#OWS Update: Prophetic ? Leonard Cohen's " First We Take Manhattan " Naomi Wolf Arrested at #OWS by NYPD

# Prophetic ? Leonard Cohen's " First We Take Manhattan "



video RT Naomi Wolf arrested at #

Author and activist Naomi Wolf has been added to the list now hundreds of names long of protesters arrested during the ongoing Wall Street demonstrations.
Wolf, a popular writer perhaps most known for her book The Beauty Myth and frequent articles in the Huffington Post, was arrested Tuesday night in Manhattan along with a handful of other Wall Street protesters.

A group of around 50 participants in the movement, including Wolf, had been in attendance outside of a gala that was honoring New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at New York’s Skylight Studios. While Gov. Cuomo was being lauded as “Game Changer of the Year” at the awards ceremony, Occupy Wall Street protesters were expressing their detest over the politician’s opposition to extending a tax on millionaires and his support of hydraulic fracking.

Being in the street near where the NY Mayor is having dinner is now illegal in New York unless you are part of the 1%.
70 % of New Yorkers support the # protesters .
Does that mean CNN & Fox News got it wrong.
Average Americans who refuse to buy into the Fox News propaganda actually believe in free speech the freedom of assembly the freedom of dissent. I thought it was only in Commie land that dissidents would be arrested for voicing their opinions in a peaceful manner. Why is it that the police and those in authority are more hostile to the # protesters while they showed restraint or often didn't show up at all at the Tea Party Protests -is it because the Tea Party was showing how they idolize the rich and prosperous and in final analysis pay homage to a golden calf who is the God of Greed and avarice so much for their phony Christian credentials.

Occupy More: OWS roughed-up by NYPD

Uploaded by RussiaToday on Oct 19, 2011
A new wave of protests erupts in New York as Anti-Wall Street activists accuse the city's police of using excessive force. Hundreds of people have been arrested during the 5-week-long nationwide protests, as police were condemned for using pepper-spray. RT's Lucy Kafanov has been following the demonstrations.

Naomi Wolf in response to he illegal and unconstitutional arrest has made it plain that she and others arrested were not breaking the law . Yet similar arrests are taking place in New York and across the US. This is just more proof of how the US under Bush and now under Obama is moving towards a police state in which the laws are enforced in an arbitrary or politicized manner.

" Naomi Wolf: how I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street
Arresting a middle-aged writer in an evening gown for peaceable conduct is a far cry from when America was a free republic " via guardian.co.uk, October 19, 2011

• Naomi Wolf condemns 'Stalinist' erosion of protest rights

Last night I was arrested in my home town, outside an event to which I had been invited, for standing lawfully on the sidewalk in an evening gown.

Let me explain; my partner and I were attending an event for the Huffington Post, for which I often write: Game Changers 2011, in a venue space on Hudson Street. As we entered the space, we saw that about 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters were peacefully assembled and were chanting. They wanted to address Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was going to be arriving at the event. They were using a technique that has become known as "the human mic" – by which the crowd laboriously repeats every word the speaker says – since they had been told that using real megaphones was illegal.

In my book Give Me Liberty, a blueprint for how to open up a closing civil society, I have a chapter on permits – which is a crucial subject to understand for anyone involved in protest in the US. In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" – requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment. One of these made-up permit requirements, which are not transparent or accountable, is the megaphone restriction.

So I informed the group on Hudson Street that they had a first amendment right to use a megaphone and that the National Lawyers' Guild should appeal the issue if they got arrested. And I repeated the words of the first amendment, which the crowd repeated.

Then my partner suggested that I ask the group for their list of demands. Since we would be inside, we thought it would be helpful to take their list into the event and if I had a chance to talk with the governor I could pass the list on. That is how a democracy works, right? The people have the right to address their representatives.

We went inside, chatted with our friends, but needed to leave before the governor had arrived. I decided I would present their list to his office in the morning and write about the response. On our exit, I saw that the protesters had been cordoned off by a now-massive phalanx of NYPD cops and pinned against the far side of the street – far away from the event they sought to address.

