that calmly sprayed those seated students shouldn't be fired and subject to civil, if not criminal litigation. That guy should lose his job immediately and then lose every scrap of his property in the subsequent lawsuits. That's just damn, damn wrong and it is infuriating to watch.
posted by darkstar at 9:23 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Seems like the cops at these events are the cops from Idiocracy. "That's enough of your bullshit!"

A lot less funny here.
posted by ignignokt at 9:24 AM on November 19, 2011


This video starts a few minutes before the other one that was posted. The police made a big point of stating that they were going to spray the students. He's patting a student on the back while the student asks him to confirm that they will be pepper sprayed for sitting. The others yell "Don't shoot students" while he poses around, getting his riot gear just so, and exaggeratedly shakes the pepper spray can. He is OBVIOUSLY not afraid -- he's showing them who is boss.
posted by Houstonian at 9:28 AM on November 19, 2011 [8 favorites]


We should push for news stories about campus police brutality incidents internationally as well, including obviously this U.C. Davis story.

American Universities are making considerable efforts to recruits foreign students. Such efforts could be spoiled if more foreign advisors and parents abroad understood the prevalence of police brutality in the U.S., both on and off campus.

Any magazine that provides coverage of higher education aimed towards consumers of said education could be contacted about this story. I wrote an email to the Times of Higher Education's Editor, suggesting that they run a story about it, although I really should've written directly to the News Editor or Deputy News Editor. I stopped short of offering to write a letter to the editor, since it wasn't obvious that they accept any, but I hinted at doing so. If anyone else, especially an academic, journalist, or someone with more first hand experience with an on-campus occupy movement, wishes to write them or anyone else, go right ahead.

It might be interesting to produce some list of universities by police brutality incidents as well, perhaps get it into some student guide for applying to universities.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:29 AM on November 19, 2011 [6 favorites]


We were trapped and surrounded! *officer steps over sitting protesters to get to other side to spray them*
posted by furiousxgeorge at 9:32 AM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]


We were trapped and surrounded! *officer steps over sitting protesters to get to other side to spray them*

They're coming right for us!
posted by ryoshu at 9:36 AM on November 19, 2011 [7 favorites]


Open Letter to Chancellor Linda Katehi from a Davis faculty member
posted by RogerB at 9:38 AM on November 19, 2011 [6 favorites]




"There was no way out of that circle," Spicuzza said. "They were cutting the officers off from their support. It's a very volatile situation."
Something I am unsure of, looking at the video (which does indeed clearly show the officer waving his pepper spray can in the air before using it against that unruly crowd) is what is happening at the very end, where one officer is taking pepper spray cans from other officers and shaking them. Is he preparing to duel-wield pepper spray, Max Payne-style, or is he taking spray cans from brother officers because he is concerned that they will discharge them into the crowd and cause a riot?
posted by running order squabble fest at 9:41 AM on November 19, 2011


jeffburdges: "Lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford's memo (pdf) spells out plan to undermine Occupy Wall Street. (Per JJF's request)

The memo identifies vulnerable anti-Wall St. Democrats in FL, PA, VA, WI, OH, NC, NV, and NM, but clarifies that Democratic victories should not be the ABA’s biggest concern, with the bigger threat being that Republicans might no longer defend Wall Street companies.
"

So their plan to undermine OWS is... Electoral politics? These guys really think we're thinking short term here, don't they? They think we're just in it for this election cycle then we'll all go home and pretend everything's ok, huh? They're buying the mainstream news media footage - which is great, because it's kinda like propaganda working against itself. They have blinders on and if everyone in the power structure refuses to see the movement as it is, they have no way to deal with it but within their narrow framework.
posted by symbioid at 9:42 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


jeffburdges, I think you've got a great idea there. Every year some magazines (US News and World Report and others) give lists of colleges -- best for this degree, best overall, best bargain, etc. Then they have little writeups about the fine library, or modern laboratories, or friendly campus. Parents read the articles and get misty-eyed thinking about their children finding greatness at the schools. High schoolers put together plans for how to compete with all the others who want in. Alumni email links to each other, patting each other on the backs that they went to such a school.

So inside the copy that says, yes the tuition is breathtakingly high but so worth it because of the trees and labs and libraries, if there was a note that mentioned that kids would also have the opportunity to experience police brutality! Now that would be great. Alumni dollars would dry up, and new enrollment would go south. And that would bring change.
posted by Houstonian at 9:43 AM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


Just because it's been shown that many people will turn into sociopathic fucks given the appropriate level of power does not mean that we should accept that. We should actively work against it and hold the police accountable for their actions.

Totally.

Note I first brought up those experiments to help support the idea that it's more likely that the police are behaving in morally wrong ways. I was arguing against the idea that it is more plausible a police officer is reacting appropriately to a threat than somehow using inappropriate force.

I can't say with 100% certainty what I would do in a given situation, but I absolutely know that I don't want to act like those police officers, and if I did I should suffer the consequences. No one gets a free pass because of Milgram and Stanford.

A lot of ethicists are really grappling with this sort of issue. It's really not clear how our moral judgments of persons should change (or not) in face of this empirical data that has come out over the last half a century. On the one hand, personally, I completely agree with you. But, on the other hand, I am worried about how we can hold people accountable for actions we can plausibly describe as being out of their control. I don't have the answer; no one really does right now. If you're curious about seeing some of the literature that tries to make sense of moral judgments in light of psychology, I can point you to some.

All I really care about right now is making sure we don't get lost in our moral judgments. We're calling this police officers things like "sociopathic fucks." But, it's pretty darn likely that they are not sociopathic fucks. It's pretty darn likely that they are people just like you and me. When we take on language like "sociopathic fuck" to describe what is happening in cases like this, we're tacitly assuming that the problem is those particular people who are acting as cops. "Oh, those fucks! They are such sociopaths! Get 'em!" It encourages the "few bad apples" way of understanding the misuse of power -- like in Abu Ghraib, where the public was sold a narrative that just a couple of sociopathic fucks were responsible for terrible abuse of prisoners, leaving the horrible social structure that encouraged that sociopathically fucked behavior in place. We get every cop who behaved inappropriately during these protests fired, they will be replaced by new cops who will find themselves in the exact same stressed position that led to such inappropriate behavior. In other words, if we focus only on punishing those who have done wrong rather than changing the larger social structure that led them to do wrong, we'll be condemning new generations of persons to fall into sociopathic fuckery.

I don't want to excuse anyone. I believe Lt. Pike should lose is job. I believe he has done something terribly immoral, and he should face consequences for that. But, I also believe, with a sickening lump in my stomach, that there's a good chance I may have done the same terrible thing in his shoes. And I believe that if we focus just on getting Lt. Pike fired, or removing the "sociopathic fucks" who are currently employed by police departments, we'll be doing nothing to address the actual problem.

The problem is the system. This coheres with the entire message of OWS, just with a slightly different bend. We're living in a system that makes us sociopathic fucks -- and that needs to change.
posted by meese at 9:45 AM on November 19, 2011 [11 favorites]


Houstonian: "Pike's pay: "Lt. Pike has received a salary in excess of $100,000 from the people of California each of the last three years. More than 40% of his 2010 salary came from student fees.""

UCD -- We'll pay you to brutalize us.
posted by symbioid at 9:46 AM on November 19, 2011


They weren't "just following orders." An update on the Student Activism post provides this quote from "their orders":

"Chemical agents are weapons used to minimize the potential for injury to officers, offenders, or other persons. They should only be used in situations where such force reasonably appears justified and necessary.”

“Arrestees and suspects shall be treated in a humane manner … they shall not be subject to physical force except as required to subdue violence or ensure detention. No officer shall strike an arrestee or suspect except in self-defense, to prevent an escape, or to prevent injury to another person."
posted by Houstonian at 9:50 AM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


You know what, you're all right about the "just taking orders" comment. I was only speaking from the perspective of "I gotta get paid and this is my job" mentality.

But yeah, fuck that shit. Fuck that shit to the max.
posted by tr33hggr at 9:54 AM on November 19, 2011


So their plan to undermine OWS is... Electoral politics?

Well, there's a bit here of when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But there's also a bit of losing a quarter over there, but looking here because the light's better.

What it boils down to, though, is that the ABA already wanted a strategy for undermining those politicians and OWS is just providing them fodder for some issue ads. In a way, to them, OWS is just something happening out there that they neither understand nor control nor even necessarily fear. OWS is people who not only don't have their handle on the lever, they don't even know where it is. The ABA? Lever. Pocket. Iron grip.
posted by dhartung at 9:55 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Has the campus police issued any kind of "thank you" to the UCD student population for allowing their officers to scuttle out of there unharmed after being attacked by them? Seems like a handwritten note on nice stationery would not be too much.
posted by Houstonian at 9:56 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Any idea why that memo is dated the 24th of November, 5 days from now? Do leakable memos really get drafted that far in advance?
posted by Eumachia L F at 9:57 AM on November 19, 2011


Listen, Lobbyists are unstuck in time.
posted by The Whelk at 9:58 AM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


Laurie Penny on BBC Newsnight vs. a GS banker

I have the biggest gay guy crush on Laurie Penny.
posted by The Whelk at 9:59 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Way back in 1997, Humboldt County (CA) deputies swabbed pepper spray - with q-tips! - into the eyes of protesters who had chained themselves together (the were protesting logging). The protesters were seated and their arms were all locked together. They were not moving or jumping or pushing anyone.

Can you say "lawsuit"?

The whole thing is kind of convoluted, with hung juries and the case moving from federal to state court and back again, and in the end (I think - I can't find if it was ever appealed by the state), in 2005, a "federal jury has returned a unanimous verdict for the Q-Tip Pepper Spray Eight activists/plaintiffs, finding the County of Humboldt and City of Eureka liable for excessive force in violation of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The excessive force was used by Humboldt County Sheriff's Deputies and Eureka Police Officers when they applied pepper spray with Q-tips directly to the eyes of the eight nonviolent forest defense protesters in three incidents in 1997. Three of the activists were also sprayed directly in the eyes from inches away. Two of the young women were juveniles.

Former Sheriff Dennis Lewis and current Sheriff Gary Philp also were found liable for causing the use of excessive force by setting policies allowing the unprecedented use of pepper spray on the passive demonstrators, who had locked their arms together inside metal pipes."

I can't imagine that the UC Davis police and the chancellor's office aren't going to get the pants sued off them.
posted by rtha at 10:04 AM on November 19, 2011 [6 favorites]


You know, I think we need to start calling pepper spray/mace what it is, which is a "chemical weapon." Great point.

Good for Prof. Nathan Brown, too. And untenured no less, that takes balls as an English professor in today's economy.

I had a talk at Berkeley scheduled for the spring. I'm considering canceling it in protest against the UC system. I've already written an email to UC Press saying I will review no more manuscripts for them or any of their journals until Chancellor Katehi has resigned or the police involved have been investigated and fired. I'm on the verge of telling my own students I won't write any letters of recommendation for grad programs or jobs in the UC system. Like all boycotts, this little personal one hurts good people and has no real economic effect (and in fact it costs me a chunk of money to take this stance), but we really need to stand up and speak when shit like this happens. We need to stigmatize it. We need to refuse to do business with bad institutions. Police misconduct has to have repercussions. It needs to be anathema to reasonable people. It has to taint the institutions where it happens by association. New York should lose tourists. Davis should lose students. The UC system as a whole should be embarrassed. I'm about to start tossing around more systematic shaming actions among my colleagues as well.

I love the idea of a college-ranking-by-brutality, by the way. It's an idea I can see many of my colleagues getting behind as a project that would gain some interesting counterpunch traction to the relentless pursuit of tuition and public money by every major institution of higher education these days, public or private. I'm surprised no one has ever rated colleges or universities directly by risk of violence (sexual assault, in particular, HELLO PENN STATE!). I can see this as a standalone web project that would get a lot of press: "Get What You Pay For Right Back In Your Face: America's Most Dangerous Colleges 2012" released, let's say, the same day the USNWR ranking came out. Loving it. Willing to work on it.
posted by spitbull at 10:04 AM on November 19, 2011 [17 favorites]


I can't imagine that the UC Davis police and the chancellor's office aren't going to get the pants sued off them.

And what happens when they do? They just hike the tuition again to pay for the lawsuit.

These people need to be made personally liable. It's the only thing people "just trying to pay the bills" will understand. Start throwing out claims of qualified immunity and say "a reasonable person knows that nonchalantly pepper spraying non-violent protestors is fucking wrong".

It's a lot easier to stand up and say "Sir I don't want to lose my pension to some hippie because you're a god damn maniac". A couple of cops found personally liable and losing their pensions will do more good than a comptroller cursing out police brutality as they write the settlement cheque.
posted by Talez at 10:12 AM on November 19, 2011 [9 favorites]


pain compliance measures
I always wondered how to say "torture" in newspeak.
enhanced arresticatin' techniques
posted by Flunkie at 10:20 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


By the way, The Other 99 is broadcasting, apparently from WTC 7. I'm not exactly sure what they're doing there - something about exposing a conspiracy? If that's so, I'm really disappointed as I think it's a distraction from the larger message.
posted by desjardins at 10:23 AM on November 19, 2011


They just hike the tuition again to pay for the lawsuit.

Shouldn't that make all the students angry at the people who decided this was a good idea?
posted by benito.strauss at 10:23 AM on November 19, 2011


rtha, that's been covered upthread. While there was a jury verdict, the damages awarded were nominal, and the case was ultimately settled on appeal. May not have all that much precedential power as a result.
posted by dhartung at 10:33 AM on November 19, 2011


Alas, Occupy Building 7 does appear to have a Truther angle. I feel this is a co-opting move, given my opinion of the whole, uh, "theory".
posted by dhartung at 10:36 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Ah, dharntung, thanks. It's a shame about the limited (or complete lack? IANAL) precedential power from this, although I can understand why the plaintiffs and their attorneys might not have wanted to slog through another endless series of hearings and trials.
posted by rtha at 10:38 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Several people in this thread and others have said that OWS needs to move away from the encampments and start participating more in electoral politics. Usually it's framed in terms that OWS is naive and the only way to effect change is through voting.

These incidents with the police prove that completely wrong. The political system is corrupted and broken, and these protests are bringing light to the fact that our police force is militarized and doesn't work in the citizens favor.

Once public opinion starts to turn away from the prosecuting attorneys and police departments, then we will begin to see changes in civil liberties, drug reform, prison reform and other critical issues.

More importantly, citizens won't be afraid to stand together in protest.
posted by formless at 10:41 AM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


I've already sent this privately, but I may as well repost it here, since it sums up pretty well how I feel about the whole thing. Pardon the highfalutin rhetoric. I'm never really sure how high to falute in this sort of situation.

Dr. Katehi,

As you know, videos have come to light which show a few UC Davis police officers pepper-spraying a group of student protestors without cause or provocation. No doubt there are many excellent officers in the UC Davis department. The few we see on video are evidently outliers who do not deserve to serve alongside the rest, and I trust the school will respond with appropriate disciplinary action.

But there are two further points related to the incident that I am writing you to address.

First, I am startled by the blatant dishonesty that police chief Annette Spicuzza has shown in defending these few officers. In the Sacramento Bee and elsewhere, she is quoted as saying that they were "forced" to use pepper spray when a group of students "surrounded" them, "cutting them off" from reinforcements. This is patent nonsense; in video of the event, we see precisely the opposite. A single-file line of students sits motionless on the sidewalk, surrounded on either side by armed and armored policemen. The remaining protestors stand back at a respectful distance. We see one officer step over the line of seated students -- he does so with ease; he is clearly not threatened by them, much less "surrounded" or "cut off" -- before turning back to pepper-spray them with calm deliberation, at close range. Soon a second officer joins in the attack, targeting students who are sitting well off the sidewalk and out of the way.

Spicuzza's account of the situation is clearly false. The most charitable explanation is that she misspoke. If Spicuzza has the integrity that befits her position, she will make public a more accurate account as soon as she realizes her mistake. On the other hand, if she continues defending an obvious falsehood, it will suggest that she, too, is unworthy of the service with which UC Davis has entrusted her.

This brings me to my second point. In video of the event, after the attack on the student protestors is complete, we do see the guilty officers surrounded -- by a formerly calm group of students moved to anger and outrage by what they have seen. This was a frightening moment for me to watch. Nevertheless, I want to commend these students in the highest possible terms. For after a few minutes of anger, a voice speaks up from the crowd: "You are free to go. We won't follow you. We won't stop you." And instead of the riot which these officers' reckless actions might have precipitated in a less enlightened community, we see a peaceful resolution: the angry crowd parts, and the guilty officers leave.

To put it plainly, this is the best example of leadership I have seen in a long time. I am tremendously impressed by the courage of the student who first spoke up -- and by the emotional and ethical maturity of all the students who echoed and responded to his call. For all the problems we have seen at UC Davis in recent days, we have also seen proof that the school is still fulfilling its mission, producing young men and women of great ability, honor and virtue. I hope you are as proud of them as I am.

Sincerely,
Daniel B. Velleman

posted by nebulawindphone at 10:49 AM on November 19, 2011 [32 favorites]


I am still sitting on the email I'm drafting to the chancellor, the police chief, and the governor, because I'm so incoherent with rage that I keep misspelling "chief" (and that's the least of my problems drafting this email!). Yours is fantastic, and I hope mine turns out half as good.
posted by rtha at 10:55 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Spicuzza's account of the situation is clearly false. The most charitable explanation is that she misspoke.
I suppose it's possible that the officers on the scene simply lied in their reports, and she took them at their word, without having seen video.
posted by Flunkie at 10:56 AM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


Ok, mentioned above that I'm a UC Davis alum, so I thought I'd just write a bit about the community in Davis. It's an absolutely fantastic place, and one of the things that makes is fantastic is an incredibly active student population that takes on big projects and sees them through. When people say that horizontal action can't go anywhere, I will point squarely to Davis.

I lived in a consensus based cooperative of 28 people for four years, down the street from three other student cooperatives with a combined 30-36 people. People who had graduated from the University started off-campus cooperatives, as well as a loose-knit system of named houses with coop-y sentiments. So the cooperatives in Davis are a pretty large scene, especially relative to other cities its size.

The coop I lived in was a collection of 14 fiberglass domes that had been built by students in 1972. Today it's a completely other-worldly space, which you walk into and immediately start to wonder that such a thing could exist. It's a place where students come in and say, 'Hey, wow, wonder what I can do here...' In the time that I lived at the domes, residents ran a volunteer bike shop, the Davis Feminist Film Festival, hosted a long-running slam-poetry group, built a community structure, ran the huge Whole Earth Festival event, and stopped the university from shutting down the Tri-Cooperatives down the road. We work hard on building community and doing our best to keep it healthy, while simultaneously keeping up with student work at both undergrad and graduate levels.

The student government in Davis has also accomplished some really stunning things. The most incredible is that the ASUCD runs the entire bus system for the city of Davis, with students driving all the buses. They also have the largest student-run cafeteria in the country.

