#OccupyWallStreet

[hbcat]

Boarders down Broadway ...

http://yfrog.com/z/nwzeuiuj

A vid of same --

[lofter1]

Looks like the get-together was communicated via SHERED:

BROADWAY BOMB

WHEN: Saturday, October 8th @ NOON.
Riverside Park and 116th St – Manhattan.
WHAT: Push Race on Broadway Ave. in Manhattan through traffic

POST RACE BARBECUE
WHEN: Saturday, October 8th @ 2pm
WHERE: East River Park, Manhattan

AFTER PARTY – YOU DESERVE IT!
WHEN: – Saturday, Oct 8th @ 7pm
WHERE: Lucky Jacks 126 Allen Street (next to the Longboard Loft NYC) – Manhattan.

20 min. VID at SHERED and VIMEO on the history of the Broadway Bomb

[hbcat]

October 9, 2011, 11:33 AM
Artists Occupy Wall Street for a 24-Hour Show
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-24-hour-show/
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

People mill about the exhibit named “No Comment,” a show with a wide variety of politically themed art at the former building of JP Morgan & Co.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

One of the works shown during “No Comment,” a politically themed art show located across from the New York Stock Exchange.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Two unidentified men hang a piece during the “No Comment” art exhibit in the former JP Morgan & Co. headquarters.

For weeks, a growing collection of protesters have tried to get their grievances heard on Wall Street — even if the police have prevented them from establishing a physical presence on the fabled street.
On Saturday night, the Occupy Wall Street movement managed to gain a temporary foothold on Wall Street, courtesy of an art show partly inspired by the group’s protests.

The show was held inside a landmark building built in 1914 as the headquarters of J.P. Morgan, across from the New York Stock Exchange; it has been empty for about five years.

The show, called No Comment, was scheduled to be up for only 24 hours, from Saturday evening until Sunday evening. It combined art that addressed a wide variety of political themes with pieces that were derived directly from the recent protests.

The organizers included Marika Maiorova, who arranged to use the former bank building in September for a show reflecting on the events of Sept. 11, 2001; and Anna Harrah, one of those who had been participating in three weeks of protests, aimed at criticizing inequities in the financial system.

The idea for the show came, Ms. Maiorova said, when her September show was disrupted to some degree by the maze of metal barricades set up by the police to help control marches by protesters.

She joined with Ms. Harrah, who had joined Occupy Wall Street’s art and culture committee. The two put out a call for submissions and ended up with dozens of pieces of work, including paintings, illustrations, photographs and video installations.

Items inspired by the protests included a collection of cardboard signs created by demonstrators, a large spray-painted banner reading “Occupy Wall Street,” and a plate that had been at the protesters’ stronghold at Zuccotti Park, which carried the message, “If you need money take some,” and also held a handful of dollar bills.

One of the artists who assisted in putting the show together, Lee Wells, contributed an installation consisting of two tents and American flags. It was a commentary, he said, on the fact that the police had decreed that the protesters sleeping in Zuccotti Park could not erect tents.

Ms. Maiorova said that some of the pieces of art could be sold at a silent auction, with most of the proceeds going to the artists but some being donated to Occupy Wall Street, or to her own organization, Loft in the Red Zone, which had rented the raw, cavernous space inside the Morgan building.

As crowds strolled through the show on Saturday night, three men with badges walked past barricades set up outside, entered the show and looked around. Soon, the streets outside were filled with police vehicles and uniformed officers.

Inside the gallery, Ms. Harrah gazed at the crowd and reflected on the irony of the show’s setting.
“As soon as I saw this place, I said let’s make something happen here,”
she said. “It seems only right to occupy this space.”

[hbcat]

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
As for adopting the ways of the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone.I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

-- Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government (1849)

Source: Nate Silver, NYTimes
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

[lofter1]

As crowds strolled through the show on Saturday night, three men with badges walked past barricades set up outside, entered the show and looked around. Soon, the streets outside were filled with police vehicles and uniformed officers.

It's really disconcerting that the NYPD and NYC officials view each and every act of those involved in OWS as a threat that needs to be monitored.

(too bad they failed to do the same with the guys who ripped us all off a few years back -- surely one or more of them broke the law, no?)