I went up and asked them why. They replied that they had been informed that the Huffington Post event had a permit that forbade them to use the sidewalk. I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks; even film crews must allow pedestrian traffic. I asked the police for clarification – no response.

I went over to the sidewalk at issue and identified myself as a NYC citizen and a reporter, and asked to see the permit in question or to locate the source on the police or event side that claimed it forbade citizen access to a public sidewalk. Finally a tall man, who seemed to be with the event, confessed that while it did have a permit, the permit did allow for protest so long as we did not block pedestrian passage.

I thanked him, returned to the protesters, and said: "The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don't block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so. Please join me if you wish." My partner and I then returned to the event-side sidewalk and began to walk peacefully arm in arm, while about 30 or 40 people walked with us in single file, not blocking access.

Then a phalanx of perhaps 40 white-shirted senior officers descended out of seemingly nowhere and, with a megaphone (which was supposedly illegal for citizens to use), one said: "You are unlawfully creating a disruption. You are ordered to disperse." I approached him peacefully, slowly, gently and respectfully and said: "I am confused. I was told that the permit in question allows us to walk if we don't block pedestrian access and as you see we are complying with the permit."

He gave me a look of pure hate. "Are you going to back down?" he shouted. I stood, immobilised, for a moment. "Are you getting out of my way?" I did not even make a conscious decision not to "fall back" – I simply couldn't even will myself to do so, because I knew that he was not giving a lawful order and that if I stepped aside it would be not because of the law, which I was following, but as a capitulation to sheer force. In that moment's hesitation, he said, "OK," gestured, and my partner and I were surrounded by about 20 officers who pulled our hands behind our backs and cuffed us with plastic handcuffs.

We were taken in a van to the seventh precinct – the scary part about that is that the protesters and lawyers marched to the first precinct, which handles Hudson Street, but in the van the police got the message to avoid them by rerouting me. I understood later that the protesters were lied to about our whereabouts, which seemed to me to be a trickle-down of the Bush-era detention practice of unaccountable detentions.

also see on the heavy handed response of police in New York and at other other related protests across the U.S.:

" The Tea Party Never Got Pepper Sprayed" by Dave Serchuk at Forbes.com, October 20, 2011

...Why are scores of OWS folks getting hauled off in school-bus sized paddy wagons, and not the Tea Party folks?

This is despite the fact that The Tea Party protests have not always been, so to speak, a tea party. Lest we forget a Tea Party member stomped on a woman’s head.

Tea Partiers also gained great attention for their ability to obstreperously interrupt town hall meetings during the health care debate, and shout down those who disagreed with them.

Were there mass arrests due to these actions? No way. Unscathed would be one way to describe how they emerged. Kid gloves could describe how they were treated by those in power. The guy who stomped on that lady’s head, for example, Tim Profitt, got some probation. But he sure didn’t get beaten down by the police, as many OWS folks have, for less.

In fact when I Googled “Tea Party” and “arrested” here were some of the top searches that came up:

A Tea Party leader was arrested for pirating software.
A man was arrested for shouting at Tea Partiers.
A Tea Party organizer was arrested for soliciting a prostitute.
One Tea Party wingnut was arrested for threatening to turn a tax protest into a full scale massacre. He told the world about this via Twitter, of course.
Overall not much there. Now do the same search for “Occupy Wall Street” and “arrested” and these are some of the top searches:

1. 80 plus arrested in New York, just a few days ago.

2. Author Naomi Wolf, that menace to society, was also thrown into the hoosegow during an OWS protest. Better still, she was in an evening gown when she got busted, which surely made for interesting jailhouse banter. (Seriously, if anyone should have good reason to be angry at Wolf you’d think it would be pretty much limited to Al Gore.)

3. OWS protestors were arrested nationwide, in honor of the movement’s one month anniversary.

4. Some OWS protestors in Lower Manhattan made the trip to an outer borough, Brooklyn, and then got arrested. (Remember, not too long ago 700 OWS folks were also arrested at the Brooklyn Bridge.) My advice? Next time try the Manhattan Bridge.