So this is a place where students organize, dream, and make those dreams turn into reality. And a huge part of that is the strength of the cooperative communities; it gives us a space to talk to other people about our ideas, and a mass of people to draw on to get excited with us and work alongside us to see projects through. So when I see the horizontal organizing in Occupy, I tihnk back to Davis, and how important it is to have that kind of incubating space, to share ideas and find allies. And it's easier to work in consensus when you've been doing it for a while, with people you've come to know and truly love; Occupy will only provide a stronger base of support as it goes longer, and social ties and contracts between activists grow stronger.

For about two and a half years I was a liaison between the Domes and the UC Davis student housing division, which has been moving strongly in the direction of bottom lines and streamlining. UCDSH has a primary business model involving building large dormitories, bringing through piles of freshmen, charging a pile of money, and doing it again the next year. Freshmen don't have a trong voice, aren't connected to their space, and so by comparison, the 60-ish on-campus cooperative residents are a huge pain in the ass, full of expectations. We pay for that privilege, of course, but as SH has moved to an industrial model, it's been looking for ways to get out of its legacy of supporting affordable cooperative housing. So we've been working like hell to preserve these spaces.

And it's a microcosm of what's going on in the larger university sphere. The whole uni is going the way of privatization, building these top-heavy bureaucracies, choosing administrators with business degrees and needless construction projects over the academic mission. Two years ago, 'fees' in the UC system were raised by 33% for undergraduates, sparking some pretty large protests. At Davis, 52 students were arrested one night, one of them assaulted by police officers and charged with assault herself. Of those 52, about half came from the cooperative communities, which provided jail support, hot meals, a phone number to coordinate legal aid, and so on, for everyone involved with the protests. The people who knew that their community was behind them all the way were able to step forward bravely and lead in the protest movement, knowing that they had a kind of family to support them.

So yeah, keep occupying, keep building this community, and keep up the work, even when it gets hard. It will pay off.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:07 AM on November 19, 2011 [22 favorites]



"Once public opinion starts to turn away from the prosecuting attorneys and police departments, then we will begin to see changes in civil liberties, drug reform, prison reform and other critical issues."

yes...martial law
posted by eggtooth at 11:09 AM on November 19, 2011


Greenwald: Here’s what attempted co-option of OWS looks like
Having SEIU officials — fresh off endorsing the Obama re-election campaign — shape, fund, dictate and decree an anti-GOP, pro-Obama march is about as antithetical as one can imagine to what the Occupy movement has been.

I dunno. This all started in Wisconsin, in a lot of ways, and the Teamsters and SEIU were critical parts of that -- and the message is at least the same (unlike that WTC7 thing). I think it's entirely natural that organizations will seek out these commonalities. For a lot of people the frustration is indeed that nothing will come of the movement, so wanting to not waste that energy and effort is pretty predictable reaction.

I'm also not sure but what the "a pox on both their houses" crowd is just as eager to do their own co-opting.
posted by dhartung at 11:12 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Could somebody kindly explain what an "outrage filter dogwhistle" is?
(Yes - I googled it but...) Thank you
posted by speug at 11:23 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Could somebody kindly explain what an "outrage filter dogwhistle" is?
(Yes - I googled it but...) Thank you


This is probably better for MeTa but fair enough.

Googling won't help since it's an adhoc coined phrase based on Metafilter slang.

It's a referring to dog whistle politics since the FPP poster will insist isn't about generating outrage but it's a subject which is sure to outrage the majority liberal populace of Metafilter and that's quickly what the thread will descend into. It's not productive and generally frowned upon.

Some politically charged threads about larger movements (i.e. this one) will have some outrage but it will be limited by the current events and political discussion eventually drowning it out. The UC Davis thread was beyond redemption from the start.
posted by Talez at 11:31 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


It means there's not much more to say about the link except "look at these assholes, this is outrageous!" And since it's an issue that most people here care deeply about, it's a dogwhistle, like a video of a welfare recipient driving a nice car would be a a dogwhistle for Republicans.
posted by desjardins at 11:33 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


> I'm also not sure but what the "a pox on both their houses" crowd is just as eager to do their own co-opting.

Yeah, I see SEIU (which I am now a member of, as a classified employee of Portland State) being pragmatic re: the Democrats. You aren't going to get an inch from the Republicans, and just as the tea party has, in a way, set the Republicans agenda by proving the force of which to put people into office, the Occupy group could have similar impact, especially on pressuring the blue dog democrats to work with the rest of the party.
posted by mrzarquon at 11:33 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Thank you Talez - crystal clear.
posted by speug at 11:34 AM on November 19, 2011


So in this video, the first pepper-sprayer is flanked by two guys brandishing (but eventually never using) black weapons of some sort. What are those?
posted by nebulawindphone at 11:38 AM on November 19, 2011


If your message is that you are angry at Wall St I just don't see how focusing on re-electing Obama really sends that message. He has been President for several years now and has not really made progress on making Wall St accountable.

Wisconsin was explicitly a union issue and explicitly a legislative issue, a lot of the energy may be the same but it was a very different matter.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 11:39 AM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


I believe the black weapons are tear gas guns.
posted by Houstonian at 11:43 AM on November 19, 2011


He has been President for several years now and has not really made progress on making Wall St accountable.

Well, yeah, where "several" = "just under three" and the where Republicans have had control of the House of Representatives for the past year (and have been gumming up the works in the Senate via filibuster for far longer).

If anyone thinks it would have been better under McCain/Palin, or would be better under Romney/Bachmann, I'd like to hear their argument. Obama's still the best option we have -- by far -- of all the viable ones.

But I agree about the difference RE Wisconsin.
posted by darkstar at 11:44 AM on November 19, 2011


Ah, on re-read, I see your point was chiefly about the message. I'd tend to agree, since Obama hasn't managed to be all that effective (for whatever reason) at holding WS accountable, then calling for his re-election (while better than the alternative) doesn't really emphasize the point they're trying to make.
posted by darkstar at 11:47 AM on November 19, 2011


(I asked the same question on Facebook, and a gun nerd I know suggested that they were essentially paintball guns, but with the rounds filled with pepper spray instead of paint.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 11:48 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]




Except the President had barely the margins to push the healthcare bill in the house and senate, and those he had were lost in 2010.

Wall Street is so entrenched, we would need more than just a new President (as it has shown, a president without a congress willing to work with him can't accomplish much), we would need new Senators and House Representatives. Or we can atleast get a congress that is more liberal than it is now, and instead of having Obama needing to compromise with the tea party movement, he has to compromise with the OWS movement.

Maybe if we can get the bigger things pushed through when that is happening (banking and campaign reform, more healthcare reform), it opens up the window for a viable third party candidate in 2016.
posted by mrzarquon at 11:49 AM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


The video in the link gives you an idea of the scope and organization of the encampment before it got smashed to bits.
posted by The Whelk at 11:54 AM on November 19, 2011


I made a thing that expresses how I feel. (self-link, natch)
posted by desjardins at 12:01 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


nebulawindphone

Specifically, I think they are PepperBall-brand carbines, or a competitor product. Basically, their use is to deliver balls full of capsicum derivatives at a longer range than pepper spray, although they can also be loaded with indelible dye to identify troublemakers later.

They are the same caliber as paintballs, but have a different casing - paintballs are gelatinous and "squish" on impact, whereas PepperBall cartridges have a hard but brittle plastic coating, which I believe is more painful on impact. I don't know what happens if you get hit in the eye with one, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
posted by running order squabble fest at 12:01 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


oh reddit
posted by The Whelk at 12:05 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


He has been President for several years now and has not really made progress on making Wall St accountable.

Well, yeah, where "several" = "just under three" and the where Republicans have had control of the House of Representatives for the past year (and have been gumming up the works in the Senate via filibuster for far longer).

And where...(greenwald)

Wall Street funded the Democrats far more than the GOP in the 2008 election; the Democrats’ key money man, Charles Schumer, is one of the most devoted Wall Street servants in the country; Obama empowered in key positions Wall Street servants such as Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Bill Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and an endless roster of former Goldman officials; JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has been dubbed “Obama’s favorite banker” after Obama publicly defended his post-bailout $17 million bonus; the President named the CEO of GE to head his jobs panel; the DCCC and DSCC exist to ensure the nomination of corporatist candidates and Blue Dogs whose political worldview is servitude to the lobbyist class; the Democratic President, after vocally urging an Age of Austerity, tried very hard to usher in cuts to Social Security and an increase in the age for Medicare eligibility; and the Obama administration has not only ensured virtually no accountability for the rampant Wall Street fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, but is actively pressuring New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and others to agree to a woefully inadequate settlement to forever shield banks from the consequences of their pervasive mortgage fraud.

If anyone thinks it would have been better under McCain/Palin, or would be better under Romney/Bachmann, I'd like to hear their argument. Obama's still the best option we have -- by far -- of all the viable ones.

Just for once, we might have a political movement that doesn't want the best of the status quo, I guess time will tell.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 12:05 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


I just shared the UCD video (and some of the related links) with the head of our college counseling program with a note that read "is this a school we want to encourage our students to attend?"
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:09 PM on November 19, 2011




Maybe if we can get the bigger things pushed through when that is happening (banking and campaign reform, more healthcare reform), it opens up the window for a viable third party candidate in 2016.

Third party candidates won't be viable until the whole damn voting system is reformed. Needs to be a mix of PR and IRV.

I dare say, and this may raise the ire of the majority of the people here, that the US political system doesn't have enough representatives to be effective. You have on average one representative for every 700,000 constituents. There shouldn't be any more than 50,000 constituents per district and even Washington himself said that 40,000 was far too many. At 50,000 constituents per rep the US should have 6,140 representatives in the house.

The senate also is well underrepresented and allows too much power to be consolidated in two parties. At the bare minimum there should be six senators per state elected via PR to allow for 16% of the popular vote to get a say in government. Personally I'd rather see 8.

But 6,740 representatives? You would be joking if you thought you could ever get that past the American people who think that 535 representatives are already too many and the logistics of running 6,740 races? That's before the primaries of parties that want to run in the seat? Plus you'd have to throw out all of this garbage FTTP election hardware and either employ people to manually count votes or buy all new voting machines.

So what do you do now?
posted by Talez at 12:10 PM on November 19, 2011 [6 favorites]


So what do you do now?

Jesusland, Cascadia, and the rest?
posted by maxwelton at 12:13 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


I made a thing that expresses how I feel. (self-link, natch)

At first I misread that as "Is this YOU, America?"
posted by Jehan at 12:14 PM on November 19, 2011


Kind of the same point. I thought about doing "Meanwhile, in America..." which I saw on Twitter, but felt it was kind of dismissive.
posted by desjardins at 12:19 PM on November 19, 2011


New statement from the Chancellor.
posted by Houstonian at 12:19 PM on November 19, 2011


"Governor Stevenson!" a woman in the crowd shouted. "You have won the vote of every thinking person in America!"

"Yes," was his dry reply, "but I need a majority."
posted by dhartung at 12:24 PM on November 19, 2011 [11 favorites]


From Houstonian's link:

To this effect, I am forming a task force made of faculty, students and staff to review the events and provide to me a thorough report within 90 days.

90 days?! What is there about this situation that could POSSIBLY take three months to uncover? I'm willing to hear contrary explanations, but to me this sounds like they're trying to bury the brutality under " yes, yes, it's horrible, we're looking into it" until outrage dies down. At which point presumably they will find that best practices weren't followed, Pike will get three days paid administrative leave or something, and nothing will change.
posted by KathrynT at 12:30 PM on November 19, 2011 [13 favorites]


And since it's an issue that most people here care deeply about, it's a dogwhistle, like a video of a welfare recipient driving a nice car would be a a dogwhistle for Republicans.

Just a clarification - dogwhistle politics refers to hidden messages, analogous to how humans can't hear the dogwhistle, but the dog can. It refers to encoding an (often unwholesome) message so that those who oppose it don't notice that you support it, while only those who support it can "hear" the message that you're their guy.

I think the usual example is "state's rights" - few politicians want to openly declare their support for racist policies, but if you use the right lingo, only the racists prick up their ears and hear what you're really saying, and yet you still sound acceptable to voters vehemently opposed to what you're saying.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:30 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


To this effect, I am forming a task force made of faculty, students and staff to review the events and provide to me a thorough report within 90 days
So, she's going to punt this into February of next year, and hope everyone forgets about it. With leaders like that, does anyone wonder why people are protesting in the streets?
posted by deanklear at 12:31 PM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]


"Driven by our concern for the safety and health of the students involved in the protest, ..."
... we shot them point-blank in the face with pepper spray.
posted by Flunkie at 12:32 PM on November 19, 2011 [12 favorites]


(Dogwhistle politics also allows plausible deniability, weaselry, and being able to accuse people who call you out on you message of being malicious and deceptive)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:33 PM on November 19, 2011


James Fallows | The Atlantic:
"I can't see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That's what I think here."
posted by ericb at 12:34 PM on November 19, 2011 [16 favorites]


(Dogwhistle politics also allows plausible deniability, weaselry, and being able to accuse people who call you out on you message of being malicious and deceptive)

Weaslewhistle politics are the worst.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 12:41 PM on November 19, 2011


Almost as bad as ferret fluting.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:44 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


So what do you do now?

You do what the unions did at their peak. Offer real, practical support to people who badly need it. Build a cohesive movement around the principle of mutual aid. Use that movement as a voting bloc in local elections. Work up from there.
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:47 PM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


In my heart, I would imagine an honorable person resigning over such acts of cowardice carried out in their name. Several people resigning. But, as mentioned, this will probably be punished with only 20% instead of 30% end-of-year bonuses for those involved.
posted by maxwelton at 12:48 PM on November 19, 2011


Rep. Deutch Introduces OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment To Ban Corporate Money In Politics
Deutch’s amendment, called the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) Amendment, would overturn the Citizens United decision, re-establishing the right of Congress and the states to regulate campaign finance laws, and to effectively outlaw the ability of for-profit corporations to contribute to campaign spending.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:57 PM on November 19, 2011 [19 favorites]


I remember when I was about ten years old I was watching the news when they showed a soldier walking up to a blindfolded Vietnamese prisoner and shoot him in the head. That scene haunted me for many years. The pepper spray incident comes nowhere near the brutality of that event. Yet the casual way in which it was done brought back the memory. I have a deep fear of people like that cop.
posted by night_train at 1:03 PM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]


I donno if Deutch’s OCCUPIED Amendment would retain any heath, even if passed, but that's mostly adjuster's original one demand.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:15 PM on November 19, 2011


For spreading the word about U.C. Davis's police brutality problem, the Chronicle of Higher Education is more U.S. focussed, while the Times Higher Education takes a more international view. I'll write an email to the Chronicle as well.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:16 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


> I donno if Deutch’s OCCUPIED Amendment would retain any heath, even if passed, but that's mostly adjuster's original one demand.

It may never get ratified or have any teeth, but it does succinctly state some of the core issues that are motivating people to protest: Corporations have undue influence on political discourse in this country and they should not.
posted by mrzarquon at 1:21 PM on November 19, 2011


... a soldier walking up to a blindfolded Vietnamese prisoner and shoot him in the head

That's an iconic photograph by AP photographer Eddie Adams.
posted by ericb at 1:22 PM on November 19, 2011


BTW -- the Viet Cong prisoner that was shot was Nguyễn Văn Lém. Video of the execution.
posted by ericb at 1:26 PM on November 19, 2011


"ALERT: Large crowd amassing now at #Zuccotti Park for a spontaneous march to Wall St. Watch LIVE: http://t.co/HevLi3C0 #OWS"
posted by defenestration at 1:34 PM on November 19, 2011


Watching that UC Davis video and reading the chancellor's three most recent statements, I'm confused. If the object was to get rid of the encampment, which I disagree with but at least view as an arguable point, why didn't the police just step over the seated protesters and start carrying shit out?
posted by KathrynT at 1:36 PM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


Rhaomi: "Rep. Deutch Introduces OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment To Ban Corporate Money In Politics
Deutch’s amendment, called the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) Amendment, would overturn the Citizens United decision, re-establishing the right of Congress and the states to regulate campaign finance laws, and to effectively outlaw the ability of for-profit corporations to contribute to campaign spending."

Lemme pop on my futurevision goggles... Wait. Words are slowly swirling in my vision... D, I sense a D, is there a D in here? De... Dead? Dead in... Com... Committee??? Dead in Committee... Yes, that's the words I'm seeing.
posted by symbioid at 1:39 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Because they have pepper spray.
posted by Flunkie at 1:39 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


This is why I moved to Mexico
six years ago.
You heard it here first:
It's gonna get worse.
I'll say it now: I told you so.
posted by eggtooth at 1:50 PM on November 19, 2011


It's gonna get worse.
I'll say it now: I told you so.


I know it's gonna get worse that's why I'm staying to help the people who don't have the luxury of being able to expatriate.
posted by fuq at 2:02 PM on November 19, 2011 [12 favorites]


I was inspired by the UC Davis clip to finally go visit OccupyToronto and make a donation.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 2:07 PM on November 19, 2011 [8 favorites]




I just don't see how focusing on re-electing Obama really sends that message. He has been President for several years now and has not really made progress on making Wall St accountable.


The simplest reason I can give for re-electing Obama is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She's seriously ill, and if her successor is chosen by a Republican, any progress made to hold Wall Street accountable, however small, will vanish for good.
posted by ambrosia at 2:17 PM on November 19, 2011 [9 favorites]


Tomorrow: "Veterans of America’s 20th Century civil rights movement will enter the 21st Century Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles on Sunday, November 20.

Known as the "Council of Elders,” they will step inside the nationwide encampments to symbolically share the torch of hope and justice and engage the Occupiers in dialogue about defining movements of the past. “We want to contribute to this intergenerational movement,” says Dr. Vincent Harding, activist and writer in the civil rights movement. “We are thankful for the efforts of Occupy Wall Street to unite the 99% and bring the many gifts and great energy of millions into effective action to transform our nation.”

The Council of Elders is an independent group of leaders from the farm workers, sanctuary and human rights movements that shook the nation’s conscience with public protests over the past 50 years."

Video in which the Elders talk about their past actions and the OWS movement.
posted by Houstonian at 2:20 PM on November 19, 2011 [10 favorites]


Watching that UC Davis video and reading the chancellor's three most recent statements, I'm confused. If the object was to get rid of the encampment, which I disagree with but at least view as an arguable point, why didn't the police just step over the seated protesters and start carrying shit out?

Because people shouldn't dare to question authority. When they do they will get pepper spray down the throat, or worse.
posted by ryoshu at 2:20 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


The irony is, Mexico has had problems for a long time now due to this same paramilitary tendency in US law enforcement.

I'm willing to believe that things are going to get worse here. And I can't fault anyone for going where they feel safe. But this stuff gets everywhere and affects all of us.
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:25 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Occupy D.C. is currently occupying an abandoned school on K Street. Washington Post and DCist Twitter have coverage.
posted by argonauta at 2:32 PM on November 19, 2011


furiousxgeorge - I just don't see how focusing on re-electing Obama really sends that message. He has been President for several years now and has not really made progress on making Wall St accountable.

ambrosia - The simplest reason I can give for re-electing Obama is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She's seriously ill, and if her successor is chosen by a Republican, any progress made to hold Wall Street accountable, however small, will vanish for good.

I'm extremely worried that those who don't like Obama because he hasn't done enough or isn't liberal enough or has compromised too much won't put their full effort into getting him re-elected.
posted by Defenestrator at 2:35 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


See, even if you think Obama should be elected that doesn't mean every political movement has to make that their priority or join you in it.

