OWS UPDATE:
OWS Thanks Our Supporters! What We've Done, Where We Are, Where We're Going December 23, 2011
2011 was a revolutionary year for a new movement that is changing the world. From NYC to Cairo, we are just getting started. We are still busy building this amazing movement, and we couldn't do it without you -- our supporters! Let's make next year even better!
(This video was passed by consensus through the New York City General Assembly on Tuesday, December 20, 2011.)
OCCUPY WALL STREET // N15 // D17 // OCCUPY 2.0 // YOUR TIME IS NOW
Time to Mic Check all 1% politicians
This action was done in a fairly low key non-violent manner. Gotta love it
Gingrich Mic Checked this is an action which could be done to any politician who supports the 1% and Big Corporations and Banks etc. before doing anything for average citizens in the USA but also thoughout the Western Corporate governments and their puppet regimes outside the West .
As one protesters pointed out that if he were to hand over a million dollars to Gingrich then Gingrich might have time to speak with the protester/donor for an hour or more.
Newt Gingrich and other politicians are only interested in filling their pockets with money to get elected to protect the 1% so they can make more money after leaving office using their insider knowledge. Or at least to get 100,000 for speaking engagements-they become boosters and entertainers for the elites.
Gingrich 'Mic Checked' at University of Iowa
Gingrich getting Mic Checked - Protesters at the University of Iowa-Part 2
#OWS update from Keith Olbermann
Hey Newt! Share The Loot! Give A Dime To The 99%! Occupy Newt Gingrich!
Meanwhile #OWS across the USA are filing law suits against municipalities, State governments and the Federal Governments who have colluded in the military style crackdown on American citizens peacefully protesting. Even Obama has been by act, deed or silence condoning the brutal crackdown.
Cities that broke up Occupy camps now face lawsuits over free speech, use of force washington Post.com, december 22, 2011
(via Occupy Wall Street Lawsuits Are Still Springing Up
By Joe Coscarelli, NYmag.com, December 23, 2011)
Yvette Felarca is among those suing campus police and administration officials at the University of California, Berkeley, after officers forcefully dispersed a group of Occupy protesters and others rallying for public education last month.
Felarca, a middle school teacher and organizer with the civil rights organization By Any Means Necessary, which filed the suit, says she was standing, arms linked with other demonstrators’, before a line of police officers who moved in after some tents were set up on a lawn. She said she was chanting and yelling when a police officer hit her in the throat with his baton. She said she was also hit in her ribs, abdomen and back and watched others bear repeated blows.
“The brutality was absolutely designed to chill the speech of students in the movement and literally try to beat and terrorize our right to criticize, to think critically and to act on that criticism,” Felarca said.
The university has called it “disconcerting” that the suit contains “so many inaccuracies.”
Sobel, of the National Lawyers Guild, said a lawsuit is also planned in the case of the pepper-spraying by campus police of peaceful protesters at the University of California, Davis, video footage of which went viral.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the lawsuits an important check on police power. She noted that authorities haven’t been uniformly excessive around the country, but pointed in New York City to mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge — which are under litigation — as well as the pepper-spraying of several women and the dark-of-night breakup of Zuccotti Park.
And once more we are reminded that the bail outs focusing on the banks and investment companies was a bad policy since some of the bail-out money should have gone to average Americans to better stimulate the economy . This could have been done by giving financial aid to those who were about to lose their homes, and to increase spending on welfare and food stamps and putting massive amounts of money into public works programs improving highways, schools , hospitals and the levees around the country to better withstan storms and earthquakes etc. It is just this sort of action which FDR took in the 1930s with the New Deal but these days FDR would be branded an anarchist or communist out to destroy America.
The Book of Jobs: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around” by Joseph E. Stiglitz Via CommonDreams, december 23, 2011
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.
It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.
The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect. First, it was wrong to think that the bankers would mend their ways—that they would start to lend, if only they were treated nicely enough. We were told, in effect: “Don’t put conditions on the banks to require them to restructure the mortgages or to behave more honestly in their foreclosures. Don’t force them to use the money to lend. Such conditions will upset our delicate markets.” In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing.
Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise. Yes, America had many things about which it could be proud. Companies in the information-technology field were at the leading edge of a revolution. But incomes for most working Americans still hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero. And “zero” doesn’t really tell the story. Because the rich have always been able to save a significant percentage of their income, putting them in the positive column, an average rate of close to zero means that everyone else must be in negative numbers. (Here’s the reality: in the years leading up to the recession, according to research done by my Columbia University colleague Bruce Greenwald, the bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income.) What made this level of indebtedness possible was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke, chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, helped to engineer through low interest rates and nonregulation—not even using the regulatory tools they had. As we now know, this enabled banks to lend and households to borrow on the basis of assets whose value was determined in part by mass delusion.
Times Wants Info on 'Killing as a Policy Tool'By MARIMER MATOS: via Joe Coscarelli New York Times Suing Justice Department Over Targeted Killing Memo NYmag.com, Daily intel, December 23, 2011
MANHATTAN (CN) - The New York Times sued the Department of Justice for "at least one legal memorandum" government lawyers are believed to have written detailing "the scope of the circumstances in which it is lawful for government officials to employ targeted killing as a policy tool."
Times reporters Charlie Savage and Scott Shane particularly want to see what the Washington Post reported on Sept. 30 as "a 'secret memorandum authorizing the legal targeting' of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had been killed earlier that day in Yemen."
"Questions surrounding the legality of targeted killing - especially the extrajudicial use of lethal force away from any so-called 'hot' battlefield where United States forces are engaged in active combat - have generated extensive public debate since October 2001, when the Bush Administration first contemplated whether covert lethal force could be used against people deemed to be al-Qaeda operatives," the federal complaint states.
"Most recently, the death of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in September, has kindled widespread interest in - and controversy over - the scope of the circumstances in which it is lawful for government officials to employ targeted killing as a policy tool.
"Given the questions surrounding the legality of the practice under both U.S. and international law, notable legal scholars, human rights activists, and current and former government officials have called for the government to disclose its legal analysis justifying the use of targeted lethal force, especially as it applies to American citizens."
NYT claims, "Both before and after the death of al-Awlaki, NYT duly filed FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests seeking memoranda that detail the legal analysis behind the government's use of targeted lethal force. To date, DOJ has refused to release any such memoranda or any segregable portions, claiming them to be properly classified and privileged and in respect to certain memoranda has declined to say whether they in fact exist."
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