A Soldier Confronts NYPD about Police Brutality Against the Occupy Wall Street Protesters
IAmNatalieCash
Uploaded by IAmNatalieCash on Oct 30, 2011
The NYPD remain stone-faced as this decorated soldier confronts them about their role in disobeying the Constitution.
His Name Is Scott Olsen He Served TWO Tours Of Duty In Iraq Shot In The Face By Oakland Cops
MOXNEWSd0tCOMEd Schultz/ ED Show Uploaded by MOXNEWSd0tCOM on Oct 26, 2011October 26, 2011 MSNBC Newshttp://MOXNews.com
Over and over again the Mainstream Media in the US and here in Canada are dismissive even now of the Occupy Wall Street movement erroneously arguing that the movement is too vague about the grievances and solutions to the current disastrous economic , political and social crisis in America.
And yet the General Assembly at #OWS have published statement of their grievances and demands but these are ignored by the US government and by their quisling Mainstream Media.
It does bring to mind the situation the 13 Colonies were in when trying to get their overlord the British Empire to address their grievances . The British were rather dismissive and saw these New Englanders as upstarts as a lower breed of human beings who had the audacity to take on the British Empire and English crown and its Parliament .
These Newly labeled Americans essentially wanted economic, political and social justice which they did not have under the rule of the British Crown.
Now the American people are rising up and protesting to insist that the US government re-institute the basic principles of economic, political and social justice which were the basis of the original American War of Independence. So the struggle for a more just society has arisen once again as it has at other times in US history ie the Civil Rights Movement , the abolition of slavery, the rights for women movements etc.
Each time the people rose up demanding justice the powers that be and the conservative forces insisted that those rising up were a danger to American society and were UnAmerican or anti-American because they dared to question the status quo of the particular era in American history.
A New Declaration of Independence The weight of the 1 Percent has become intolerable. How can we take our country back? Here's a fresh draft by Alex pareene via Salon.com October 30, 2011
Here’s where we are in the course of human events right now: 14 million Americans are jobless and millions more are underemployed. Those still working have seen wages fall after 30 years of stagnation. The 1 Percent of top wage earners could buy and sell the rest of us without so much as a low balance warning on their checking account apps.
The tenth-of-1 Percent earns millions more every year in barely taxed capital gains and derivatives while everyone else struggles to pay down trillions of dollars of debt. Massive, growing income inequality is now belatedly acknowledged by political and media elites, but many of them seem befuddled as to its cause and importance.
It is our belief that many of the problems facing Americans today can be directly connected to the unchecked power and complete unaccountability of the 1 Percent, a group that benefits from every unequal boom of the modern era and escapes each disastrous bust unscathed.
The 1 Percent is insulated from the negative effects of its disastrous policies by its paid representatives in government. The elite 1 Percent ensures the slavish loyalty of its political handmaidens by flooding their campaign coffers with money squeezed from the 99 Percent as deposits, fees and interest.
1. Debt relief (of student loans & mortgages etc. )
...We demand immediate relief for the 99 Percent, particularly the poor and young students and college graduates. The Debt Jubilee is an ancient idea, and an attractive one in an era of growing economic feudalism, as the poor increasingly devote all their labor to repaying the rich.
2. A substantial jobs program
Most American cities are filled with beautiful old buildings and monuments and parks dating back to the recovery programs of the New Deal, as well as increasingly decrepit bridges and roads and structures that have been neglected by the last couple of decades of shrinking infrastructure investment. A real, direct jobs program, done in the WPA style, would rebuild our cities and towns in addition to putting thousands of people back to work.
3. A healthcare public option
Medicare is probably the single most popular government program in the country, which is no surprise, because government-subsidized healthcare tends to be the most popular government program in every nation that has implemented it.
4. Reregulate Wall Street
...in lieu of smashing the banks with brickbats why not just reinstate the rules that effectively limited their behavior for 40 years or so? Bring back Glass-Steagall. Pass the Volcker rule, too. Ban banks from trading derivatives. Limit their behavior and tax their earnings.
5. End the Global War on Terror and rein in the defense budget
Brown University estimates that our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have cost 236,000 lives and $4 trillion. Millions more people are displaced refugees. If 10 years of war have weakened al-Qaida, we should draw down. If it hasn’t, we should seriously rethink our tactics. Regardless, there’s no way the world’s sole remaining superpower can justify spending more than every other country on Earth combined on its military. There’s no coherent reason why the Pentagon’s budget should be rising inexorably every year, while the rest of the country grows shabbier and poorer. Spending more on defense now than we did at the height of the Cold War is insane.
6. Repeal the Patriot Act
Speaking of expensive wastes of resources that are also in direct violation of the nation’s founding principles, let’s dismantle the expansive domestic surveillance state, hurriedly established at a panicky period of national crisis and then enshrined as permanent without a word of serious debate.
7. Tackle climate change
We may be rapidly approaching the catastrophic point of no return when it comes to preventing major, devastating climate change. To keep warming below “dangerous levels,” one recent study says, we’d need to “reverse the rise in emissions immediately and follow through with steep reductions through the century.” Immediately — like now.