If you are strongly opposed to Wall St. supporting mainstream Democrats can make you sound incoherent fairly quickly. What I would like to see is Obama supporting OWS, not the other way around.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 2:39 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


(There is a reason 70% of OWS identifies as independent.)
posted by furiousxgeorge at 2:41 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


Students are treated for the pepper spray by the Davis Fire Department.

The police brutalized and hurt the students, so firemen gave them medical help. What the hell has happened to this country?
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:41 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


What I would like to see is Obama supporting OWS, not the other way around.

That could be a pretty good statement. "We backed you up in 2008. Now it's your turn to support us."
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:43 PM on November 19, 2011 [11 favorites]


@CaliforniaAggie reports that there will be a press conference at Davis at 4 pm Pacific. If you have questions for the chancellor, you can email them to campus@theaggie.org.
posted by rtha at 2:43 PM on November 19, 2011




Is anyone aware of an address to which one could mail donations of items for the protestors at UC Davis? For example, tents. And gas masks.
posted by Flunkie at 2:54 PM on November 19, 2011


furiousxgeorge - See, even if you think Obama should be elected that doesn't mean every political movement has to make that their priority or join you in it.

If you are strongly opposed to Wall St. supporting mainstream Democrats can make you sound incoherent fairly quickly. What I would like to see is Obama supporting OWS, not the other way around.


It's a matter of pragmatism. Unless a bloody revolution is planned sometime soon a president will still be selected next November and if you oppose Wall St. greed and influence it's in your best interest to choose the candidate that will be the most amicable to your cause. That, to me, sounds plenty coherent.
posted by Defenestrator at 2:59 PM on November 19, 2011 [7 favorites]


"Choose" wasn't really the right word. "actively support" is better.
posted by Defenestrator at 3:01 PM on November 19, 2011


And gas masks.

My understanding is that gas masks (and any other protective measures) are used by police as evidence of criminal intent, and will be confiscated and also used as justification for any pre-emptive assaults.

I'm told that Maalox (antacid) is appreciated, because it can be used with water to help flush out pepper weapon residue.

posted by -harlequin- at 3:01 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


A 90-day task force is simply unacceptable. There is no way in hell it takes 90 days to discern what went wrong here. Lieutenant Pike, at the very least, should be fired immediately, by the Police Chief. If the Police Chief doesn't do it, she should be fired, too. If the Chancellor doesn't call for anything else, and just tries to bury this under a three-month inquiry, then the Chancellor ought to be forced to step down.

Where is Governor Brown on this? Does he have a statement? And does he have any authority in this situation? How about the Californian State Legislature? There's no way in hell reasonable public servants can look at that video and let this slide, and they shouldn't be allowed to skate off on the thin ice of a new day without being held accountable.
posted by darkstar at 3:02 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


"We backed you up in 2008. Now it's your turn to support us."

Ahem.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:07 PM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]


Considering the extent to which the GOP is rushing headlong into dismantling every last safeguard against corporate dominance while slashing taxes on the rich, selling the social safety net for scrap, and repealing all regulations, OWS should be supporting Democrats in the near term at least as a basic matter of survival.

Many Dems may be crappy sycophants, but the more of them there are in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, the fewer fringe-right radicals there are in their stead. Crappy sycophantic Dems (plus a bloc-voting GOP) weakened the stimulus and defanged financial and healthcare reform, but at least we were discussing those issues. Now, with a GOP House, we're discussing exactly how many trillions to cut from the government. And don't forget that with one more left-leaning justice, we wouldn't have gotten the abomination that was Citizens United.

Also, simply accepting them as the lesser of two evils isn't the final word. By all means, draft OWS-backed progressives to challenge the worst Democratic candidates in primaries next year. But allowing the modern Republican Party to take over the government next year because Democrats weren't good enough would be a huge leap backwards for everything OWS is fighting for.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:08 PM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


Is there anyone here who will write the proprosed list of the Top Most Brutal Campuses, in contrast to but in the style of the usual top-university lists?

I suspect HuffPo or similar would publish it.

Hurting institution enrolment prospects is an extremely practical way to make the institutions take this seriously and act on it. As can be seen by the Chancellor's response, this is currently not taken seriously, and is even (as has been pointed out in the open letter) encouraged.
posted by -harlequin- at 3:15 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Forbes: Police Militarization in the Decade Following 9/11.
posted by ericb at 3:16 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


The California Aggie (UC Davis campus newspaper): Community Responds to Police Actions, Supports Non-Violent Protesters.
posted by ericb at 3:22 PM on November 19, 2011


There are infinitely higher priorities for Occupy Wall Street than Obama's reelection campaign, Defenestrator, which include keeping the rhetoric focussed upon financial inequality, bank malfeasance, the need for real democracy, ala meaningful campaign finance reform, and now police brutality.

You cannot fix the system by playing the two party plus corporate donors game, no way. And squandering your energy on Obama's reelection campaign does exactly that, along with alienating independents, and anti-Wall St. Republicans. You achieve meaningful change by “refusing to go home” until the powerful are forced to listen.
“The problem with protests and the political process is that it is very easy, no matter how big the protest is, for the politicians to simply wait until the people go home. And then they can ignore you.”

“Well, Occupy Wall Street [is] a little different. Back in 2008, I wrote that when we will actually see change is when the people come, they set up camp, and they refuse to go home. That appears to be happening now.”


--Karl Denninger, Tea party cofounder, stating his support for the Occupy Wall Street movement and hoping it can learn from the Tea party's mistakes during an interview with RT.com. (via)
There is a very simple reason why working for candidates gets you nothing but working for your own ideals achieves lots : You force the candidates into falling in line behind you rather than simply falling in line behind them.

I retracted my offer to do statistical work for Obama's campaign thanks to his support for ACTA.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:29 PM on November 19, 2011 [9 favorites]


The police brutalized and hurt the students, so firemen gave them medical help. What the hell has happened to this country?

@ charlie don't surf: Coming from a firefighter's household, I'd say this is not surprising in the least. There is a significant difference between the mindset of someone who goes into law enforcement and someone who goes into firefighting. I'm not saying that all police officers are apt to become power crazed bullies, or even that most of them are, but I would expect that there are more people who go into police work due to the lure of power than firefighters who have the same bent.

I have no data to support this other than my own experience with firefighters and police officers.
posted by blurker at 3:52 PM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


It means there's not much more to say about the link except "look at these assholes, this is outrageous!"

Except, look at these fucking assholes right? There's different shades of LATA outrage. This crosses the threshold for me.

The chancellor's statement is absurd. 90 days? A committee? Fuck that. I want to hear that Lt. Pike is on desk duty or fired. I want an apology issued now.

This afternoon I sent a detailed description of this entire situation to hundreds of my colleagues, along with contact info for the chancellor and the UC system chancellor. I suggested we all threaten not to do any more work for UC -- most of which is uncompensated or very modestly compensated among colleagues, like serving on dissertation committees or tenure review letter writing or giving talks or reviewing manuscripts. Fellow academics, I urge you to do the same. We can stigmatize UC over this. We can threaten to ask our professional associations not to meet in California too, or tell those associations we won't be attending any meetings they plan to hold in California in the future.

None of this should be necessary. Davis is a research university, not a liberal arts college primarily. If they start to feel shunned by the community of scholarship, it might make an impression.

OK, let's start with unsafe campuses. How about the ones we know and that will get the attention of the press:
1) UC Davis -- ding ding ding at number one
2) Penn State -- where the campus police value the football program over prosecuting rape
3)

Bob Ostertag -- a fantastic music professor at Davis -- has a pretty good piece on the "Militarization of Campus Police" that reflects on this incident in more general terms. It also calls out Chancellor Katehi with vehemence.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ostertag/uc-davis-protest_b_1103039.html
posted by spitbull at 4:16 PM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]






UStream is quickly becoming my go-to news source.
posted by Houstonian at 4:23 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


A protest chant broke out, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. Everyone behind the podium bounced in a second too.
posted by defenestration at 4:24 PM on November 19, 2011


Sounds like the presser was cut short by protestors getting into the building, they're yelling in the background for UC PD to go.
posted by indubitable at 4:25 PM on November 19, 2011


"MIC CHECK!"
...

"If they really wanted people to participate, they would have held this in a bigger room."

...

"Who's university? Our university!"
posted by defenestration at 4:25 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


jeffburdges wrote: There are infinitely higher priorities for Occupy Wall Street than Obama's reelection campaign, Defenestrator, which include keeping the rhetoric focussed upon financial inequality, bank malfeasance, the need for real democracy, ala meaningful campaign finance reform, and now police brutality.

I completely get what you're saying, and agree that Obama has been disappointing regarding the progressive agenda. That said, I think we're a lot more likely to see things like real campaign finance reform with Democrats in Congress and the White House than you are if, say, Herman Cain was elected.
posted by wierdo at 4:26 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


UStream of the UC Davis press conference in progress

Wow. I started watching just in time to see the chancellor get put in her place. She needs the students and faculty, they don't need her.
posted by fuq at 4:29 PM on November 19, 2011


Is this an Abbott and Costello routine? There's a lot of door play...
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:30 PM on November 19, 2011


If it makes you feel better, all that focusing on real issues will indirectly help Obama get reelected, first because one of said issues is truly a major democrat talking point, but also because Obama is simply smart and more able to deal with reality than any candidate the Republicans have fielded. You should not however do *any* campaigning for Obama under the OWS, Anonymous, etc. banners.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:31 PM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


Chancellors is still apparently in the building, nervous people in the conference room are calling police, protestors sound to be outside.
posted by indubitable at 4:33 PM on November 19, 2011


Ustream feed has been cut.
posted by indubitable at 4:34 PM on November 19, 2011


ooops, the found the camera and turned it off! It was neat to watch the behind the scenes action. It seems one of the occupiers left their camera/computer behind to record what happened after they were forced out. Nicely done.
posted by fuq at 4:35 PM on November 19, 2011


Any other live feeds out there?
posted by blurker at 4:37 PM on November 19, 2011


CaliforniaAggie: Police have been called on protesters interrupting press conference about police reaction to protesters. #ucdavis #occupy
posted by indubitable at 4:38 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


aren't any mainstream outlets streaming the press conference? isn't that what a press conference is for?
posted by Think_Long at 4:40 PM on November 19, 2011


The way I think about it is this: the Tea Party has been forcing the GOP to do what its far right base wants, damn the consequences in many cases. OWS can have the same relationship to the corporate centrist Democratic party. If we get caught up in the "Obama rox/sux" debate we're wasting time. We can make him do better.
posted by spitbull at 4:41 PM on November 19, 2011


So, can we assume that a bunch of students are currently getting pepper sprayed in the hallway?
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:41 PM on November 19, 2011


More UStream goodness, live stream from outside the presser.
posted by indubitable at 4:43 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Fellow academics, I urge you to do the same. We can stigmatize UC over this. We can threaten to ask our professional associations not to meet in California too, or tell those associations we won't be attending any meetings they plan to hold in California in the future.

Any suggestions for those working at UC?
posted by one_bean at 4:45 PM on November 19, 2011


The protesters outside about letting Katehi get safely to her car when she exits the building. Someone just shouted "we paid for her car!"

"Whose car?"

"Our car!"
posted by Wuggie Norple at 4:47 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


2566 total comments. 1749 since your most recent comment, last 10 shown below...

Egads.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 4:47 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Whoa! They have Katehi basically trapped inside... And they are surrounding her car.

Whose car? Our car!

Mic check! This is exhilarating! Damn I wish I was there.
posted by spitbull at 4:48 PM on November 19, 2011


To be clear, they are talking quite a lot about making sure she gets to her car safely, not obstructing her.

("Let her do the college walk of shame!")
posted by Wuggie Norple at 4:49 PM on November 19, 2011



Any suggestions for those working at UC?

Leave? Seriously, speak up, especially if you are tenured. Defend junior colleagues who have spoken up. Let your administration know this will stigmatize the UC system among your colleagues nationwide.
posted by spitbull at 4:50 PM on November 19, 2011


Police have been called on protesters interrupting press conference about police reaction to protesters

It's an ourobouros!
posted by desjardins at 4:51 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


From the stream: "She said that she will not resign, as long as nobody tells her that she did her job wrong."

Fine, I'll step up. Lady, you did your job wrong. You do not, not ever, approve of pepper-spraying people who are peacefully sitting on the ground. Shame for trying to legitimize that.
posted by cmyk at 4:52 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Chancellor Katehi was born in 1954, so she was earning her degree in the early 1970s. In Greece. At the same school that is known for the student uprising against the military junta that ended in 1974. Kids were killed. A tank drove through their gates. The junta was ultimately ended.

Greece observes this day on November 17, with schools either closed on that day or holding commemorations in honor of the fight for democracy. Does Katehi not feel a sense of irony here?
posted by Houstonian at 4:53 PM on November 19, 2011 [9 favorites]


One of the pepper-sprayed protesters, Willie, was on the feed: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/occupy-uc-davis

He quoted the officer as saying "No, leave them. I want to spray these kids" or something to that effect.
posted by defenestration at 4:57 PM on November 19, 2011


It's a matter of pragmatism. Unless a bloody revolution is planned sometime soon a president will still be selected next November and if you oppose Wall St. greed and influence it's in your best interest to choose the candidate that will be the most amicable to your cause. That, to me, sounds plenty coherent.

but it doesn't sound like a protest movement.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 4:59 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


The students have formed a chain around the building, told to prepare for police.
posted by indubitable at 5:03 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


You are wrong, spitbull, the Tea party does the Republicans / Koch brothers bidding, not conversely. Yes, Tea party rhetoric panders to the racist Christian right, but that's manipulation, not influence. Read the Karl Denninger interview I linked. Also, you cannot win by merely controlling the Democrats, otherwise you'd find yourself roadblocked like Obama's healthcare. You must change the discourse entirely by causing the powerful real economic pain, destroying their legitimacy, etc. There is no "Obama rox/sux" debate because Obama is simply irrelevant.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:09 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


"You can leave in peace!"

"You can leave in peace!"

"You can leave in peace!"

"You can leave in peace!"

"You can leave in peace!"
posted by defenestration at 5:11 PM on November 19, 2011


Thanks to everyone who's been providing ustream links to the NYC and now the UC Davis action. Watching these streams the last couple of days have felt just like this past January when I was watching Al Jazeera coverage of Tahrir square on livestream.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 5:17 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Interesting... on the ustream some news orgs are saying Katehi is claiming she's trapped. Others are saying that she is still in the building. The students are showing how there's a clear path to her car and they are still chanting that she is not trapped.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 5:20 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


The president of the US is not irrelevant.
posted by spitbull at 5:22 PM on November 19, 2011


She's coming out...
posted by spitbull at 5:25 PM on November 19, 2011


They are being silent. Awesome.
posted by spitbull at 5:26 PM on November 19, 2011


Her exit is being mediated. A mitigating factor is silence...?
posted by defenestration at 5:26 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Holy fuck, she's refusing to come out unless everyone promises to be silent? I've never seen such cowards.
posted by Houstonian at 5:27 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


i think the silence is a statement by the students, not a demand from the chancellor.
posted by Think_Long at 5:28 PM on November 19, 2011


she forgot she needs the students in order to have a university.
posted by mrzarquon at 5:29 PM on November 19, 2011


Any suggestions for those working at UC?

Do you teach? Mention it in class. Just briefly, at the beginning, if it's not relevant to the subject you teach.

Judging by my college experience, there will be all sorts of misinformation flying around, and plenty of kids who are apathetic or confused enough to be like "Whatever, some hippies are whining, I'm sure they're exaggerating what happened." You can't use your position as a teacher to try to pull anyone over to your point of view; that would be unethical. But you can do your part to get word out about the magnitude of the situation, and to legitimize it as an important event that people should be following, whatever position they eventually come to take on it.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:29 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Police in riot gear on the way....

Be strong. This is so moving.
posted by spitbull at 5:30 PM on November 19, 2011


Riot police on the way
posted by thescientificmethhead at 5:30 PM on November 19, 2011


"Riot gear police officers might be on their way."
posted by defenestration at 5:30 PM on November 19, 2011


They quieted down so... bring in riot police? Oh boy.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 5:30 PM on November 19, 2011


No -- she has a mediator and she asked through the mediator to have complete silence. Some of the students suggested that they sit down so that she doesn't feel threatened, but then remembered what happened if you sit.

The are saying that they won't harm her, to encourage her to get out of the building.

They are bringing out riot police.
posted by Houstonian at 5:31 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


"If the police beat us, how many more will show up at the next press conference"
posted by mrzarquon at 5:33 PM on November 19, 2011


I am watching the feed right now, and I'm in absolute shock. These students keep TELLING her that she is in no danger, but I would bet you dollars to donuts the story reported tomorrow is "Chancellor trapped in building by angry mob, fears for life."
posted by Eumachia L F at 5:33 PM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]


"If we come in peace, they bring police."
posted by defenestration at 5:35 PM on November 19, 2011


To be fair, the police say they are there to help, just before they taze or pepper spray someone.
posted by mrzarquon at 5:35 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


They are smart that they showed the clear way out -- very wide path. It was not smart that someone tried to ensure that she would exit out of a specific door by putting a U-lock on the other door. Pretty sure that's what will be latched onto by police/media.
posted by Houstonian at 5:37 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


I really like these guys running the uc davis livestream.
posted by Think_Long at 5:37 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


What would Jesus do?
posted by eggtooth at 5:38 PM on November 19, 2011


The livestream folks are awesome.

I'm sure when the riot police come they'll be chanting "you can leave in peace" to the students, right? Right?
posted by Wuggie Norple at 5:39 PM on November 19, 2011


Me too. I'm glad they finally moved to the front of the chain, where there's light.
posted by defenestration at 5:39 PM on November 19, 2011


...and it's Off Air.

Battery drained?
posted by defenestration at 5:40 PM on November 19, 2011


Switching computers.
posted by blurker at 5:40 PM on November 19, 2011


Change.org Petition Demanding Katehi's Resignation is here. They keep mentioning it on the livestream. Up over 11K signatures now!
posted by spitbull at 5:42 PM on November 19, 2011


Are we taking bets on what time she slinks outta there?
posted by Houstonian at 5:42 PM on November 19, 2011


That "the negotiator says we have to be totally silent" is some bullshit.

They're not making demands. They're not holding her. She can, as they have said, just leave in peace. The mere idea of a "negotiator" plays into the idea that it's a hostage situation.

And "be silent"? Please. As she leaves in peace, they should chant "Shame".
posted by Flunkie at 5:43 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


eggtooth: What would Jesus do?

Jesus would burst through the door, overturn the tables of the moneychangers bankers and throw them out of the temple.

After that, he'd feed the poor and care for the sick while admonishing the rich that they're less likely to get into heaven than a camel is to pass through the eye of a needle.

That's my guess, anyway.
posted by syzygy at 5:44 PM on November 19, 2011 [15 favorites]


any estimates on how many students are out there? not more than a couple hundred surely?
posted by Think_Long at 5:44 PM on November 19, 2011


Watching these streams the last couple of days have felt just like this past January when I was watching Al Jazeera coverage of Tahrir square on livestream.

today's headline: Two dead, hundreds injured as protests rock Egypt

Sigh.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:44 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


"You can leave in peace!"