And the list goes on, and on, nationwide, ad infinitum. Suffice to say, by this point at least a thousand OWS folks have felt the leathered fist of The Man, for asserting their rights to assembly, and freedom of speech. And they haven’t merely gotten arrested, but pepper sprayed, and in some cases beaten.

and citizens of Manhattan claiming they are not getting the police presence they need because NYPD is stretched due to the Wall Street protests. The irony is that most of the violence that has occurred during the protests have been due to unnecessary rough treatment of protesters by the police . So will they bring in the National Guard or the U.S. military to quash the protests to appease the 1% and their quisling supporters ie the White House, the Congress and Senate and the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and Homeland Security.

Occupy Wall Street Protest Drains Police Precincts Across Manhattan By Jill Colvin, Mary Johnson, Carla Zanoni and Julie Shapiro DNAinfo Staff October 21, 2011

MANHATTAN — The Occupy Wall Street protest is draining police resources at precincts across Manhattan, raising concerns about the department’s ability to fight low-level crime within their neighborhoods, according to high-ranking sources from across the city.

At the Midtown North Precinct, which oversees the Theater District, Rockefeller Plaza and northern Hell’s Kitchen, supervisors complained this week that they and their officers are being diverted to monitor the situation at Zuccotti Park, where protesters have been camped out since Sept. 17.

While staffing needs at the site depend on the day and what protesters have planned, one lieutenant in the precinct said he’d spent 14 hours at Zuccotti Park last Friday alone.
“It’s quite a drain,” he said, warning residents to expect a drop in the number of summonses issued in the precinct this month because police just don't have the manpower to enforce as many quality of life crimes.

While NY Mayor Bloomberg says charges will not be dropped against #ows protesters because he doesn't want to politicize the courts. This is a bit hypocritical and disingenuous since the NYPD response to these protesters is in fact politicized especially as we have noted when compared to police response to The Tea Party movement in which there seemed to be a "hands-off order" because the Tea Party were pro-GOP and were defending the 1% the elite that is the wealthy and the rich and powerful who are in control of the judicial , legislative and the policing mechanisms across the US.

This may be true of the organizers and those who fund the Tea Party movement but not necessarily the average citizens who were the foot soldiers for the movement who in fact have more in common with the #OWS protesters than they realize.

Their bosses and handlers have done all they can to try to divide these two groups because if they the OWS protesters and The Tea Party foot-soldiers were united against the super-wealthy elite and Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Coal, Big Oil then the elite would be truly threatened .

The GOP and its lackey Mainstream Media prefer to characterize the Wall Street protesters as being far to the left or Commies and that they are all supporters of Obama this is not the case. President Obama when it comes to these fundamental economic issues is not much different than the GOP Neoconservative positions on these issues.

By Shayna Jacobs and Olivia Scheck DNAinfo Staff October 17, 2011

MANHATTAN — A lawyer representing many of the protesters who were arrested or given summonses in connection with the Occupy Wall Street protests met with prosecutors Monday, calling on them to dismiss all but the most serious cases.

Defense attorney Martin Stolar, of the National Lawyers Guild, said he asked the Manhattan District Attorney's Office to dismiss all desk appearance tickets and summonses stemming from the protests, during a meeting at the courthouse Monday afternoon.

There are roughly 750 such cases with the vast majority for disorderly conduct, according to Stolar.

..."Every arrest that comes into the DA’s Office is assessed individually, and charging decisions are based on the evidence and circumstances unique to each case and defendant,” DA spokeswoman Erin Duggan said in an email.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg slammed reports that those who were arrested might try to jam the court system by demanding full trials unless charges were dismissed.

"I don't think our court system should be a political football," Bloomberg told reporters at a press conference Monday in Queens. "I think it's hard to reconcile that with what America stands for, to say we're going to deliberately keep our court system from working."

Prosecutors also held a separate meeting Monday with Kaylee Dedrick, a protester who was allegedly pepper sprayed by a high-ranking NYPD officer.

Dedrick's lawyer, Ron Kuby, criticized the DA's office for not filing charges against the officer, identified as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who was allegedly caught on video spraying Dedrick and others in the penned-in crowd.

"The video on its face makes out a case for third degree assault," Kuby insisted on his way out of the meeting. "Had this been anyone other than a deputy police inspector, that person would have [already] been arrested [and] prosecuted."