Today I heard a drum beat outside my window. There were about eight guys walking up Broadway, on the sidewalk, beating a drum, chanting "We are the 99%" and were trailed by four NYPD officers. As far as I know, even under NYC's most onerous laws, groups of under 20 people can gather and walk together without the need of a parade permit. I never see NYPD trailing a tour group walking en masse through SoHo. Or following a group of NYU students being shown the neighborhood.

[lofter1]

Ben & Jerry's takes a stand ...

To those who Occupy: We stand with you.


We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity. The issues raised are of fundamental importance to all of us. These include:

• The inequity that exists between classes in our country is simply immoral.
• We are in an unemployment crisis. Almost 14 million people are unemployed. Nearly 20% of African American men are unemployed. Over 25% of our nation’s youth are unemployed.
• Many workers who have jobs have to work 2 or 3 of them just to scrape by.
• Higher education is almost impossible to obtain without going deeply in debt.
• Corporations are permitted to spend unlimited resources to influence elections while stockpiling a trillion dollars rather than hiring people.

We know the media will either ignore you or frame the issue as to who may be getting pepper sprayed rather than addressing the despair and hardships borne by so many, or accurately conveying what this movement is about. All this goes on while corporate profits continue to soar and millionaires whine about paying a bit more in taxes. And we have not even mentioned the environment.

We know that words are relatively easy but we wanted to act quickly to demonstrate our support. As a board and as a company we have actively been involved with these issues for years but your efforts have put them out front in a way we have not been able to do. We have provided support to citizens’ efforts to rein in corporate money in politics, we pay a livable wage to our employees, we directly support family farms and we are working to source fairly traded ingredients for all our products. But we realize that Occupy Wall Street is calling for systemic change. We support this call to action and are honored to join you in this call to take back our nation and democracy.

— Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors

[lofter1]

Geraldo Rivera & his Faux News Team Get Drummed Out of Zuccotti Park Sunday October 9 ...

[lofter1]

Down at OccupyDC a right wing media guy starts some trouble to make a story ...

American Spectator Editor Admits to Being Agent Provocateur at D.C. Museum

FIREDOGLAKE
October 9, 2011

The following photograph taken by opednews.com shows a confrontation in the lobby of the National Air and Space Museum between two individuals and an officer shortly before video shows officers with the Museum’s security forces rush outside indiscriminately pepper-spraying numerous individuals.



It appears that one of the two in the confrontation with the security officer is Patrick Howley, Assistant Editor of The American Spectator. [See the following photograph in which Howley's Facebook Profile Photo is side-by-side with the person pictured at the Air and Space Museum]



Immediately after the incident began hitting the newswires Howley published a “Breaking News” story with The American Spectator online in which he reveals that he had consciously infiltrated the group on Friday with the intent to discredit the movement. He states that “as far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator — and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story.”

[NOTE: The Link to Howley's story at the American Spectator now says: "You have tried to access a URL that no longer exists or was entered incorrectly!"]

According to Howley’s story he joined the group in its march toward the Air and Space Museum but the protesters on the march were unwilling to be confrontational. He states “they lack the nerve to confront authority. From estimates within the protest, only ten people were pepper-sprayed, and as far as I could tell I was the only one who got inside.”

He claims that upon arrival at the Museum the group of approximately one hundred protesters split into two factions with the smaller of the two “rushing the doors,” the majority “staying behind.” Howley then admits in his piece that he snuck past the guard at the first entrance in order to “infiltrate” the building and then confronted another guard. He then “sprinted toward the door” at which time he was first hit with pepper-spray.

As he describes his next actions “I forced myself into the doors and sprinted blindly across the floor of the Air and Space Museum, drawing the attention of hundreds of stunned khaki-clad tourists (some of whom began snapping off disposable-camera portraits of me).”

FULL STORY

[hbcat]

It's really disconcerting that the NYPD and NYC officials view each and every act of those involved in OWS as a threat that needs to be monitored.

(too bad they failed to do the same with the guys who ripped us all off a few years back -- surely one or more of them broke the law, no?)