"You can leave in peace!"

"You can leave in peace!"


"Just don't come back!"

(That's why I don't trust myself at a demonstration. I would invariably say something a thin-skinned cop would think deserved a beating.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:47 PM on November 19, 2011


Like "you're going to shoot me for sitting here"?
posted by Think_Long at 5:48 PM on November 19, 2011


Looks like CBS News has live streaming coverage now.
posted by indubitable at 5:51 PM on November 19, 2011


New stream location
posted by Houstonian at 5:51 PM on November 19, 2011


cbs livestream is up.
posted by Think_Long at 5:52 PM on November 19, 2011


lol jinx
posted by indubitable at 5:52 PM on November 19, 2011


I get it. CBS. Not that they're going to interrupt the Saturday Night CSI reruns... (puts on sunglasses, cues The Who)
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:53 PM on November 19, 2011


I guess this time slot is . . . occupied.


yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
posted by Think_Long at 5:54 PM on November 19, 2011 [9 favorites]


admonishing the rich that they're less likely to get into heaven than a camel is to pass through the eye of a needle.

For shame, syzygy! That's class warfare!
posted by homunculus at 5:55 PM on November 19, 2011


A student livestream is back up too: chrisgomezwong
posted by Wuggie Norple at 5:57 PM on November 19, 2011


I would like to reiterate...

This is not a negotiation...

This is not a hostage situation...

Just walk home!

posted by indubitable at 5:57 PM on November 19, 2011


Hey, did I just get mic checked by some Mefite on the scene?
I would like to reiterate

I would like to reiterate

This is not a negotiation

This is not a negotiation

This is not a hostage situation

This is not a hostage situation

She can just walk home

She can just walk home
posted by Flunkie at 5:59 PM on November 19, 2011


Now they're organizing money for pizza.

Ahhh students.

Any spots in the area delivering? I'd like to order them one.
posted by Think_Long at 5:59 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


This is not a hostage situation...

If a larger group of peaceful and unarmed individuals, preventing a smaller group with weaponry from doing as they please, is considered a hostage situation, we really have crossed over into WTF Backwards Land.
posted by cmyk at 5:59 PM on November 19, 2011 [7 favorites]


Eventually she's got to leave the building. She's just making it worse for herself by the minute. Although obviously she does fear her customers, which explains why she thinks pepper spraying her customers is OK.
posted by Houstonian at 6:00 PM on November 19, 2011


I can't tell whether to think she's legitimately afraid of them, or to think she's acting afraid in order to spread the meme that the student protesters are aggressive and frightening.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:01 PM on November 19, 2011


No one is preventing anything, cmyk. That's what makes this so absurd.
posted by Eumachia L F at 6:02 PM on November 19, 2011


CHANCELLOR KATEHI, MEET THE PRESS.
posted by spitbull at 6:02 PM on November 19, 2011


nebulawindphone, I've been thinking the latter all along. It lets her play the victim in this situation.
posted by manguero at 6:04 PM on November 19, 2011


okay this is a really shitty angle that cbs has chosen. Do they know they're livestreaming?
posted by Think_Long at 6:05 PM on November 19, 2011


Just think Chancellor. If you resign they'll have enough to hire nearly 4 more cops.
posted by spitbull at 6:08 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Maybe she's worried if the police spray the students, they might spray her... oh wait, they won't spray the students again.

Surely!
posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:08 PM on November 19, 2011


"we will not touch your property

we will not touch your person

we are here in peace

and we have pizza"
posted by mrzarquon at 6:11 PM on November 19, 2011 [3 favorites]


maybe the only way she can survive as Chancellor is to be a victim here?
posted by eggtooth at 6:11 PM on November 19, 2011


The Ustream comments are mentioning something about a heli-fucking-copter?
posted by spitbull at 6:11 PM on November 19, 2011


From the comments: "Someone get the Chancellor a tent? It looks like she is going to occupy this building."
posted by Houstonian at 6:12 PM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


I wonder if Chancellor Katehi's response was based on something the head of the Campus Police threatenedsaid.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:14 PM on November 19, 2011


bohemian rhapsody?
posted by Think_Long at 6:16 PM on November 19, 2011


She said during the failed press conference that she is not resigning — unless someone tells her she did her job wrong (or something like that).

Well. Open your eyes, Chancellor.
posted by defenestration at 6:16 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


"Ma'am, it's not safe out there. We might have to invoke pacification measures. With extreme prejudice."
posted by manguero at 6:16 PM on November 19, 2011


They have over 12,000 signatures saying she did something wrong.
posted by mrzarquon at 6:17 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


First channel back up.
posted by manguero at 6:18 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


She said during the failed press conference that she is not resigning — unless someone tells her she did her job wrong (or something like that).

Since when has a University Chancellor listened to anybody?
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:20 PM on November 19, 2011


The Occupy Davis Facebook page is pretty timely with updates.
posted by spitbull at 6:21 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


they're just directing us to the chrisgomez channel. I'm sticking with cbs for reliability and sound, but the student channels are more fun.
posted by Think_Long at 6:21 PM on November 19, 2011


From another thread:

Amazon wish list for tents, from Nathan Brown (UC Davis professor who has called for the chancellor's resignation).
posted by Flunkie at 6:22 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Whose University? Our University!
posted by spitbull at 6:24 PM on November 19, 2011


Occupy Law Team on the case, with cool green hats!
posted by defenestration at 6:25 PM on November 19, 2011


Second ustream recording Just a quick changeover again, should be back up..
posted by mrzarquon at 6:25 PM on November 19, 2011


did cbs switch to oakland? Or is that arial from davis?
posted by Think_Long at 6:26 PM on November 19, 2011


Anyone know Davis and where one might go about ordering pizzas for these kids?
posted by spitbull at 9:27 PM on November 19 [+] [!]
posted by spitbull at 6:28 PM on November 19, 2011


From the UC Davis fb: Occupy UC Davis
Update: a UC Davis student, one of those arrested today, has suffered radial nerve damage in his left hand (he is left-handed) after having been handcuffed for an extended amount of time. Doctors in the emergency room estimate that he will not have full feeling nor mobility in his hand for two weeks.

posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:32 PM on November 19, 2011


it's like the civil war, when, for the first battle, families from Washington brought
picnic baskets to sit and watch the battle.
posted by eggtooth at 6:33 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


> Anyone know Davis and where one might go about ordering pizzas for these kids?

Yelp search for Pizza, found woodstocks, open now, delivers.
posted by mrzarquon at 6:36 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]




Moving the car up to the building, protestors standing aside. She's gonna ride out of there.

Something is being born here, a new generation of actual campus activism.
posted by spitbull at 6:44 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hey what is that, a fucking Lexus?
posted by spitbull at 6:45 PM on November 19, 2011


They are sitting down.
posted by defenestration at 6:47 PM on November 19, 2011


Sitting down, Katehi walks the "walk of shame" in silence!
posted by spitbull at 6:47 PM on November 19, 2011


There she goes.
posted by spitbull at 6:49 PM on November 19, 2011


man, the students are amazing. absolute silence.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:49 PM on November 19, 2011


She walks out in complete silence.
posted by defenestration at 6:49 PM on November 19, 2011


wow, absolute fucking silence.
posted by Think_Long at 6:49 PM on November 19, 2011


Whoa, that was powerful. Chancellor walks out as students stand there silently.
posted by indubitable at 6:49 PM on November 19, 2011


That was amazing. I have goosebumps.

Off she goes in "The People's Lexus." You could see her career crumbling before her eyes as she walked through the utter silence of that crowd.
posted by spitbull at 6:51 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


What stream are you guys watching? For me, the two student ones are dead, and the CBS one is showing the Capitol.
posted by Flunkie at 6:51 PM on November 19, 2011


It only makes sense. As I wrote earlier, since when has a University Chancellor ever listened to anybody?
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:51 PM on November 19, 2011


Second stream has her getting in the car right now.
posted by defenestration at 6:52 PM on November 19, 2011


Flunkie: Try http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chrisgomezwong
posted by running order squabble fest at 6:52 PM on November 19, 2011


"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"

"Who's university? Our university!"
posted by defenestration at 6:53 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


chrisgomezwong is marching with the crowd now. He's guessing there's over a 1,000 people.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:53 PM on November 19, 2011


Of course it's a Lexus! In 2009 when she started, her salary was $400,000. And the perks!
- Annual auto allowance of $8916.
- Relo of $100,000 plus moving costs.
- University-provided housing.
- Pension!
- Full insurance.
- Sabbatical accrual.
posted by Houstonian at 6:53 PM on November 19, 2011


KATEHI RESIGN!

I swear this is so powerful. A new student movement is born here.
posted by spitbull at 6:54 PM on November 19, 2011


And then the obligatory "we still have pizza and music, so stay and party"
posted by mrzarquon at 6:56 PM on November 19, 2011


Mic Check: "We Still Have Pizza and Music . . . For Free . . . SO Stay!"

Gandhi would cheer.
posted by spitbull at 6:56 PM on November 19, 2011


I am overwhelmed with love for those kids.
posted by Errant at 6:59 PM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]




Holy cats that video is amazing.
posted by KathrynT at 7:18 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Wow. Yeah. That video... When she answered the reporter's brief questions, she sounded so defeated, and rightfully so. A pretty clear and profound victory for the occupiers. That silence was louder than an LRAD.
posted by fuq at 7:22 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


Those were well-chosen questions from the reporter.

"Are you planning on addressing the students at all?" -- answer commits her to a statement on Monday.

"Do you still feel threatened by the students?" -- answer clears the students of any accusations that she was a hostage.

"Did you feel trapped?" -- answer again clears the students, although it makes it hard to understand what she was doing in the building with a negotiator if she wasn't cowering.
posted by Houstonian at 7:24 PM on November 19, 2011 [5 favorites]


The only inch I'd get her is that from her background in the greek student riots, where there were massive student demonstrations that ended violently, she had no frame of reference for a "large group of students outside of your building not ending in violence." Not saying her actions were justified, but that may be a data point in understanding why she took those actions.
posted by mrzarquon at 7:27 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]


The students did as good a job of turning lemons into lemonade as the chancellor did a bad job.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:27 PM on November 19, 2011


Good points all, Houstonian.

I was floored that these students were able to hold together in silence, not one of them breaking and shouting in anger. This should go far in helping them to show their peaceful intent. I very much hope they are heard.
posted by blurker at 7:33 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]


I think that given her background, she would've had the inkling that protests are part of democracy, and that it's not nice to attack students. When she was a student, the military drove a tank into the school grounds. They shot people dead. The violence came from authority against students, with the obvious parallels here (although not as terrible). That gave her no compassion?
posted by Houstonian at 7:35 PM on November 19, 2011


The silence of the occupiers was a noble one.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:35 PM on November 19, 2011 [1 favorite]




They shoulda thrown that cop under the bus once they saw that picture. The way he's casually spraying the kids doing nothing... absolutely indefensible.

Keep the non-violent heat on 'em, Davis students.
posted by fleacircus at 7:44 PM on November 19, 2011




> They shot people dead. The violence came from authority against students, with the obvious parallels here (although not as terrible). That gave her no compassion?

That is assuming she was one of the student protestors, and not one of the students who didn't want to get involved. She hasn't been very talkative about her experiences of the movements during her years in college. And being able to take a bigger picture view of a traumatic event (ie, I am committing now what was committed against me when I was younger) is not an inherent human ability. But in the end it is all speculation anyway.
posted by mrzarquon at 7:45 PM on November 19, 2011


Is there any official confirmation that she has resigned?
posted by argonauta at 7:56 PM on November 19, 2011


Crap, I was at GA telling everyone during "newsreel" that something major was happening at UCDavis. I came back and now I missed everything. Is there any recording of the press conference? Any recordings other than Katehi's walk of shame?
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:56 PM on November 19, 2011


argonauta, I would be surprised if we hear anything before Monday. When she was leaving, that's when she said she would address the students (and presumably the public at large).
posted by manguero at 8:01 PM on November 19, 2011


Maybe she means Monday "90 days" from now.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:08 PM on November 19, 2011 [4 favorites]


I'm so glad I was able to watch that in real time. After listening to the students talk and gather outside, how they totally were not going to let their actions be misrepresented by others. Twitter is aflame with the #walkofshame and that is going to be very, very memorable.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 8:17 PM on November 19, 2011


Katehi needs to resign, but that would just be a good start.
posted by thescientificmethhead at 8:28 PM on November 19, 2011


Thanks, odinsdream. I'm watching the press conference right now. Holy shit. Katehi said that the students were pepper sprayed to insure their safety. Spicuzza said the officers in the field made the decision to pepper spray the students to insure the police officer's safety. Spicuzza said that the police were not wearing riot gear, they were wearing protective safety gear.

And they had to destroy the village in order to save it.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:28 PM on November 19, 2011 [2 favorites]




franklin,
security,
freedom,
trading,
neither,
etc.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:31 PM on November 19, 2011


(For anyone who hasn't checked the front page in a while, there is now a FPP about the recent UCD events as well as UC protests more broadly.)
posted by manguero at 8:33 PM on November 19, 2011


Yeah, it's true manguero, but camping is in fashion these days. occupymefi.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:35 PM on November 19, 2011


Also linked to in the other thread: video of Katehi's walk of shame, with repeated pledge at beginning, led by pepper-sprayed UCD student.

Hooray, I contributed something useful and now have both threads in my recent activity!
posted by iamkimiam at 3:06 AM on November 20, 2011 [3 favorites]


She has not said anything about resigning yet. But she must know it's in the cards.

I didn't realize that was Spicuzzi, the police chief, with her. Ladies, as it were, let us show you to your ($65,000) car.

I woke up bursting with pride for those kids. My colleagues are all emailing about it. The story has gone viral. They have inspired many beyond Davis.
posted by spitbull at 3:49 AM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


That video is so powerful. More of this sort of thing is needed.
posted by reynir at 4:08 AM on November 20, 2011


Occupy DC is asking for donations of goggles. I bet they would be well-received at other Occupy sites as well. I sure wish no one needed them.

[Anyone know what's the best inexpensive kind to protect from pepper spray? Industrial safety goggles? Swim? Ski?]
posted by argonauta at 7:59 AM on November 20, 2011 [2 favorites]


In this thread -- or maybe it was in the other one -- it was noted that police view any protective gear as prima facie evidence of criminal intent (and, consequently, justification for even more force). I hope Occupy DC knows this and knows what it's doing.
posted by gerryblog at 8:02 AM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


Excellent point, gerryblog. Ugh.
posted by argonauta at 8:04 AM on November 20, 2011


That is a good point gerryblog, but I sort of wonder if swim goggles--especially if they were pink or maybe had Spongebob on them--would look nonthreatening enough to avoid that problem (or at least make the cops look really, really stupid if they arrested someone for wearing them).

How effective are swim goggles against pepper spray, though?
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 8:26 AM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


How effective are swim goggles against pepper spray, though?

Absolutely useless for nose and throat irritation regardless of how well it protects your eyes.
posted by Talez at 8:34 AM on November 20, 2011


Damn, I was hoping that the goggles, they did something.
posted by griphus at 9:24 AM on November 20, 2011 [5 favorites]


But the bandana with vinegar is good for protecting the nose/mouth... At least that's supposed to be good for tear gas, not sure about pepper spray. Combine with goggles and hope for the best. The bandana, at least, is a normal enough article of clothing that it probably can't be cited as criminal intent.
posted by kaibutsu at 9:36 AM on November 20, 2011


Anyone know about any livestreams that are following this?

Newyorkist
Police massing, on 5th Ave at 79th Street, near Bloomberg's mansion twitpic.com/7gzie4
posted by Wuggie Norple at 9:55 AM on November 20, 2011


Anecdotally, apple cider works as well as vinegar, and is more pleasant to inhale.

Any innocent bystanders whose route to work passes a crowd of agitators concerned that they may get caught on the edge of pepper spray clouds used in the lawful pacification of extremist elements might consider having a non-face-concealing bandana ready around their neck or head, a bottle of water in their pockets, and also might want to think about wearing non-porous clothing, which will both protect against rain and keep droplets of pepper spray off the skin.

The police are currently having a very stressful time, and responsible citizens should do their best to minimise the stress they might experience from the fear of endangering innocent, law-abiding Americans.

Goggles might look suspicious - nothing to hide, nothing to fear! - but kept in a pocket and only employed if the police mask up or present arms they might help a law-abiding citizen to retain clear vision long enough to remove themselves from an area where they might impede the fulfilment of the police's duties by staggering around blindly.

Protective gear is less likely to be of much use to anyone standing and facing off against the police in non-violent passive resistance, though, because they will simply physically remove the protective gear and spray again, or escalate to the baton or Taser, depending on their rules of engagement.
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:08 AM on November 20, 2011 [5 favorites]


Our most potent weapon has to be the size of our crowds and the moral force of our arguments.
posted by spitbull at 10:18 AM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


Yesterday, MSNBC reported that a Washington lobbying firm (Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford) with ties to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to promote "negative narratives" about Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests.

MSNBC said it had obtained a memo in which the lobbying firm pitches the negative campaign to the American Bankers Association, saying it could help the industry avoid fallout if the protests result in a Congress that is less friendly to Wall Street.
posted by dejah420 at 10:18 AM on November 20, 2011


Apple cider vinegar surely...just plain cider would not be effective.
posted by schyler523 at 10:18 AM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


Meanwhile, outside New York -- a team of people is on its way to DC, on foot, to be a visible presence on November 23rd when the Supercommittee finally meets.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:25 AM on November 20, 2011 [3 favorites]


schyler523 Oh, yes - absolutely. Apple cider vinegar rather than wine or malt vinegar, to minimise irritation of the nose and mouth. A bandana soaked in apple cider would be delicious but less effective.

(Something else to be aware of, I guess, is the small risk that if somebody who has been doused in pepper spray is then Tasered, they may catch fire, and the blue flame the solvent burns with may be hard to see in daylight. So, ironically, shaking off a blast of pepper spray might be very bad for one's health.)
posted by running order squabble fest at 10:30 AM on November 20, 2011


Let them make a choice: the conversation can be about economic inequality and rampant corruption in our financial/political system, or it can be about police militarization and brutality.

This is turning very interesting from the point of view of "seeing like a state," as Scott calls it. For two to three decades, critical thinkers of many stripes have been predicting the collision course the west has been on would eventually test the basis for the social hegemony we've known since the great depression, pretty much, in the advanced capitalist economies. The frictions of that hegemony have sometimes been dissipated with violence (Civil Rights movement, gay rights movement, feminist movement, anti-war movement, etc.) but have always been mostly dissipated through cultural channels, tactical appeasement, setting one or another identity-based group against another (with anti-Black racism, and now anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant/Latino racism as fallbacks for almost any social problem), and through a cycle of war-modulated boom and bust. Just enough pitch and yaw to make workers nervous, just enough goodies over the horizon to keep them compliant and busy hating each other more than they hate their masters. And always patriotism demands you not speak of class or honor sacrifice, only speak of race or gender or sexuality and honor greed.