8. Stop locking everyone up for everything and end the drug war
The American incarceration rate dwarfs that of our closest competitor, Russia, at 743 per 100,000 residents. A full quarter of the world’s prison inmates are American prison inmates. One in 100 American adults are behind bars. These staggering numbers have been repeated over and over again for years by activists, reporters, academics and even the very rare courageous politician, but the prison system just keeps growing, and growing, and growing.
9. Full equality for the queer community
Gay marriage is a no-brainer — rights granted to a majority are being denied to a minority based on arguments founded solely on bigotry — and should be recognized nationwide.
10. Fix the tax system
There are a million ways the tax code could be made fairer, simpler and more progressive, and most of those ways are opposed by powerful entrenched interests. But it is an inescapable fact that for most of the 20th century, federal income tax rates were very high on the wealthy — very, very high, in fact — and most of that period also happened to be a time of widespread prosperity for rich and middle-class Americans alike. The experiment in slashing taxes on the rich seems to have failed everyone but the rich.
And here's a strange twist -Egytian Pro-Democracy movement holds protest to support the American Occupy Wall Street Movement. Meanwhile the move towards creating a more democratic and free society is being undermined by the military which now rule in Egypt.
Egyptian Protesters March in Support of Occupy Oakland by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd via Alternet.org, October 29, 2011
Occupy Wall Street was unequivocally influenced by the Egyptian uprising, but yesterday the citizens in Tahrir Square flipped the script: a group of protesters, dismayed by the police brutality California protesters were met with this week, marched in solidarity with Occupy Oakland. The Egyptian activist and journalist Mohammed Maree posted an incredible collection of photos, each with protesters holding signs in support of #Occupy. Those are viewable here.
Simultaneously, Egyptians are continuing their own struggle against their abusive military, which has retained control of the country since the ouster of Mubarak in February. The military has held brutal trials in the past months, including one that left Essam Ali Atta dead. The Guardian:
Egyptian officials have tortured a 24-year-old prisoner to death, provoking accusations that the increasingly unpopular junta is failing to dismantle Hosni Mubarak's brutal security apparatus.
Essam Ali Atta, a civilian serving a two-year jail term in Cairo's high-security Tora prison following his conviction in a military tribunal earlier this year for an apparently "common crime", was reportedly attacked by prison guards after trying to smuggle a mobile phone sim card into his cell.
According to statements from other prisoners who witnessed the assault, Atta had large water hoses repeatedly forced into his mouth and anus on more than one occasion, causing severe internal bleeding. An officer then transferred Atta to a central Cairo hospital, but he died within an hour.
As one Egyptian protester's sign read: "From #Tahrir to #OccupyOakland and #USA, One Case, One Goal, Social Justice For All."
It was noted in the article from Salon.com that US has the second largest prison population than all other nations except Russia. But the US has expanded its prison mindset around the globe including those rendition(ed) by the US to other nations where "detainees" can be tortured in super secret prisons. Because these facilities are outside American soil those in authority including President Obama erroneously claim that these facilities are not within the jurisdiction of American law but even if this were true these facilities whether run officially by the US or by a proxy with the aid of the US government are in contravention of International Law as War Crimes or Crimes Against Humanity and are in breach of the Geneva Conventions .
The breaching of International Law on the part of the US is essentially an attempt at an end run around the Rule Of Law and shows America's on going disdain for International Law and Agreements .
As argued numerous times at this blog and elsewhere that it would not be much of a stretch to label the US as a Rogue State which apparently believes it answers to no one except those in power in the US and God of course.
The thing of it is that the US has lost any credibility among the nations of the world because like other Rogue States it believes it is above and beyond man made laws or morality or even common decency and commonsense.
Lithuania in the dock for role in CIA rendition program Via WarIs A Crime.org RT.com October28, 2011
A human rights group has filed a lawsuit against Lithuania for its role in a CIA rendition program which allegedly involved the illegal detention and torture of “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah.
Zubaydah, who was initially captured by American and Pakistani special services in a raid in Pakistan in 2002, spent some of his time in custody in a secret detention center in Lithuania, according to the Interights group. The European country allegedly collaborated with the CIA on its program of secret prisons, which allowed suspects to be incarcerated and tortured outside American territory.
The Saudi national was rendered to Lithuania in 2005 along with a number of other prisoners, the Interights statement says. It adds that Lithuanian officials ignored “information indicating the serious nature of human rights violations occurring in the CIA-led rendition program.”
On Thursday, Interights filed a complaint in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over the failure of the Lithuanian government to prevent the alleged detention and torture as well as to conduct a proper criminal investigation into the secret CIA prison program on its soil.
The probe was launched after a 2009 report on the American TV channel ABC exposed the secret detention facilities in Lithuania, which closed later the same year, reports the Delfi news agency. The General Prosecutor discarded a parliamentary report which strongly indicated that the country’s special services aided the CIA in its secret transportation, detention and interrogation of prisoners.
The US authorities initially claimed Zubaydah was a senior member of al-Qaeda who had had a hand in the majority of the terror attacks it carried out. However, the US government later retracted its statements, Interights says. It is not clear what Zubaydah is being accused of or what the legal grounds are for his current incarceration at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
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