Today I heard a drum beat outside my window. There were about eight guys walking up Broadway, on the sidewalk, beating a drum, chanting "We are the 99%" and were trailed by four NYPD officers. As far as I know, even under NYC's most onerous laws, groups of under 20 people can gather and walk together without the need of a parade permit. I never see NYPD trailing a tour group walking en masse through SoHo. Or following a group of NYU students being shown the neighborhood.

But this is actually a good thing. Police harassment is unpleasant, but look at that graph posted in the NYTimes. The arrests and abusive use of mace have put raised the profile of these demonstrations. As long as no one is seriously harmed, the policing is to be welcomed.

[hbcat]

Geraldo Rivera & his Faux News Team Get Drummed Out of Zuccotti Park Sunday October 9 ...

Brilliant. It took me a while to hear "Fox News lies!" I thought they were chanting, uh ... something else... but equally relevant.

'Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, hey -- good bye!'

[lofter1]

Yep, the alternative understanding of the Zuccotti chant was the first thing that popped into my mind, too.

[mariab]

For those of you who have talked to the leaders: Have you heard anything about possibly getting an organized, well spoken contingent together to speak before congress to redress their grievances?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Dylan Ratigan from MSNBC (and CNBC before that) was at Zuccotti Plaza last weekend.

If you missed it, he delivered a classic rant on TV a few months ago:



He's now involved in the drafting of a Constitutional Amendment on political campaign financing. Two draft versions:

No person, corporation or business entity of any type, domestic or foreign, shall be allowed to contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office or to contribute money on behalf of or opposed to any type of campaign for Federal office. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, campaign contributions to candidates for Federal office shall not constitute speech of any kind as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or any amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Congress shall set forth a federal holiday for the purposes of voting for candidates for Federal office

No non-citizen shall contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office. United States citizens shall be free to contribute no more than the equivalent of $100 to any federal candidate during any election cycle. Notwithstanding the limits construed to be part of the First Amendment, Congress shall have the power to limit, but not ban, independent political expenditures, so long as such limits are content and viewpoint neutral. Congress shall set forth a federal holiday for the purposes of voting for candidates for Federal office

You can add your name to the petition at

Get Money Out

[lofter1]

The second option, limiting a contribution to $100 per person per candidate, is the more viable of the two drafts.

[lofter1]

Who Do the White Shirt Police Report to at Occupy Wall Street Protests?

Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll

COUNTERPUNCH
by PAM MARTENS
OCTOBER 10, 2011

Videos are springing up across the internet showing uniformed members of the New York Police Department in white shirts (as opposed to the typical NYPD blue uniforms) pepper spraying and brutalizing peaceful, nonthreatening protestors attempting to take part in the Occupy Wall Street marches. Corporate media are reporting that these white shirts are police supervisors as opposed to rank and file. Recently discovered documents suggest something else may be at work.

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.
When the program was first rolled out, one insightful member of the NYPD posted the following on a forum: “… regarding the officer working for, and being paid by, some of the richest people and organizations in the City, if not the world, enforcing the mandates of the private employer, and in effect, allowing the officer to become the Praetorian Guard of the elite of the City. And now corruption is no longer a problem. Who are they kidding?”

Just this year, the Department of Justice revealed serious problems with the Paid Detail unit of the New Orleans Police Department. Now corruption probes are snowballing at NOPD, revealing cash payments to police in the Paid Detail and members of the department setting up limited liability corporations to run upwards of $250,000 in Paid Detail work billed to the city.

When the infamously mismanaged Wall Street firm, Lehman Brothers, collapsed on September 15, 2008, its bankruptcy filings in 2009 showed it owed money to 21 members of the NYPD’s Paid Detail Unit. (A phone call and email request to the NYPD for information on which Wall Street firms participate in the program were not responded to. The police unions appear to have only scant information about the program.)

Other Wall Street firms that are known to have used the Paid Detail include Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center complex which houses financial firms, and the New York Stock Exchange.

The New York Stock Exchange is the building in front of which the Occupy Wall Street protesters have unsuccessfully tried to protest, being herded behind metal barricades, clubbed with night sticks, kicked in the face and carted off to jail rather than permit the last plantation in America to be defiled with citizen chants and posters. (A sample of those politically inconvenient posters and chants: “The corrupt are afraid of us; the honest support us; the heroic join us”; “Tell me what democracy looks like, this is what democracy looks like”; “I’ll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.” The last sign refers to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, giving corporations First Amendment personhood, which allows them to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections.)