Meanwhile, we were using up a very limited pool of raw resources, and setting in motion global forces that have now created new ascendant powers unconstrained by our pretense to a social contract between state, citizen, and capitalist firm. We meet it with more war. We meet it with more useless culture warring. We meet it with ever more fantastical casino-capitalist illusions -- infinitely rising real estate process, dot coms, a college education as a sure route to membership in the accommodationist class.

And now the sand is running out of the hourglass. The tide is receding. Pick your metaphor. And at this point, what has always been behind that fragile hegemony -- the state's monopoly on legitimate violence and cultivation of illegitimate violence as a means of social discipline and justification for ever increasing resources for that legitimate violence -- is increasingly necessary. We need a prison industrial complex, and a permanent war, just to soak up a portion of the reserve army of labor; we keep the proletariat uneducated and ignorant and doused in chemicals and ideological blather. And the closer that reality gets, the more the reactionaries are going to close ranks, demand heads be broken and police be empowered with as much brute machinery of violence and impunity to use it as they wish, in a vicious cycle that has clearly had its coming out party with OWS. Because you can bet a hundred police departments across the country -- nay, 1000 -- are salivating at the prospects of justifying more munitions and more surveillance in response to this latest Terrorist Threat to the Homeland that OWS is to so many on the right, whether sincerely or cynically.

Eventually, know this, there ain't enough lifeboats to go around under the current structure. No matter how comfortable you are, or successful, or aspiring to successful, or confident in our unregulated market based society, or trusting of absolute power and authority in the hands of militarized forces with the legal right to arrest, punish, detain, abuse, and even kill you and very little risk of accountability for mistakes or over-zealousness, there may come a time when you, too, get a pepper spray to the back of the throat for the crime of conscientious, premeditated civil disobedience. Someday your ox will be gored. Someday your industry will disappear. Someday your kid won't be able to find a job. Someday you'll retire without health insurance or sufficient income. And if you complain in the name of a set of rights that get so much lip service they should probably be tested for STDs, you can expect to be covered in burning yellow foam with a boot on your face.
posted by spitbull at 10:43 AM on November 20, 2011 [7 favorites]


Police massing, on 5th Ave at 79th Street, near Bloomberg's mansion

The official stream is showing a different location. Right now, they are talking about tuition costs. Later today is the passing of the torch with the Council of Elders. BUT their schedule shows this:

2:00pm: 24 hour "Occupy Bloomberg's Mansion Drum Circle Protest And Love-In Art Show " in front of Billionaire Bloomberg's massive mansion on 17 East 79th Street.

Wish they wouldn't take away from the truly cool Council of Elders event. There's a facebook event page, but I don't do facebook so I can't log in to see. Maybe there's info about a stream there?
posted by Houstonian at 11:01 AM on November 20, 2011


bandana with vinegar
pepper spray.


= Tabasco.
posted by Miko at 11:03 AM on November 20, 2011


Houstonian: Apparently, our favorite, Tim Hood will be doing a stream. (Right now he's interviewing the philly police chief.)
posted by kaibutsu at 11:03 AM on November 20, 2011


oh, it's pre-recorded, apparently; they're off the air right now, but should be covering the mansion sit-in.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:04 AM on November 20, 2011


the newyorkist twitter feed reports that the police closed the street. There will be no drumming in front of mansions.
posted by Houstonian at 11:07 AM on November 20, 2011


OccupyNYC livestream is at Bloomberg's mansion now.
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:32 AM on November 20, 2011


Love among the protestors
posted by The Whelk at 11:33 AM on November 20, 2011


How TheOther99 livecasts are bringing Max Headroom to life
posted by stagewhisper at 11:46 AM on November 20, 2011


Occupy Rape..

Which I think is probably better cast Occupy Non-Violence.

Get money out of politics and get violence out of society. Peace out, neighbor.
posted by five fresh fish at 2:58 PM on November 20, 2011


How TheOther99 livecasts are bringing Max Headroom to life

WTF? Because Tim Pool is a cybernetic creature living inside a computer?
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:49 PM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


wouldn't surprise me.
posted by The Whelk at 3:50 PM on November 20, 2011


bandana with vinegar
pepper spray.
= Tabasco.


That'd be a hellishly hot Tabasco.
I had no idea that the pepper spray is two to five times hotter than the hottest chili in existence.
posted by hat_eater at 4:40 PM on November 20, 2011


How TheOther99 livecasts are bringing Max Headroom to life

WTF? Because Tim Pool is a cybernetic creature living inside a computer?


From the article:

"The series was pre-Web. It anticipated today’s backpack journalism, live streaming and networked reporting. And all those things are coming together today in the work of Tim Pool, the live streamer and citizen journalist who is documenting Occupy Wall Street to a growing audience online. "

Max Headroom was about Edison Carter, who took a camera where ever to find the story, report on it live, and do some good.
posted by ZeusHumms at 5:14 PM on November 20, 2011


Zeus, have you ever actually watched the series? Absolutely none of it involved "backpack journalism" or live streaming. The show was based on 1980s "ENG," Electronic News Gathering with massive shoulder-carried ENG cameras, and live remotes were already commonplace. The most high tech feature of the show was satellite teleconferencing. I participated in a satellite teleconference in 1980, five years before the pilot was created.

I don't think Professor Rosen has seen the show since it first aired, his memory is a bit fuzzy. Or perhaps he is just straining too hard for a lame metaphor.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:22 PM on November 20, 2011


We should definitely argue about this, it's very important, especially if we don't read the article or skip over the word "anticipated" in "anticipated backpack journalism" (eyeroll).

Professor Rosen is compares how Tim Poole's coverage is directed buy users sitting at home- they ask questions, he tries to find out answers. They ask him to move to a location or give him tips on where the action or danger is and he reports on the fly based on viewer information.

from the article: "Carter is aided by his deskbound producer, Theora Jones, who has complete access to the datasphere on her computer and constant contact with Carter when he’s in the field....Edison Carter had Theora Jones watching out for him. Tim Pool has the users themselves. In many ways it’s Max Headroom come to life."
posted by stagewhisper at 6:49 PM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


oh god the typos so sorry
posted by stagewhisper at 6:50 PM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


There was some reference to this upthread but I missed the link until I opened reddit :

NYPD arrest retired Philly police captain Raymond Lewis at OWS protests

He offered considerable good advice for protestors in NYC, noted upthread.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:56 PM on November 20, 2011


bandana with vinegar
pepper spray.

= Tabasco.

No, Miko. Not anymore than flamethrower + holding a box of paraffin wax = tea candle. The rest of your posts displayed a lot more forethought.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:00 PM on November 20, 2011


(I thought it was a good joke.)
posted by kaibutsu at 8:27 PM on November 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


Tabasco or no, that concoction would taste great on a hamburger.
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:29 PM on November 20, 2011


I dunno, the bandana might be a bit too chewy.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:35 PM on November 20, 2011 [2 favorites]


No, Miko. Not anymore than flamethrower + holding a box of paraffin wax = tea candle. The rest of your posts displayed a lot more forethought.

Thanks. Yes, it was a joke, because pepper and vinegar are the ingredients of Tabasco.

I'm actually surprised it took this long to draw an overserious response, though. But I knew it would come.
posted by Miko at 8:38 PM on November 20, 2011 [7 favorites]


For the record, though, apparently the answer is no, vinegar does not help with pepper spray.
For pepper spray, we've tested a number of substances rumored to help which haven't, including: whole milk, bioshield, baby shampoo, bentonite clay, and rescue remedy. Three other substances which didn't work on pepper spray but are rumored to be helpful with tear gas: baking soda in water, vinegar and water, and lemon juice and water.
It doesn't sound as if vinegar is very effective even against tear gas. Most sites call it "just a barrier," that it can't neutralize the gas because both are acidic, and that instead what happens is that when the gas encounteres a moist surface it just situates the first reaction at the moist face/bandanna barrier instead of in the throat, though it will penetrate the throat given a few more seconds. It's mentioned that water is just as good at this.It looks like there's just a ton of misinformation and half-correct information out there.
posted by Miko at 8:50 PM on November 20, 2011 [3 favorites]


Can anybody that is following Occupy LA offer some individuals/accounts on Twitter that I can follow for updates? Thanks to accounts like TheOther99 I feel like I know what NY is doing in near real time but the only info I have on Occupy LA, a mere 25 miles up the freeway, is from their website.
posted by Defenestrator at 10:35 PM on November 20, 2011


.It looks like there's just a ton of misinformation and half-correct information out there.

Yes, there is - but I think you might be adding to that here. The passage you quote is about substances rumored to be effective as a shield against the effect of pepper spray on the skin and mucous membranes once deployed. From the very same page that you are quoting:
We also recommend minimizing skin exposure by covering up. A bandana soaked in apple cider vinegar (water if nothing else) and tied tightly around the nose and mouth provides limited protection.
Vinegar won't work to counter the effects of pepper spray once it's got into the system - water or liquid antacid and water seem to be indicated for immediate rinsing of the eyes and mouth and topical antacid for treating its immediate effect on the skin.

A vinegar-soaked bandana may give you enough time to get out of the immediate area, as might swim goggles with the anti-fogging holes blocked up. If you're going for non-violent passive resistance or direct action, though, any such barriers can simply be removed by police before spraying, in which case the only thing to do, really, is to make sure someone gets it on camera.
posted by running order squabble fest at 2:07 AM on November 21, 2011


Yeah, I think all of that is pretty clear in the link, running order. I also did some other non-linked searching and found wide variations in what the vinegar/bandanna was supposed to do, with many claiming it neutralizes. It doesn't. As the link says, it's just a barrier and one that doesn't give long-lasting protection. In any case, I don't think I'm adding to misinformation as everything I linked and noted seems to be acurate. I'm not sure what aspect of what I said you are challenging, since you're merely confirming this set of facts. Vinegar doesn't do anything against pepper spray and provides only a physical barrier to gas.
posted by Miko at 5:30 AM on November 21, 2011


Oh, I see what you're saying, that you think it's confusing that I'm saying vinegar doesn't protect against pepper spray when in fact it is also a physical barrier. my point was that water apparently works just the same way as vinegar - there's nothing special, in other words, about vinegar as the liquid of choice there.

I would imagine, though, that as soon as you've been sprayed you want that wet bandanna off your face immediately, because it's now contaminated and right up against your skin.
posted by Miko at 5:33 AM on November 21, 2011


Disclaimer: I have no practical experience dealing with pepper spray. This is not advice for those likely to be exposed to it.

I would imagine, though, that as soon as you've been sprayed you want that wet bandanna off your face immediately, because it's now contaminated and right up against your skin.


Maybe, maybe not. It looks like capsaicin has horrible water solubility and no vapour pressure, so it might not actually penetrate the bandanna, instead just beading on the outer layer of water. If the cloth contained vinegar, then you'd probably see some penetration because the acetic acid would increase solubility a little. The spray still requires direct contact though, so if your bandanna isn't physically touching your nose/mouth you might be ok.

At a guess that the purpose of the antacid is to deprotonate capsaicin's phenol, increasing the water solubility and allowing it to be washed off. A quick google search suggests that milk has a similar effect, but deprotonated capsaicin may also be inactive (or not).

Disclaimer: I have no practical experience dealing with pepper spray. This is not advice for those likely to be exposed to it.
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 5:59 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


Ethyl alcohol works perfectly fine as a solvent for extracting the raw capsaicin. You could probably use it to redissolve it. Maybe an alcohol based baby wipe?
posted by Talez at 6:49 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


The primary sites of irritation are the eyes/nose/throat though, and alcohol would burn. I'd almost lean towards a mix of baking soda and whole milk/cream, but I wouldn't want to be the first to try it.

The police manual for the pepper spray might contain a few good tips, in case of accidental exposure.
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 7:38 AM on November 21, 2011


Oh, I see what you're saying, that you think it's confusing that I'm saying vinegar doesn't protect against pepper spray when in fact it is also a physical barrier.

Nope - I'm specifically pointing out that the section you quoted appears to refer to the use of vinegar as a treatment of burns sustained from pepper spray, when the discussion here was about the use of vinegar-doused cloth as a way of limiting or delaying the impact of pepper spray on the nose, mouth and throat. Which is the use that was being discussed, and the use recommended on the same page that you cited as proving that vinegar was of no use in helping with pepper spray. Tightening up the verbs a bit should sort that right out, though - maybe "helping to ameliorate the pain caused by pepper spray"?

Nobody had suggested that vinegar was a good treatment for pepper spray burns, however, only that a vinegar-soaked bandana could help to give one time to remove oneself from the immediate area of danger. The source your link draws from from, the Black Cross Health Collective, which also informs the Street Medic Wiki, says essentially the same thing, and suggests that apple cider vinegar is a better substance for drenching the bandana than water, although water is preferable to nothing in an emergency. They may be wrong, but they are evidence-based:
A bandana soaked in apple cider vinegar (2nd choice is water) and tied tightly around the nose and mouth is a last resort. It is far better than nothing, but is not going to do much for long-term protection, and multiple uses will render it as gassy as the air around you.
Both recommend respirators as a preferable alternative, but they are, I think, thinking of events like the G20 summits, where running battles between police and protestors are broadly expected and certainly a lot of gas is going to be flying around. At a peaceful protest, a gas mask would almost certainly represent escalation, and on current form the police would go in with raised batons to pull you out. So the best way to avoid pepper spray is to stay 20 feet away from the police, and if you are prepared to be pepper sprayed in the course of non-violent protest if need be, like the protestors at UC Davis, to accept that it's going to hurt. In the middle ground, some concealable protection could be donned if it was clear that spray was about to be deployed, to stave off the effects for long enough to get clear.

Orange Pamplemousse: Certainly during student protests in London, people who had been pepper sprayed by police were assisted by employees at a nearby cookie stand, who used milk from their coffee supplies to wash out eyes. The use of pepper spray was a surprise, not least to the police, at least one of whom managed to pepper spray himself. Which I guess is one way to approach community policing... and the Street Medic wiki does indeed recommend alcohol to remove the spray, after mineral oil is applied with gauze. It feels like in the case of these protests having people available with palliative tools would be more useful than too much ostentatiously protective gear, since various police officers have shown a willingness to spray people they don't intend to take into custody.
posted by running order squabble fest at 7:50 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


Sorry, Miko, but flat delivery of sparse jokes don't always communicate online. Congrats on your trolling.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:04 AM on November 21, 2011


flat delivery of sparse jokes don't always communicate online. Congrats on your trolling.

Flat delivery of sparse jokes isn't trolling.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:14 AM on November 21, 2011 [7 favorites]


Miko don't troll, yo.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:16 AM on November 21, 2011 [6 favorites]


Congrats on your trolling.

This is basically the opposite of making the conversation better here. If you want to tell someone you don't think their joke worked, go ahead and do that. If you want to talk about that sort of thing as something that's an ongoing problem, head on over to Metatalk and make a post that outlines your concerns.
posted by cortex at 8:22 AM on November 21, 2011 [7 favorites]


What? Miko got accused of trolling? Did I wake up in a parallel universe again? I hate when that happens.
posted by desjardins at 8:49 AM on November 21, 2011 [6 favorites]


In the bizarro universe, The Whelk is an introvert with nothing much to say.
posted by desjardins at 8:50 AM on November 21, 2011 [7 favorites]


yep.
posted by The Bizzaro Whelk at 9:06 AM on November 21, 2011 [19 favorites]


I believe that recalibration may be needed here, because if Miko had decided to start trolling, we might as well all go home.

Because no one will ever beat her.
posted by quin at 9:37 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


Bizarro Miko's Breakup Guidelines:

1) Take a shot of Beam
2) "FUCK YOU!"
3) Take a shot of Beam
4) Ride Harley off into the sunset in t-shirt reading "If you can see this, the favorites fell off."
5) Any questions?
posted by griphus at 9:41 AM on November 21, 2011 [12 favorites]


OK, here's the conversation I thought I was participating in, just for the record.

Kaibitsu said ...the bandana with vinegar is good for protecting the nose/mouth... At least that's supposed to be good for tear gas, not sure about pepper spray. Combine with goggles and hope for the best. The bandana, at least, is a normal enough article of clothing that it probably can't be cited as criminal intent.

Running order squabble fest said Anecdotally, apple cider works as well as vinegar, and is more pleasant to inhale.

Schyler523 clarifiedthat running order squabble fest probably meant Apple cider vinegar surely...just plain cider would not be effective.

Running order squabble fest agreed Oh, yes - absolutely. Apple cider vinegar rather than wine or malt vinegar, to minimise irritation of the nose and mouth. A bandana soaked in apple cider would be delicious but less effective.

I made a joke about Tabasco which went down like a lead balloon.

Then I got curious about in what ways the vinegar was supposed to actually "protect the nose/mouth" or "minimize irritation of the nose and mouth." I looked it up on many sites and found lots of incomplete or inaccurate information (such as the idea that it neutralizes anything) and found the one I linked to be fairly comprehensive. The site discussed the idea that vinegar does not have any powers of neutralizing pepper spray - that is why I quoted the section on treatments meant to counteract the pepper spray. Vinegar doesn't chemically counteract pepper spray, which was the point I was making, although I now see that others were focused on a different point - whether it was helpful in preventing contact in the first place. The site does say "We also recommend minimizing skin exposure by covering up. A bandana soaked in apple cider vinegar (water if nothing else) and tied tightly around the nose and mouth provides limited protection"

What I was interested in was whether the vinegar had active properties of neutralizing or ameliorating the effects of the chemicals in the spray. Many people (not necessarily here) seem to think so, but apparently it does not. What it does do is provide a physical barrier against the sprays contacting skin and mucous membranes. The article notes that water also works to do this. So I posted the link thinking that people might read it and learn that apple cider vinegar or any type of vinegar, really, may not confer any additional protective powers above that provided by water, and in any case do not have the power to neutralize the body's reaction to attacks from these chemicals.

So, I certainly didn't mean to spread misinformation, but I wasn't clear about which purpose I was speaking to in choosing the relevant section to quote. I wanted to debunk the "neutralizing" idea, but the "physical protective barrier" idea does hold up, though it doesn't have to be vinegar.
posted by Miko at 10:23 AM on November 21, 2011 [5 favorites]


In fact I'm having kind of a hard time figuring out why vinegar is recommended as the preferred choice above water, especially because of the solubility issue. Part of me just idly wonders if this is sort of picking up a halo of associations from folk remedies and DIY green home chemistry. A few sites mention that people think it makes tear gas "easier to tolerate" because it seems to take the edge off the smell, while some attempt scientific explanations but without the understanding that the acid itself isn't affording protection. Many people say cider vinegar "works the best" and I really would like to understand why that would be so.
posted by Miko at 10:44 AM on November 21, 2011


I think you're still getting the vinegar thing slightly confused, though, Miko.

Let's take it as read that vinegar has no power to neutralize pepper spray - that is, it doesn't deactivate pepper spray when it comes into contact with pepper spray (e.g. by being splashed onto affected skin in a dilute solution), and it also doesn't deactivate pepper spray when pepper spray comes into contact with it (e.g. by landing on a bandana soaked in vinegar). I don't know where you read that it did, but regardless it is quite right that it doesn't.