On September 8, 2004, Robert Britz, then President and Co-Chief Operating Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, testified as follows to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services:

“…we have implemented new hiring standards requiring former law enforcement or military backgrounds for the security staff…We have established a 24-hour NYPD Paid Detail monitoring the perimeter of the data centers…We have implemented traffic control and vehicle screening at the checkpoints. We have installed fixed protective planters and movable vehicle barriers.”

Military backgrounds; paid NYPD 24-7; checkpoints; vehicle barriers? It might be insightful to recall that the New York Stock Exchange originally traded stocks with a handshake under a Buttonwood tree in the open air on Wall Street.

In his testimony, the NYSE executive Britz states that “we” did this or that while describing functions that clearly belong to the City of New York. The New York Stock Exchange at that time had not yet gone public and was owned by those who had purchased seats on the exchange – primarily, the largest firms on Wall Street. Did the NYSE simply give itself police powers to barricade streets and set up checkpoints with rented cops? How about clubbing protesters on the sidewalk?

Just six months before NYSE executive Britz’ testimony to a congressional committee, his organization was being sued in the Supreme Court of New York County for illegally taking over public streets with no authority to do so. This action had crippled the business of a parking garage, Wall Street Garage Parking Corp., the plaintiff in the case. Judge Walter Tolub said in his opinion that

“…a private entity, the New York Stock Exchange, has assumed responsibility for the patrol and maintenance of truck blockades located at seven intersections surrounding the NYSE…no formal authority appears to have been given to the NYSE to maintain these blockades and/or conduct security searches at these checkpoints…the closure of these intersections by the NYSE is tantamount to a public nuisance…The NYSE has yet to provide this court with any evidence of an agreement giving them the authority to maintain the security perimeter and/or conduct the searches that their private security force conducts daily. As such, the NYSE’s actions are unlawful and may be enjoined as they violate plaintiff’s civil rights as a private citizen.”

The case was appealed, the ruling overturned, and sent back to the same Judge who had no choice but to dismiss the case on the appellate ruling that the plaintiff had suffered no greater harm than the community at large. Does everyone in lower Manhattan own a parking garage that is losing its customer base because the roads are blocked to the garage?

Some believe that Wall Street is given special privileges and protection because New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg owes his $18.1 billion in wealth (yes, he’s that 1 percent the 99 percent are protesting) to Wall Street. The Mayor was previously a trader for Salomon Brothers, the investment bank made famous for attempting to rig the U.S. Treasury market in two-year notes.

The Mayor’s business empire which bears his name, includes the awesome Bloomberg terminal, a computer that houses enormous pricing data for stocks and bonds, research, news, charting functions and much more. There are currently an estimated 290,000 of these terminals on Wall Street trading floors around the globe, generating approximately $1500 in rental fees per terminal per month. That’s a cool $435 million a month or $5.2 billion a year, the cash cow of the Bloomberg businesses.

The Bloomberg businesses are run independently from the Mayor but he certainly knows that his terminal is a core component of his wealth. Nonetheless, the Mayor is not Wall Street’s patsy. Bloomberg Publishing is frequently in the forefront of exposing fraud on Wall Street such as the 2001 tome “The Pied Pipers of Wall Street” by Benjamin Mark Cole, which exposed the practice of releasing fraudulent stock research to the public. Bloomberg News was responsible for court action that forced the Federal Reserve to release the details of what it did with trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to Wall Street firms, hedge funds and foreign banks.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly may also have a soft spot for Wall Street. He was formerly Senior Managing Director of Global Corporate Security at Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., the Wall Street firm that collapsed into the arms of JPMorgan in March of 2008.

There has also been a bizarre revolving door between the Wall Street millionaires and the NYPD at times. One of the most puzzling career moves was made by Stephen L. Hammerman. He left a hefty compensation package as Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co. in 2002 to work as Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters for the NYPD from 2002 to 2004. That move had everyone on Wall Street scratching their head at the time. Merrill collapsed into the arms of Bank of America on September 15, 2008, the same date that Lehman went under.