The two sentences "We also recommend minimising skin exposure by covering up" and "a bandana soaked in... provides limited protection" are connected by the idea of covering up (exposed skin and vulnerable mucous membranes) rather than by the idea of vinegar. The advice is to cover up with clothes, which can be easily removed, and ideally with a non-porous shell (a raincoat and waterproof hat, say). The vinegar is only cited as useful in the context of soaking a bandana to place over one's mouth.

In that context, multiple sources say that soaking the bandana in vinegar is more effective than soaking it in water. It's perfectly possible that this is an old protestor's tale, but it does seem to be evidence-based at least in the case of the Black Cross Health Collective, although how large their sample was and their testing methodology is unclear. The science of it is mystifying to me, as well - it may just be that the acrid smell of the vinegar takes the edge off the smell of the spray, or its acridity helps to dry out the mucous membranes... But IANAbiologist.
posted by running order squabble fest at 11:01 AM on November 21, 2011


I wonder if vaseline would at least minimize skin irritation? (preventatively I mean)
posted by ian1977 at 11:42 AM on November 21, 2011 [2 favorites]


It seems pretty clear at this point that the overly-violent tactics by police across the country have been effective in shifting the dialogue from income inequality to police brutality, which can easily be dealt with by firing the few insignificant people (i.e Katehis and Pikes) "responsible." Remarkable, really, how quickly that happened.
posted by one_bean at 11:49 AM on November 21, 2011 [2 favorites]


I wonder if vaseline would at least minimize skin irritation? (preventatively I mean)

Well, a barrier's a barrier. There are easier/more effective ways though, and you won't have to explain why you're covered in vaseline to people on the internet.
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 11:54 AM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


I wonder if vaseline would at least minimize skin irritation? (preventatively I mean)

My thoughts as well. It would also make it, if applied to the arms incredibly difficult for the police to get a grip, but man, what a mess it would make and wonder if a thin layer of mineral oil might not be just as effective.
posted by Skygazer at 11:55 AM on November 21, 2011


Bear in mind that capsaicin is quite hydrophobic, and (according to wikipedia) suspended in propylene glycol/water (kinda/sorta like soapy water, but with a burning feeling instead of bubbles).

Capsaicin loves fat, and mineral oil/vaseline would be no different. Vaseline is thick enough that the capsaicin probably wouldn't penetrate through to the skin, but if you cover yourself in mineral oil I expect things are going to hurt after a moment or two.
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 12:06 PM on November 21, 2011


It seems pretty clear at this point that the overly-violent tactics by police across the country have been effective in shifting the dialogue from income inequality to police brutality, which can easily be dealt with by firing the few insignificant people (i.e Katehis and Pikes) "responsible." Remarkable, really, how quickly that happened.

I wonder if there are many who've received injuries under police brutality or who've had valuable items destroyed by the police who'd be willing to present what has been done to them -- with the message that this is nothing next to the hundreds of billions worth of fraud on Wall Street that no one's gone to jail for.

Or next to the corrupt campaign finance system. Or the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

I don't blame anyone though if personal injury takes first place in their minds.
posted by Anything at 12:11 PM on November 21, 2011


There's topical cremes I've seen at the drug store that have Capsaicin as the active ingredient, for arthritis, much like Ben Gay, and I wonder if applying that proactively might not be a little tolerable exposure and the medium/cream it is in might not be formulated to act both as a barrier and a time release agent giving enough time to get the spray off, and also allowing it to work with water as cleanser?

That would be my best bet. A little advance capascin exposure, to make yourself immune from the burn of the weapon grade stuff...

with petroleum jelly around the nostrils and mouth and a bandana and a hat. Goggles not recommended because it is an invitation to get sprayed.
posted by Skygazer at 12:22 PM on November 21, 2011


It seems pretty clear at this point that the overly-violent tactics by police across the country have been effective in shifting the dialogue from income inequality to police brutality...

Well the police tactics are a tool used to help enforce income inequity, so it needs to be dealt with as part of a means to an end. Another tool would be corporate money in politics. Etc.

It's not an either-or thing. The details must be addressed and resolved as part of the big picture solution.
posted by LordSludge at 12:28 PM on November 21, 2011 [3 favorites]


I don't know of anyone who's been on the receiving end *who hasn't been doing that*, Anything.

sheesh.
posted by stagewhisper at 12:28 PM on November 21, 2011


stagewhisper, you must follow them closer than I do because I have not seen that specific message presented anywhere publicly.

I know many keep on protesting on Wall Street issues, but that's not the same as highlighting the comparison.

And it wouldn't surprise me at all if most of them believe what I suggested but I have not seen it in the discussion.
posted by Anything at 12:42 PM on November 21, 2011


I'm not following "them", Anything. I *am* "them".

Just because mainstream media hasn't been broadcasting the message doesn't mean it hasn't been stated. I take it you are not in the U.S. or involved in of any of the occupations?
posted by stagewhisper at 12:56 PM on November 21, 2011 [3 favorites]


I didn't say anything about mainstream media.

Yes, Finland, not US.
posted by Anything at 1:01 PM on November 21, 2011


I wonder if Gloves in a Bottle would work.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:28 PM on November 21, 2011


stagewhisper (or others), do you have links to blog posts or videos or stuff on the subject?
posted by Anything at 1:39 PM on November 21, 2011


How's this for a crowd chant:

The leaders are lost in lust
The leaders are lost in lust
the leaders are lost in lust
the leaders are lost in lust


...then you could substitute "fear", or "hate" or any one syllable word as the last word as needed.
posted by eggtooth at 2:30 PM on November 21, 2011


i can't confirm anything happening, but ustream and twitter are blowing up with reports that the nypd is arresting students at baruch college in manhattan.
posted by qnarf at 3:22 PM on November 21, 2011


video starting to come out of arrests at baruch:
link (facebook)
baruch is trending on twitter, and you can also follow the livestream here.
posted by qnarf at 3:41 PM on November 21, 2011


baruch is trending on twitter

don't worry im sure that will be rectified soon.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:53 PM on November 21, 2011 [2 favorites]


Reports on Twitter of students being beaten at CUNY, and also of students dropping books off a balcony onto the arresting officers. Sounds like a clusterfuck all around. I've yet to see any video that conveys anything other than "Many people are screaming about something."
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:33 PM on November 21, 2011


same here, nebula, though there's word circulating that at least one journalist was roughly treated by the cops.
posted by qnarf at 4:39 PM on November 21, 2011


It occurs to me that part of the power of the Davis videos is just that they're so ... cinematic. I mean, clear line of sight, decent framing, everything that happens happens right on camera, there's very little distracting action. It's what the faked-for-Hollywood version of chaotic protest footage would look like.

Of course I'm not calling it fake. Just anomalous, in that everything was so calm and controlled right up until the attack, and the perps were so deliberately obvious about what they were doing.

I wonder if the depressingly common blurry-and-ambiguous footage of police brutality ("See, if you slow the video way down, right here that cop in the background kicks someone in the ribs, though admittedly you can't see the moment of impact because there's a sign in the way...") will have more credibility with yer average voter now that there's a really unambiguous recent example on the record.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:54 PM on November 21, 2011


That is, I wonder whether the message people take away from this is going to be "Davis was an anomaly — normally police only use violence when it's absolutely necessary," or whether it's going to be "Davis was an anomaly — normally, guys who are about to commit an atrocity don't do you the favor of posing for the cameras first."

I know which one I believe. The question is which one The Average Voter will come to believe.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:00 PM on November 21, 2011


I think it's because the police, like many politicians, haven't grokked that cameras are everywhere, and everything can be recorded. Technology is imposing accountability in many areas where people had become accustomed to acting with impunity.
posted by ambrosia at 5:08 PM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


nebulawindphone - That is, I wonder whether the message people take away from this is going to be "Davis was an anomaly — normally police only use violence when it's absolutely necessary," or whether it's going to be "Davis was an anomaly — normally, guys who are about to commit an atrocity don't do you the favor of posing for the cameras first."

I know which one I believe. The question is which one The Average Voter will come to believe.


OWS is the first large protest of its kind that is in an era of cameras everywhere. Video is being created all of the time that can be shared almost immediately and without going through a funnel of editors. I'm thinking the odds are that the Davis video won't be the last. There will be a million more of the blurry "was that the moment he hit hit him?" videos, but based on the odds a few of them are going to be as nicely framed as the Davis one.
posted by Defenestrator at 5:24 PM on November 21, 2011 [1 favorite]


and also of students dropping books off a balcony onto the arresting officers.

I hope none of them had anybodies names in 'em.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 5:35 PM on November 21, 2011


I think it's because the police, like many politicians, haven't grokked that cameras are everywhere, and everything can be recorded.

See, I feel like Pike knew exactly what he was doing. He didn't lose his cool and temporarily forget about the cameras. He was posing for the damn cameras — as if he were onstage, performing the role of Vicious Bully.

I agree with you that most of the violence we've seen on film can be chalked up to, you know, "Oh crap, I got angry and distracted and forgot it's not 1999 anymore." But that one seems different, though I'm still struggling to put my finger on the difference.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:44 PM on November 21, 2011 [4 favorites]


Dear UCD - Here in Madison - the Police show how you do it right.

That said - I know it's been mentioned in the thread a little, but... It makes me sad that the focus has now shifted from the 1% to the Blue Faction of the 99% who enable and work for the 1%.

It's important to remember that they do work for the ruling elite, but we have to keep our eyes on the prize.

We don't just have tents, we're building fucking hoop houses out of metal and wood!

Also: DB Pedersen is a talented Local Musician
posted by symbioid at 7:57 PM on November 21, 2011


There is no way the attention of unemployed protestors has been shifted away from their own personal lack of employment, symbioid, i.e. how financial inequality impacts them. If anything, this simply earns them more ears, and helps raise the cash for winter camping.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:09 PM on November 21, 2011


more from baruch.
best i can tell, at about 3:50, the cops rush the kids without provocation.
posted by qnarf at 9:32 PM on November 21, 2011 [3 favorites]


I'm really glad to see the press starting to call this "the 99% movement" not "the occupy movement." If it's about economic fairness, we win; if it's about people sleeping in public places, we lose.
posted by msalt at 10:39 PM on November 21, 2011 [4 favorites]


nebulawindphone: He was posing for the damn cameras — as if he were onstage, performing the role of Vicious Bully.

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic comes up with this possible explanation:
He's a guy who did the wrong thing after administrators forced he and his colleagues out among the students, equipped in such a way that they'd either end up looking like brutes or fools. Put a group of officers in that position and at least one of them will usually act like a brute, figuring it's better than being laughed at and looking powerless.
Reminds me of that joke about the Tea Partier and the union guy fighting over the one cookie left, after the fatcat CEO took all the other cookies. Only with different 99%ers: cop vs non-cop citizen, and the fatcat behind the curtain whispering to the cop, "You gonna let them make a fool outta you? Protect your cookie crumbs! Here, military grade weapons for defending yourself against perceived threats!"
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 1:48 AM on November 22, 2011 [2 favorites]


The Stranger is reporting that Jennifer Fox, who was assaulted and pepper sprayed by police in Seattle, says she has miscarried as a result of her handling by police.

The comments section, predictably, blames her for "protesting while pregnant".
posted by anastasiav at 8:05 AM on November 22, 2011


Megyn Kelly explains pepper spray to Bill O'Reilly on Fox News: "It's a food product, essentially."
posted by argonauta at 8:49 AM on November 22, 2011


No one who spells thier name like that is allowed to have an opinion on anything.
posted by The Whelk at 8:53 AM on November 22, 2011 [3 favorites]


For some damn reason I read her name as Megan Mullally and I was like WHAT THE FUCK
posted by desjardins at 9:08 AM on November 22, 2011 [1 favorite]


Well, at least that resolves the argument about whether it's a chemical agent or a chemical weapon. It's a food product. Like a falafel.
posted by running order squabble fest at 9:51 AM on November 22, 2011 [6 favorites]


Megyn Kelly explains yt pepper spray to Bill O'Reilly on Fox News

Worth watching for the cognitive dissonance about free speech/assembly: "And you can do that -- it's very American -- but it may also be against the law." For Fox, it always comes back to obeying. "It was on the Chancellor's orders!"

For more cognitive dissonance, and I wish I had the time for a real breakdown, look at this NY Post (Murdoch/News Corp.) story on one of the OWS "leaders" taking an expensive lower Manhattan hotel room for at least a couple of nights, even though he paid for it himself -- but wait, paying for it himself is also bad! OWS attracts dirty homeless people, but staying in a hotel room is escaping the dirty homeless people! OWS is all about people without jobs, but one of them has a job, so he shouldn't be part of them or listened to by them! Etc. For me, one of the virtues of the movement is, in fact, this inability to get a consistent negative frame around it.
posted by dhartung at 10:52 AM on November 22, 2011 [9 favorites]


I understand all of what you are saying, running order squabble fest. So my question is completely and totally about this one aspect:

multiple sources say that soaking the bandana in vinegar is more effective than soaking it in water.

I see that they say it, but I don't see any substantiated justification for saying it other than self-reported experience. And it might be absolutely true, but I would like to understand why. I don't see any evidence in the Black Cross Health Collective assertions, either. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong page, so if you have a citation that explains exactly what it is supposed to do that is superior to water and why, or has even tested the two side by side, I'd be interested.

The science of it is mystifying to me, as well - it may just be that the acrid smell of the vinegar takes the edge off the smell of the spray, or its acridity helps to dry out the mucous membranes... But IANAbiologist.


I can believe the smell just takes the edge off, maybe by merely confusing the receptors, but I don't think acid dries out mucous membranes, I think it stimulates them to secrete more liquid, as when you put a lemon wedge in your mouth. And then, over time it can cause burning, which it would seem would just make you more vulnerable to other irritants in the air.

This is admittedly a total derail, I'm just curious as to how these things come to enter folk practice.
posted by Miko at 10:57 AM on November 22, 2011




Well, at least that resolves the argument about whether it's a chemical agent or a chemical weapon. It's a food product. Like a falafel.

The Falafel Cannon. Coming soon to a free speech zone near you.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:32 PM on November 22, 2011 [1 favorite]


Obama gets mic checked
posted by indubitable at 2:55 PM on November 22, 2011 [5 favorites]


great thread. i know people say 'mefi doesn't do news well' but i disagree. when something big happens i'm always sure to check here, as the discussion and information presented in these comments are the best and sometimes only way to really get the whole picture. i can't stress enough how much of a treasure this is.

i do have to comment on the discussion re: Wisconsin, though. it's been said here, and even by people like Tom Morello, that this was just a union thing, that it was top-down, and that it's politics-as-usual with the grassroots backlash taking the form of recalls. i wanna set the record straight.

first off, although the attack on collective bargaining was aimed at the public unions, it wasn't the only 'tool' the repubs were wielding. once we Wisconsinites all got a good look at their 'budget repair bill', and saw the attacks on our environment, our municipalities, our schools, our elderly and disabled, our vets, we knew they were coming hard, fast and heavy for everything. at that point it was no longer about union vs non-union or public vs private sector, because it was an attack against all citizens of this state in order to reward the wealthy backers who had put these goons in office (99% vs 1%, anyone ?).

the grassroots movement here in WI has drawn a lot of people out of their shells, from all political stripes and walks of life -- public, private, union, non-union, left, right, independent, everybody. i'm not in a union, i've never ever been involved in anything like this before...but i'm sure as hell involved now. i hope it's not too late, and i'm sorry i didn't get involved sooner, but i feel the need to work to fix this all the same. it's no less than our future and our world at stake.

and at every turn they've tried to silence dissent -- meetings closed to the public or announced at the last second; meeting rooms too small for anyone to fit into; threats, intimidation, lies, misinformation, suppression; fake primary candidates; redistricting; changing the laws and the rules to fit their version of the game; rampant corruption and cronyism; power-grabs; massive amounts of corporate cash into dirty ads; destruction of property ...no dirty trick's gone unused or been too extreme for them. and so it's in all of our best interests to fight this.

the way the tea-party repubs are running things now is NOT the way it's supposed to be in WI. we have always valued respect, fairness, compromise, cooperation between people from either 'side'. right now that's being threatened, uprooted, destroyed -- in a quick, dirty and brutal way. but there are many ways to fight back.

we can work within the system -- recalls, ad campaigns, door-to-door, working with candidates -- and we can work outside of it also -- through community-building actions. and we've been doing both. the little local group i joined in March of this year, that only got its start in March, has done all of these things. we cleaned up parks. we protested. we had a concert on the square and registered voters and informed them of the shitty new voter id law. we're building a network of citizens and keeping them informed of things they won't see on cnn, the nightly news, or in the local rag. we're pushing 'buy local'. we've met with state politicians who sat across from us on the couch, listening intently, because they're so glad that everyday people are involved again, and they want to do the right thing by us. we're encouraging and supporting people to get involved on the ground floor, and on all kinds of levels within both the community and politics. and we're recalling Scott Walker and some of the state senators who support this extreme agenda. and people are talking, and acting...more so than ever before.

and to top it all off, we've collectively built this awesome community of new friends and neighbors, that we can share with, laugh with, cry with, rely on when things get rough. that transcends 'politics-as-usual'. and it's how we take our communities back, our states back, and our country back, and show the people at the top that we are many, we are united and we have the *real* power. no matter what you think of occupy / 99% / whatever you call it, try to see the larger picture. this is calling out and exposing the lies and hypocrisy and the inequality. this is forward momentum. we can get bogged down in the details, arguing over methods or ideologies and splitting hairs (which is what the 1% wants and is actively encouraging in order to defeat us), or we can grab a corner and start lifting...
posted by g.i.r. at 7:57 AM on November 23, 2011 [14 favorites]


less than 20% of the People's Library recovered.

Guess who's all kinds of angry again!
posted by The Whelk at 8:05 AM on November 23, 2011 [2 favorites]


Wait, who said Wisconsin was a top-down movement? You obviously don't live here.
posted by desjardins at 8:27 AM on November 23, 2011


That might not have even been the NYPD.... could have been the CIA.
posted by empath at 8:46 AM on November 23, 2011



Wait, who said Wisconsin was a top-down movement? You obviously don't live here.
posted by desjardins at 10:27 AM on November 23 [+] [!]


of all people, tom morello said that. i think he said it on 'countdown', iirc. i nearly died. i can't find any text of it and i can't watch videos where i'm at right now...
posted by g.i.r. at 8:49 AM on November 23, 2011


another thing tom morello said, when he came back to madison (labor day, i think) was 'the next time you have 250,000 people in one place, grab the wheel and steer things in the direction you want them to go !' ...but that's overlooking what really took place and how.

for a lot of people in WI, protests are (or were, at least) a thing that happens in other countries. we lead pretty quiet lives. and so when this happened, it was so outrageous that it drew people out from all over -- farmers drove their tractors around the capitol, fer chrissakes -- but it was almost like we weren't quite sure exactly what to do. many of us were starving for direction, for leadership. it was like 'we're here, we're mad (but positive), we're fired up, we're ready to act...lead us !' ...but no real leadership was forthcoming. some actors came and spoke, some other famous types, but still no leadership or direction really took shape from so-called 'leaders'. by all accounts, the Dems and the unions were unorganized, befuddled, and didn't know what to do or how to handle it. so you saw people take matters into their own hands. inside the capitol itself, that took place right away. but for the rest of the once-sleepy state, things grew more slowly and organically...but surely.

so that statement was kinda some 'hindsight-is-20/20' on tom's part...
posted by g.i.r. at 9:09 AM on November 23, 2011


Hm, I guess. I was there in February and March and there were all kinds of groups, from the General Strike folks to people handing out Communist newspapers to Capitol "occupiers" to firefighters and teachers. I still think the message was pretty clear: Hey Legislature, Listen To Us! And very soon it became "you're not listening to us, so we're recalling your asses and voting for people who do." I saw people registering voters from Day One. So, to say there was no direction or leadership is kind of disingenuous and sounds like what people say about OWS.

Side note: I'm really curious about how many Occupiers saw Michael Moore's speech at the Wisconsin Capitol. It was more about income inequality than specific events in Wisconsin and was a clear harbinger of what was to come. "By [Corporate America] trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement -- a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us."
posted by desjardins at 9:25 AM on November 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


desjardins -- please don't misunderstand me. there were many shades of grey then, as there are now. a lot of us drove for hours and showed up in madison with no prompt other than some unexplainable feeling that we needed to be there, with no pretext for this type of thing and no real understanding of where it would go and who would lead us there. we come from bumfuck nowhere, the sticks, where nothing happens and no one speaks up. i'm not slamming the movement as it stood and as it unfolded, but rather saying that it was a reactive and not proactive thing, an auto-reflex, on many levels. an awakening. and when you wake to something unexpectedly there is confusion. i'm not saying that's bad, just that it is what it is.

yeah, there were a lot of people going around handing stuff out, and standing on statue footings and walls and calling out to people, but when these other people -- these 'leaders' from the establishment or actors or whatever (not the everyday people, mind you...i mean the jesse jacksons and the susan sarandons and the fab 14 and ed show and whoever) -- would get up and speak, it was like 'wait, what ? i'm glad you agree with how bad this is, but what the fuck do we *DO* ?' a lot of us were expecting to be led in some way, by some 'legitimate' persons or entities, and in some defined direction....and when that didn't happen, *then* we took the wheel. that's good, and i'm very glad it happened that way. but to say that we didn't use the full force of that 250k of bodies -- *that's* somewhat disingenuous, and short-sighted. it was all so sudden and unexpected that i'm not sure everybody knew what to do with this new-found power and solidarity. and that's not a bad thing either. going through these growing pains is how we find ourselves, and each other, and rebuild these bridges, and use these experiences and our past experience to come up with the ideas and the plans to fix this shit.
posted by g.i.r. at 9:46 AM on November 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


What are you talking about? The truck was clearly taken by the NYPD.

They would never be so blatant. I'm almost certain that what happened was that it was (probably allowed to be) stolen.

The city is notorious for towing scams. Basically, you call AAA, AAA dispatches someone, and while they are getting to you -- because the good guys are always backed up -- somebody out there is listening to the scanner and shows up, tells you he's from AAA (maybe an actual company name or YP listing), and hauls you to a garage where he gets a good kickback, afterward charging you an arm and a leg.

Now, let's say a notice goes out on the scanner that a fully-laden panel truck is sitting at a curb, its driver in police custody....

From the cops' point of view, they have almost complete deniability.

As for Madison, the extent to which those protests appeared spontaneous or organized may depend on your personal six degrees of separation to a union. My family went up there on our own, but many people we knew went up on provided buses or otherwise hooked up with their labor brethren, often with prefab signs and organized marches. I believe it's fair to say that the initial protest seed was planted by the teaching assistants' union, who remained key schedulers and liaisons throughout the entire thing, and it was the fact that there was a bottom-up anger that motivated the unions to make this a conscious effort, but of course there were also many people who participated wholly on their own. I don't think that without the latter there would have been a real labor cast to this -- many of the leaders made initial statements about Walker's proposals that were defeatist or conciliatory; but without the labor push, the Saturday rallies especially would not have been as well attended or cohesive. I know the times I was there the speakers were largely union functionaries (as opposed to Susan Sarandon) with very well-trod messages.
posted by dhartung at 11:15 AM on November 23, 2011


(oh the posters I did for OWS with Molly Crabapple are now a part of OCCUPY DESIGN
)
posted by The Whelk at 11:17 AM on November 23, 2011 [4 favorites]


Occupy Design rocks! Thanks Whelk!
posted by jeffburdges at 11:54 AM on November 23, 2011


dhartung --

for sure, local unions up here sent a few buses on saturdays, but to what end ? just for numbers ? once i was there, i realized that the vast numbers were a powerful message in and of itself, but i guess i was left wanting for more. others i've talked to felt the same. i hoped there'd be something in the way of a goal that would present itself, and some means to get there, and someone to lead us there, because i felt like we needed to not just rally but to SURGE forward...somewhere, somehow. in my newfound, confused and naive state of awakening this was what i hoped i'd see.

that it didn't happen was initially disappointing, but it forced me to realize that the answer was still in that group of ordinary people, and in me, and not in some puffed-up speaker with his 'well-trod message' full of stale rhetoric that hadn't worked on the disillusioned masses before and probably wouldn't work now. this realization amongst us is what drove us to go back to our little towns and begin to do the things we're doing. i'm not trying to brag...i'm telling you this is like a whole new world for so many of us, a whole new state of consciousness, coming to realize that we can make a difference without or in spite of those ineffective Dems and unions...and we're still learning how to move around in this new world. it's unprecedented for us and for our communities as well. it's all new and it's a huge third-eye-opener and it's awesome !

i've been trying to tie all this to the occupy movement, and probably failing. so what i'll say now is this : we will not all agree. our perceptions of events are different. people from all over are still asleep, or just waking up, while some of us are much further down the path. we come from different places and mindsets that might be truly alien to one another. our ideas on exactly how to fix things will not be the same. we may want to work within the system, or outside of it, or break it -- and any one of those things will turn some of us off or even frighten some of us. but...we are all in the same boat here, as the 99%. the 53%, the tea-party, the unemployed, the employed, the homeless, the anarchists, the housewives, all of us. our fate is in each others' hands. to sit here and squabble amongst ourselves over the whys and hows is what the 1% wants and needs in order to hold onto power and keep us down. let's decide to stand together as one... and then as individuals or smaller groups, let's work in the ways we know how, in the ways we understand and can be effective. no one way is right or wrong, no one's perception is right or wrong, no one's lack of understanding or involvement is cause for attack or ridicule. let's overcome all that band together and push forward !
posted by g.i.r. at 11:54 AM on November 23, 2011




Obviously his cat disagrees with him.
posted by desjardins at 1:03 PM on November 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


(symbioid: I know I've seen different projects like this copters on youtube before - but I don't know what it takes to make one, nor how long they can stay afloat, etc...

$300-$400 in parts is typical, and 5-15 minutes of flight time for a copter, though I think that for protest monitoring you could build something that could perch (e.g.) for a longer time. If it's knocked down and you can recover the pieces, you can probably recover most of the build cost. Simple autonomy and live video downlink are common. As far as the FAA's concerned they're not especially illegal if the operator has a direct line-of-sight to the copter at all times— flying it by FPV is against the rules, though it's what a lot of people do. Local city ordinances are often more restrictive. Model copters can be dangerous despite their small size.)

posted by hattifattener at 1:13 PM on November 23, 2011


From the Ai Weiwei link:

I already said my knowledge of "Occupy Wallstreet (sic)" is limited because in china we don't have free flow information, we don't have CNN, Twitter, Youtube or Facebook. Therefore our knowledge about it is very limited. Forgive me if what I said is not appropriate. If I was in N.Y., I would be part of it.

The headline could just as easily read "Ai Weiwei on OWS: "If I was in N.Y., I would be part of it."

Or maybe "Ai Weiwei doesn't know a whole lot about OWS, but doesn't like it."
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:17 PM on November 23, 2011 [3 favorites]


....and "he doesn't like it" would be the wrong choice of words.

Indeed, he doesn't really call it "primitive" and "hopeless" - he says "the movement is still in a primitive form" and "you can see the kind of hopeless struggle because it seems to have no structure to get the messages across."

The headline chosen by The Atlantic, to whit, is disingenuous. When you read it, he admits he doesn't actually know a whole lot about OWS.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:37 PM on November 23, 2011 [8 favorites]


From the Occupy Design page: That Molly Crabapple's a pretty fine artist.
posted by benito.strauss at 1:56 PM on November 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


FROM TWITTER:

WikileaksTruck Art Superheroes

An OWS sympathizer judge just dropped all of my parking tickets. They say the truck is at pier 76 impound. On my way. Great Day!

posted by The Whelk at 4:56 PM on November 23, 2011 [4 favorites]


finnb: This would be a great hackerspace project.

symbioid: What if hackspaces started building these things

It is being discussed: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackupy/OccuCopter :)

There is also a thread about this on the noisebridge-discuss list.

Given the catastrophic failure modes intrinsic to helicopters, ITSM blimps are probably a better route.
posted by finite at 6:06 PM on November 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


It is being discussed: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackupy/OccuCopter :)

Be aware that my local Occupation is participating in a joint statewide Direct Action against a local defense contractor building a quadrotor UAV for Homeland Security surveillance. I personally do not condone the building of hacker UAVs, since this gives legitimacy to government UAVs.

There are a lot of problems at the edges of this hackerspace. My publisher did a project where they flew a helium balloon up to 89 kilometers and then it dropped a paper airplane and recovered it. Now they want to do it again, but bigger. They're designing a rockoon, a balloon carrying a rocket propelled aircraft, with GPS guided flight system to fly it back home. They're adapting an open source model aircraft flight controller software to this purpose. I'm trying to tell them this is a really bad idea, they don't realize they're building a cruise missile.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:26 PM on November 23, 2011 [2 favorites]


charlie don't surf, I applaud you paying attention to your conscience, but I think that genie has been out of the bottle for quite some time.
posted by hattifattener at 8:09 PM on November 23, 2011


charlie don't surf, I applaud you paying attention to your conscience, but I think that genie has been out of the bottle for quite some time.

Yes, perhaps a determined engineering effort could have built a GPS guided UAV, even using light general aviation aircraft, any time in the last couple of decades. But now you can buy it off the shelf. I want you to consider this:

This Arduino system ($250) is basically the same as this military avionics system (probably $250k).

So this Arducopter hobbyist kit that costs a few hundred bucks becomes a military and Homeland Security project for a few hundred million bucks. And they got a tax break from the state and city to build the factory.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:58 PM on November 23, 2011 [4 favorites]


A Very Zuccotti Thanksgiving
posted by Miko at 4:40 AM on November 24, 2011 [2 favorites]


A priori, UAVs sound less useful than more numerous smaller cameras among protestors, including some infrared cameras.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:44 AM on November 24, 2011


Time Magazine. One of these things is not like the other ...
posted by stagewhisper at 10:03 PM on November 25, 2011 [9 favorites]






"God, what a day! I've been clubbing strikers for eight hours!" Full set from The Ruling Clawss by John Redfield, 1935, here.
posted by Houstonian at 6:56 PM on November 26, 2011 [3 favorites]


"God, what a day! I've been clubbing strikers for eight hours!" Full set from The Ruling Clawss by John Redfield, 1935, here.

"John" Redfield? No.

It's The Ruling Clawss by A. Redfield, the pseudonym used by New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hoff in the Communist newspapers The Daily Worker and New Masses. Source.

As biting and relevant as ever.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:55 PM on November 26, 2011 [4 favorites]


What OWS Really Want
posted by Xurando at 12:15 PM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]


WikiLeaks Truck Found
posted by jeffburdges at 1:05 PM on November 27, 2011 [1 favorite]


The truck, he says, was never taken to impound after the arrest. Instead, Police "left it in a bus spot and let it collect tickets until it got towed".

Wow. I have a funny feeling I was half right: they wanted it to get stripped.

The NYC parking enforcement guys are incredibly efficient, at least in Manhattan (personal experience). As I was leaving the pier [yelp reviews] with my car, an unfortunate pedestrian (I had taken a cab) making his way up the driveway was taunted by a tow truck crew, "You don't mess with the bad-ass browns" (their uniforms are/were all brown). I have seen them pull up to a vehicle, and 90 seconds later have it in tow and underway.
posted by dhartung at 7:48 AM on November 28, 2011


Interesting article by Alex Klein about how the Occupation in Zuccotti park was organized.
posted by Kattullus at 8:14 AM on November 28, 2011 [3 favorites]


Walked by the Wikileaks truck this morning while on my way to teach in Newark. There are a few tents set up there in Military park and a smattering of signs. Moving a small permanent location for OWS to Newark to join them isn't a bad idea. Mayor Cory Booker has been receptive so far, as expected since he once spent a 10 day fast camped out next to some dilapidated housing projects and also lived in a camper for a while that he parked on different corners of the city. I'd like to think he's still in touch enough with his roots that he'd not only allow the movement to gather in his city, but would engage in ongoing conversations in a participatory way should a robust GA start forming there.
posted by stagewhisper at 11:53 AM on November 28, 2011 [1 favorite]


_newjournalist Patrick deHahn
Protester says 50-60 #ows protesters are in the penned in area at 7th and 53rd. #dinnerwithbarack


Sounds like they have the protesters surrounded and won't let them out until Obama leaves? So far it doesn't sound like anyone has been arrested, but no one has been allowed to leave.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 6:57 PM on November 30, 2011


What do we want?
CLEAN DISHES!
When do we want them?
NOW!
(SLYT)

The Boston PD confiscated Occupy Boston's sink today.

Actually, OB was challenged by the city to improve hygiene in the camp. So, they had a sink delivered. Which the BPD promptly confiscated as 'contraband'. This is all related to OB's win in court today to avoid eviction until at least December 15th. (link to Bosotn Phoenix coverage of today's hearing.)
posted by anastasiav at 10:24 PM on December 1, 2011 [4 favorites]


... and here's a little more (not about the sink specifically) in a pretty balanced editorial from The Phoenix.
posted by anastasiav at 10:29 PM on December 1, 2011


Occupy Tampa had 29 arrests last night, the biggest number yet. No riot gear or tear gas or pepper spray, thankfully.

Of special interest is Daiquiri Jones who's been repeatedly singled out by TPD for, as near as we can tell, Protesting While Black. A few days ago a cop approached him, grabbed him by the arm, pulled him off balance, and called the ensuing stumble 'battery on a law enforcement officer.' I'm hoping the legal team gets somebody good on this.
posted by cmyk at 8:59 AM on December 2, 2011 [3 favorites]


Philip Glass At Occupy Wall Street Protest
From an Occupy Wall Street protest at Lincoln Center, on Dec. 1, 2011. A performance of Philip Glass's Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera has just ended, and in the first three minutes of the video protesters try to get operagoers to ignore the police, walk down the steps, and join the demonstration. Then, after 3:00, Glass recites the closing lines of his opera, which come from the Bhagavad-Gita: "When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again."
posted by ericb at 11:49 AM on December 3, 2011 [2 favorites]


Really great story from The Nation about the challenges of keeping Occupy Boston a safe space.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:55 AM on December 4, 2011 [4 favorites]


Photos from today's Occupy Homes action in East New York. Occupy Our Homes interventions took place across the country. Leaked Bank of America memo in anticipation of the action.
posted by stagewhisper at 2:24 PM on December 6, 2011 [4 favorites]


Got the following email at work in DC (very slightly modified to remove identifying info):

Good Afternoon,

As you are probably aware, activities related to the Occupy movement have increased around the country; including several arrests here in McPherson Square over the weekend. It has been brought to our attention by the corporate offices of our security guard vendors (via local law enforcement) that this week has been designated by the movement to be a week of heightened presence and civil disobedience. This has been evidenced in the commuting challenges experienced this week as you get closer to the remaining encampments. We have been informed that WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 7th is expected to be a high alert protest day, where the stated goal of the organization is to disrupt downtown office life by occupying lobbies, sidewalks and causing general disturbances. Our proximity to K Street (their target area) makes these plans of heightened concern to us.

Although our current plan is to maintain normal “open” perimeter door access, all tenants should plan to have their access keys on them. If protest activity gets close to the building or reaches the building we most likely will secure the building perimeter.

We appreciate your cooperation in this matter. We understand this may be a disruption to your business day; however safety is of tantamount importance and the property company wants to do all we can to ensure our buildings are safe, secure environments at all times.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact our office.


Can anyone point me to anything that indicates the "stated goal of the organization is to disrupt downtown office life by occupying lobbies, sidewalks and causing general disturbances"? I can't find anything like that in some quick searches online, but maybe I'm using the wrong keywords. Or maybe it's bullshit?
posted by inigo2 at 6:32 PM on December 6, 2011 [2 favorites]


I will hopefully be divesting from Wells Fargo Friday and I suggest you do the same.
posted by fuq at 7:55 PM on December 6, 2011


Can anyone point me to anything that indicates the "stated goal of the organization is to disrupt downtown office life by occupying lobbies, sidewalks and causing general disturbances"?
posted by inigo2


Well, there's this -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45567182/ns/local_news-washington_dc/#.Tt7rpxzvKnQ - which might not be the perfect source, but the agenda seems to be "Swarm lobbying offices on K Street". Of course, that might be a bit different than a general "occupying lobbies" sort of thing.
posted by blaneyphoto at 8:35 PM on December 6, 2011


Actually, OB was challenged by the city to improve hygiene in the camp. So, they had a sink delivered. Which the BPD promptly confiscated as 'contraband'.

That's one perspective. A different take is that the protestors, knowing they had been told long ago that police would not allow any new construction materials to be brought into the encampment, decided to "have a sink delivered" purely as a stunt so they could claim they'd tried to sanitize the camp and been denied. They did the same thing with a winterized tent this week. Of course, one could say this interpretation was overly cynical...except that the protestors have explicitly admitted to the press that's exactly what they were doing.

It's worth noting that the reason Occupy Boston has endured is largely—maybe solely—the support of the Boston mayor. He supported them quite explicitly, and in fact while other mayors were evicting encampments he told the press that he had no similar plans, that the protest was important. They responded by basically spitting in his face. When OWS was evicted in New York and sought court action, the Boston protestors felt inspired and decided to follow that lead preemptively, suing for a restraining order against the city and trying to smear the mayor as a fascist in court and in the press.

Talk about dumb. If they had sent a contingent walking to City Hall to sit down with the mayor's staff and say, "Look, we know you can't authorize our presence but you've been great so far, and we want to talk about how both sides can avoid what happened yesterday in New York," things would look different in Boston right now. The encampment wouldn't feel like it's under a ticking clock. The mayor wouldn't be criticizing them in the press for "aiming their fire at the wrong place." He was supporting them, at potential political cost (certainly, no gain) to himself. And they kicked him in the shin.

I don't really understand the logic behind any of the court actions, anyway. They took the square illegally and proudly boasted that fact, proclaiming that unauthorized "occupation" was a vital part of their message: They weren't seeking approval or participation from the system. Now suddenly they want to wrap themselves in legal entitlement. I guess the implication is that the executives are part of the 1%, the judiciary is part of the 99%...and the legislators? Well, to quote the mayor, "Mayors can’t do much about what they’re talking about. It’s the Congress and the Senate but nobody’s talking to them at all."
posted by red clover at 9:50 PM on December 6, 2011 [4 favorites]


"They responded by basically spitting in his face. When OWS was evicted in New York and sought court action, the Boston protestors felt inspired and decided to follow that lead preemptively, suing for a restraining order against the city and trying to smear the mayor as a fascist in court and in the press."