Wall Street is not the only sector renting cops in Manhattan. Department stores, parks, commercial banks and landmarks like Rockefeller Center, Jacob Javits Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral have also participated in the Paid Detail Unit, according to insiders. But Wall Street is the only sector that runs a private justice system where its crimes are herded off to secret arbitration tribunals, has sucked on the public teat to the tune of trillions of dollars, escaped prosecution for the financial collapse, and can put an armed municipal force on the sidewalk to intimidate public protestors seeking a realignment of their democracy.

We may be learning a lot more in the future about the tactics Wall Street and the NYPD have deployed against the Occupy Wall Street protestors. The highly regarded Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has filed a class action lawsuit over the approximately 700 arrests made on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. The formal complaint and related information is available at the organization’s web site, www.JusticeOnLine.org.

The organization was founded by Carl Messineo and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard. The Washington Post has called them “the constitutional sheriffs for a new protest generation.”

The suit names Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Kelly, the City of New York, 30 unnamed members of the NYPD, and, provocatively, 10 unnamed law enforcement officers not employed by the NYPD.

The lawsuit lays out dwhat has been curtailing the constitutional rights of protestors for a very long time in New York City.

“As seen in the movements for social change in the Middle East and Europe, all movements for social justice, jobs, and democracy need room to breathe and grow and it is imperative that there be a halt to law enforcement actions used to shut down mass assembly and free expression of the people seeking to redress grievances…

“After escorting and leading a group of demonstrators and others well out onto the Brooklyn Bridge roadway, the NYPD suddenly and without warning curtailed further forward movement, blocked the ability of persons to leave the Bridge from the rear, and arrested hundreds of protestors in the absence of probable cause. This was a form of entrapment, both illegal and physical.

“That the trap and detain mass arrest was a command-level-driven intentional and calculated police operation is evidenced by the fact that the law enforcement officials who led the demonstration across the bridge were command officials, known as ‘white shirts.’ ”

In April 2001, I was arrested and incarcerated by the NYPD while peacefully handing out flyers on a public sidewalk outside of the Citigroup shareholders meeting – flyers that warned of growing corruption inside the company. (The unlawful merger of Travelers Group and Citibank created Citigroup and resulted in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression era investor protection legislation that barred depositor banks from merging with high-risk Wall Street firms. Many of us from social justice groups in New York City had protested against the repeal but were out maneuvered by Wall Street’s political pawns in Washington.)

Out of a group of about two dozen protestors from the National Organization for Women in New York City, Rain Forest Action Network, and Inner City Press, I was the only person arrested. There was no civil disobedience occurring. Rain Forest Action Network was handing out fortune cookies with prescient warnings about Citigroup and urging pedestrians to cut up their Citibank credit cards. The rest of us were peacefully handing out flyers.

Chained to a metal bar inside the police precinct, I was grilled on any crimes I might know about. I responded that the only crimes I knew about were listed on the flyer and apparently, in New York City, one gets arrested for disclosing crimes by Wall Street firms.
A mysterious, mature, white shirted inspector who ordered my arrest on the sidewalk, and refused to give his first name, disappeared from the police report when it was filed, blaming the arrest instead on a young police officer. Citigroup is only alive today because the Federal government inserted a feeding tube into Citigroup and infused over $2 trillion in loans, direct investment and guarantees as the company veered toward collapse.

The NYPD at the time of my arrest was run by Bernard Kerik – the man President George W. Bush later sent to Iraq to be the interim Interior Minister and train Iraqi police. The President subsequently nominated Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security for the entire nation. The nation was spared of that eventuality only because of an illegal nanny popping up. Today, Kerik is serving a four year sentence in Federal prison for a variety of criminal acts.

The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a Federal lawsuit on my behalf (Martens v. Giuliani) and we learned that the NYPD had arbitrarily established a policy to arrest and hold for 72 hours any person protesting in a group of 20 or more. The case was settled for a modest monetary award and the repeal by the NYPD of this unconstitutional and despicable practice.

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. She spent the last decade of her career advocating against Wall Street’s private justice system, which keeps its crimes shielded from public courtrooms. She has been writing on public interest issues for CounterPunch since retiring in 2006. She has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article.