"Talk about dumb. ... The mayor wouldn't be criticizing them in the press for "aiming their fire at the wrong place." He was supporting them, at potential political cost (certainly, no gain) to himself. And they kicked him in the shin."

Between this kind of stuff and a recent metatalk thread about OWS that accuses OWS supporters of ramming their opinions down MetaFilter's collective throat, I'm seeing a trend toward describing non-violent protests using the most physically violent of metaphors. I wonder what that's about.
posted by stagewhisper at 10:16 PM on December 6, 2011 [1 favorite]


Well, to quote the mayor, "Mayors can’t do much about what they’re talking about. It’s the Congress and the Senate but nobody’s talking to them at all."

Psst! Hey, Mayor! That "nobody" includes you. In fact, since you represent the people of your municipality, that "nobody" is you. You have more clout than any Joe Schmoe -- or any thousand Joe Schmoes with placards. So, uh, hey, maybe make some calls or something?
posted by Sys Rq at 10:54 PM on December 6, 2011 [2 favorites]


It's a bit like characterizing Obama's lack of support for something as 'throwing [proponents] under the bus.'
posted by anigbrowl at 10:58 PM on December 6, 2011


Thanks for that link, blaneyphoto. Would still prefer to hear something from the horse's mouth, as it were, but I'm guessing that's the closest I'll get.
posted by inigo2 at 5:55 AM on December 7, 2011


Okay, found the schedule on OccupyDC's website. Yeah, that memo I got at work is huge bullshit and contains lies.
posted by inigo2 at 5:58 AM on December 7, 2011


Only tangentially related to the Occupy protests, but Scott Walker instituted a policy that require groups of more than 4 people to obtain permits and pay for police protection and cleanup. Naturally, the ACLU is involved.

I expect policies like this to spread amongst Republican governors.
posted by desjardins at 6:50 AM on December 7, 2011 [3 favorites]


Celebrities meet OWS
posted by The Whelk at 7:08 AM on December 7, 2011


Video of the family and their reoccupation of a foreclosed home in East New York.
posted by stagewhisper at 7:39 AM on December 7, 2011




Only tangentially related to the Occupy protests, but Scott Walker instituted a policy that require groups of more than 4 people to obtain permits and pay for police protection and cleanup. Naturally, the ACLU is involved.

Because tone deaf authoritarianism has worked so well for him so far...


I think this is the perfect definition of stupid. Deeply deeply and irreparably doubling down on the stupidity kind of STUPID that makes me wish someone would just give this asswipe a solid kick in the pants with boots on...

But I guess Walker should be thanked in some ways. It is his brand of stupid that has launched a thousand occupy movements across the country and the world, with many more to come in the Spring guaran-fucking-teed and strategies get perfected and brainstormed over the Winter.

It's going to be a fucking blast.


Grar...grar.
posted by Skygazer at 12:22 PM on December 7, 2011


And just as an update, Occupy Boston has been given until midnight tonight to vacate Dewey Square.

The protestors have apparently scheduled a meeting for 1 pm today, and they're Bat-signaling all supporters to show up tonight. They're also back to knocking the mayor. "I expected he would have given us a little more time, and I thought he would have been a little more gracious," said one protestor. Well...he was. He gave the protestors all the slack in the world, and they responded by going to court and to the press and arguing that he was suppressing their rights. He was taking all manner of political heat from local businesses, potentially alienating people who actually do vote and contribute because he agreed with the Occupy goals and believed the movement was important. But they got scared when OWS was evicted and they got dumb, and they decided to react as if this mayor was exactly like their stereotype of every other mayor.

It's exactly the problem that people have voiced on this website and over in MetaTalk: The tenor of the Occupy movement is that "if you're not with us 110% on every single issue and tactic, then you're the enemy," and that has turned people off the movement. People in MeTa have been skeptical of this, but here's a concrete example of it happening.

So now, less than 24 hours after a judge said on paper that the protestors "have no privilege under the First Amendment to seize and hold the land on which they sit" and may be evicted by the city, Occupy Boston is facing a midnight deadline that's their own fault.

Now—again—we'll get to see their character. They asked the court to order the city hands-off, and they expected the city to obey. (For a time, that's exactly what happened.) That was a 180-degree turn from their original tack that an illegal "occupation" was part of their message, and the lingering question was whether Occupy Boston was acting in good faith. Now we'll see.
posted by red clover at 9:52 AM on December 8, 2011


an illegal "occupation" was part of their message

You keep saying this. It's still bullshit.

The occupations are and always have been predicated on "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" as laid out in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:03 AM on December 8, 2011 [2 favorites]


That's not accurate re Occupy Boston. I can't speak to the other sites.
posted by red clover at 10:13 AM on December 8, 2011


an illegal "occupation" was part of their message

You keep saying this. It's still bullshit.

The occupations are and always have been predicated on "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" as laid out in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.


Both things can be true. I think that a lot of the legal restrictions on protesting that have arisen in recent times (here I'm thinking especially of "free speech" zones) have the effect of depriving people of the very Constitutional right which you identify.
posted by gauche at 10:15 AM on December 8, 2011


That's true. But the fact that people are being arrested does not mean the point is Hey Everybody, Let's Break The Law!!!, and seeking legal protections does not make the movement even slightly hypocritical.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:20 AM on December 8, 2011 [3 favorites]


"Well...he was. He gave the protestors all the slack in the world, and they responded by going to court and to the press and arguing that he was suppressing their rights."

I'm sorry, man, but you're full of shit on this. They went to court to defend their first amendment rights from being suppressed. And the mayor didn't give them all the slack in the world — if he did, he wouldn't be evicting them.

"It's exactly the problem that people have voiced on this website and over in MetaTalk: The tenor of the Occupy movement is that "if you're not with us 110% on every single issue and tactic, then you're the enemy," and that has turned people off the movement. People in MeTa have been skeptical of this, but here's a concrete example of it happening."

This is also bullshit. What people have been telling you again and again is that since you don't support the occupy message or tactics, there's no incentive to listen to you on your concern trolling. Your repeated hand-waving over "turning people off" is disingenuous given that you've never supported it, and these fantastic people that are being turned off either don't understand the Occupy movement or are actually against it.

"So now, less than 24 hours after a judge said on paper that the protestors "have no privilege under the First Amendment to seize and hold the land on which they sit" and may be evicted by the city, Occupy Boston is facing a midnight deadline that's their own fault."

So now, in the city that launched the American Revolution, protestors are peacefully disobeying an order that goes against the spirit of our liberal democracy. And sure, when shots were fired, there were Tories in their houses saying exactly the same nonsense you are now. But a failure of the American justice system to live up to the ideals laid out at our founding should never prevent citizens from fighting for those ideals, even against the pusillanimous vacillations of their fellow Americans who lack the heart to support them.
posted by klangklangston at 10:38 AM on December 8, 2011 [9 favorites]


I'm sorry, man, but you're full of shit on this.

You and I had this discussion in another thread already. G'day.
posted by red clover at 10:44 AM on December 8, 2011


I know you don't like being told that you're full of shit when you're full of shit; not many people do. On the other hand, noting that you're making disingenuous, incoherent misrepresentations repeatedly, full of shit is pretty accurate, and there's no real reason to treat you with kid gloves instead of just calling you out.
posted by klangklangston at 12:03 PM on December 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


But they got scared when OWS was evicted and they got dumb, and they decided to react as if this mayor was exactly like their stereotype of every other mayor.

So, uh, they started acting as though he was cracking down and evicting them...after he cracked down and evicted them?

potentially alienating people who actually do vote and contribute because he agreed with the Occupy goals

Wow. Just wow.
posted by kagredon at 12:36 PM on December 8, 2011


No, Kagredon. They (Occupy Boston) started acting as though Mayor Menino was cracking-down and evicting them when Mayor Bloomberg started cracking-down and evicting the protestors down in New York. Different places, different people.

If you recall, the protestors in New York scored a temporary victory when they sought an injunction from the court in the middle of their eviction. The protestors in Boston saw that and decided to do the same thing preemptively, to seek an injunction before the city could move to evict them. These might look like parallel moves, but they happened in very different contexts. In New York, protestors were in the process of being evicted when they went to court. By contrast, at the time when Boston protestors went to court, there was no eviction imminent and they were regularly receiving fairly vocal support from the mayor.

So it's the other way around. They began acting as if he was cracking-down and evicting them...and so he quit supporting them and began cracking-down and evicting them.
posted by red clover at 1:01 PM on December 8, 2011


Ah, got it. Sorry, I misread OWS in that first quote as referring to Occupy Boston. In their defense, it's worth noting that a whole lot of cities were being evicted within days or weeks of each other (as is evident from the links people posted in this thread), even in places where officials had previously been supportive (Bloomberg had made supportive statements, even until quite shortly before Zuccotti was evicted.) It's possible, as you say, that OB reacted poorly. I think it's also quite possible that they recognized something that could plausibly happen to them, and took steps to prevent it. It's possible that OB alienated important allies and brought this on themselves. But it's also possible that the crackdown in NY (and Toronto, and Seattle, and Davis...) is what spurred officials in Boston to take action, and OB's reaction made no difference.
posted by kagredon at 1:22 PM on December 8, 2011


The tenor of the Occupy movement is that "if you're not with us 110% on every single issue and tactic, then you're the enemy," and that has turned people off the movement.

Another thing that has turned people off the movement is people making accusations about what Occupy is/does/stands for/believes, like the one above, or the "it's all hippies", or the "everything smells like poo and trash", etc etc etc.
posted by inigo2 at 1:32 PM on December 8, 2011


I think it's also quite possible that they recognized something that could plausibly happen to them, and took steps to prevent it.

That's true. I think they could have done so more tactfully. For instance, they could have sent a contingent to City Hall. Sit down with the mayor's staff, recognize that you have differing interests (he can't authorize the occupation, and y'all ain't leaving), and talk about how to prevent what was happening in other cities. Do the guy a favor and tell some reporters about it. "Mayor Menino spoke with us today. He expressed concern and relayed some of the objections that we are hearing from business leaders, but we appreciate that he's willing to talk with us. Every city has reacted differently to our movement, and we think the dialogue happening in Boston reinforces why this is such a great, important city."

If that doesn't sound great, then honestly, even the legal approach can be done tactfully. First give City Hall a head's up and ask if you can work together. Instead of seeking a temporary injunction, see if they're willing to go into court together to schedule a hearing. More importantly, focus on the legal issues. For instance, don't use your court papers and press releases to allege police brutality. It's not relevant to the legal issue, for one thing: Whether or not you have a right to occupy Dewey Square has nothing to do with how police behaved when clearing out the second encampment on October 10. And it makes life more difficult for a mayor who's already taking flak on your behalf.

I agree that it's possible the city would have evicted the protestors regardless. (The mayor said they couldn't stay forever, he just refused to say when "forever" would come and stressed that their protest was resonant.) But that article that Horace Rumpole posted above is really interesting, about the painstaking patience that protestors exercise toward trying to work with antisocial members of their group. If they had directed that same tact toward working with the mayor's office, I think the occupation's inevitable end would have happened much differently.

And that's important, I think. First, because pretty much every other major city's occupation seems to have ended in identical fashion. It hasn't added much momentum to the movement, and maybe seeing one city's occupation resolve (or evolve) in a different fashion would be helpful. Second, I think Menino's point is apt: Every iota of energy that protestors spend arguing with mayors about the occupation is energy not spent arguing with legislators about the issues. The occupations became a distraction from the message.
posted by red clover at 2:09 PM on December 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


potentially alienating people who actually do vote and contribute because he agreed with the Occupy goals

Just unpacking this little throwaway line explicitly, it would appear that you don't believe the Occupy people "actually do vote and contribute".

Your wording really suggests, as was noted above, that you aren't really concerned at all with what the Occupy goals or tactics are, since you don't have any respect for the actual people, themselves, that are promoting them.

With that in mind, it really undermines any moral authority you may have to suggest improvements to the way they handle themselves, doesn't it? It's the very definition of "concern trolling".
posted by darkstar at 2:47 PM on December 8, 2011 [3 favorites]


Just unpacking this little throwaway line explicitly, it would appear that you don't believe the Occupy people "actually do vote and contribute".

In other words, that I think they're deadbeats? That's one way to unpack it, and it's fair. But another is simply that I was emphasizing that the mayor really was risking alienating constituents. It's one thing when your actions irk folks who live in the suburbs. They don't live in the city. That's part and parcel of being a mayor, and it happens all the time. It's not really "risky" in the same way as ignoring the objections of people actually vote on the ballots you need.

Sorry if I was unclear. "Assume good faith," though.

And to that point. I don't think I've asserted any "moral authority." Respectfully, I think you're conflating this website with an Occupy Boston General Assembly. It isn't. If I stood up at the GA and recommended something, then sure, there would be an implicit understanding that I supported the protest and that's why I was speaking up. That isn't the case here. We're just chatting on a weblog, "Monday-morning quarterbacking," and I'm participating because I find the topic interesting and I like talking about it.

I assume that's why most of us paid five bucks.
posted by red clover at 3:14 PM on December 8, 2011


Really, red clover. You've been very active in the OWS threads and have been working the whole "the protesters are selfish and ungrateful" angle from the start. Why not just come out and say you think that they are wrong, you don't stand for what they stand for, etc. and own your opinions rather than pretend you'd be in their corner if only they framed their actions and stated their beliefs in ways you find more palatable? My assumption of good faith on your part is now way past its sell date.

You've been chronically mischaracterizing the purpose of the occupations in various cities, yet you follow the threads so closely and seem so invested in analyzing every action I'm finding it difficult to believe you're simply ill-informed. There are a fair number of people here on metafilter who have been contributing information and commenting on OWS-related posts who are or have been heavily involved in OWS in the physical manifestations and actions of the movement. Your relentless negative armchair analysis of "what their real motivations are" and "what it's really about" is maddening because it feels like an attempt to attribute malevolent intentions or violent inclinations to us as a group that don't exist. In essence you are saying that a lot of us are failing to recognize that our own motivations for being involved are not altruistic (as we've convinced ourselves they are) but are actually base and cruel.

I'd imagine at this point I'm sort of feeling the same way that men on metafilter do when they are accused of publicly supporting feminist issues in order to get laid more.
posted by stagewhisper at 3:21 PM on December 8, 2011 [6 favorites]


If you recall, the protestors in New York scored a temporary victory when they sought an injunction from the court in the middle of their eviction.
And how'd that work out? If I were participating in Occupy Boston, you'd better believe I'd learn a lesson from that. The NYPD's clearly illegal ignoring the temporary restraining order is precisely what inspired me to get involved in the movement.
posted by MrMoonPie at 3:34 PM on December 8, 2011 [1 favorite]


In other words, that I think they're deadbeats? That's one way to unpack it, and it's fair.


And once you've said that, you've pretty much said all you have to say. The rest is just filler.
posted by darkstar at 3:41 PM on December 8, 2011


And once you've said that, you've pretty much said all you have to say. The rest is just filler.

You just took a quote, removed it from context, and presented it falsely as if it said the opposite of what it did, in fact, say. That's patently dishonest. You're welcome to conclude anything you like about me, but if that's your manner of response then there's not much point in my commenting further.

(Here, I'll save you the trouble: You just took a quote...and presented...what it did, in fact, say.)

My assumption of good faith on your part is now way past its sell date.

Then I'll keep my reply brief. I think you've misinterpreted a few things. (Including my participation in Occupy threads. To my recollection I've only posted in two, this and another about Oakland.) I'm sorry if you feel that I have painted you or something you care about as "base and cruel." I do have my objections to the Occupy movement, but I've tried to be level about voicing them here. First, because I know the tenor of the room. And second, because every time an issue that I care about comes up on the blue, there are dozens of comments quite explicitly saying—not intimating—that my perspectives are base and cruel. It sucks and it doesn't make me want to talk to those people. So I apologize if something I said came across that way to you.

If you change your mind about my "good faith," I'm happy to talk more. Like I said, I find the topic interesting. It's a month-old thread and we're not too far off-topic, so it seems an okay place to chat. But if you're assuming I'm coming from a place of bad faith, then there isn't much point in us trying to talk. Ironic, given the subject.
posted by red clover at 4:02 PM on December 8, 2011 [2 favorites]


Ah, I thought you were owning the idea that the Occupiers are deadbeats and don't contribute. My mistake.

Rather, it does seem, taken in larger context, that that's how you feel about them. Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, etc.

In any event, a basic moral authority to speak is probably the fundamental prerequisite to establishing any sense of "good faith" with one's interlocutor. If you are actively undermining what moral authority you may have had by casting aspersions on the folks you ostensibly are attempting to counsel on tactics "in good faith", then why in the world should anyone care what you have to say regardless of whether you spent five bucks to say it?

Hence the "concern trolling" accusation. And truthfully, you don't seem to understand the fundamental objection to "concern trolling" at all, which is that when the interlocutor has already indicated that he doesn't care about promoting the views of the folks he's counseling, then his counsel generally can be dismissed as obfuscatory and condescending BS, because the interlocutor abdicates the moral authority that allows him the courtesy of being assumed to be speaking in good faith.

But of course, if that's a misread of your particular views, take it all with a grain of salt. I'll leave it to others to decide whether it has any merit, and any further on the point would require me to take it to MeTa, and I just don't have the energy, to be honest. Peace.
posted by darkstar at 6:14 PM on December 8, 2011


You just took a quote, removed it from context, and presented it falsely as if it said the opposite of what it did, in fact, say. That's patently dishonest.

FWIW, I don't see this as darkstar being dishonest; I read your line (in the context of that whole comment) the same way darkstar did. (And I don't meant this to criticize you, just to clarify that that's how you're coming across to me.)
posted by inigo2 at 5:16 AM on December 9, 2011 [1 favorite]


darkstar, I'm really glad you ended up qualifying your 'concern trolling' statement, because it has started to look like a number of OWS proponents are in love with their impression that they can shut people up by invoking that particular fashionable catchphrase instead of having an argument.

I can hardly express how deeply I loathe that attitude.
posted by Anything at 8:29 AM on December 9, 2011 [1 favorite]






Is anyone else getting... douche chills?
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:09 PM on December 12, 2011 [2 favorites]


From the Dept. of WTF: Police use tent to cover Occupy Houston protestors (crossposted from Sailormom's comment in the UC Davis thread).
posted by Kattullus at 6:55 PM on December 12, 2011


Jesus Christ, Katullus, that's just chilling to watch.
posted by darkstar at 7:57 PM on December 12, 2011


Also in today's Fun and Games with the Police. Let's check in and see how well NYPD is doing with that whole "Let the (credentialed) press do their job" memo. Hmmm not so good.
posted by stagewhisper at 8:01 PM on December 12, 2011


And in Los Angeles, Calvin Milam, the City News Service reporter who was arrested during the OccupyLA eviction and said by LAPD to be "possibly drunk and belligerent" has retained the services of attorney Mark Geragos. Now that a video has emerged clearly showing Milam holding his press pass up as he seeks to pass through a police line, LAPD is investigating.
posted by Scram at 8:37 PM on December 12, 2011 [2 favorites]


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