Occupy Everywhere - Sept 17th - Day of Rage Against Wall Street and what it stands for!

[David Guyatt]

Don't fuck with the banks seems to be the story here doesn't it.

No info whatsoever on the alleged perps or what steps - if any - were taken by the FBI to arrest, interview or prosecute them. All very disturbing.

[Albert Doyle]

No doubt mirrored after the successful and unprosecuted preferred method of sniper killings in Dallas and Memphis in 1963 and 1968 respectively.

[Peter Lemkin]

Judge Lets FBI Hide Info on Alleged Murder Plot

By CAMERON LANGFORD
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(CN) - The FBI was right to withhold records about an alleged murder plot targeting the leaders of Occupy Houston, to protect its informants, a federal judge ruled.
Plaintiff Ryan Noah Shapiro is a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research includes "the policing of dissent ... especially in the name of national security" and "examining FBI and other intelligence agency efforts to preserve domestic surveillance capabilities while simultaneously subverting the Freedom of Information Act," according to his MIT profile.
Shapiro sent the FBI three Freedom of Information Act requests in early 2013, asking for records about "a potential plan to gather intelligence against the leaders of [Occupy Wall Street-related protests in Houston] and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership [of the protests] via suppressed sniper rifles."
Shapiro told Courthouse News he learned of the alleged plot from FBI documents obtained by investigative reporter Jason Leopold.
The Houston group is an offshoot of a movement that started in New York City in 2011 and focused on the widening income gap between America's richest people and everyone else.
Shapiro said he wanted the records for his doctorate work and he intended to release urgent info about Occupy Houston to the public.
The FBI found 17 pages of pertinent records and gave Shapiro five, with some information redacted.
Unsatisfied with the response, Shapiro sued the FBI in April 2013.
In a March 2014 order , U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Rosemary Collyer found the FBI had properly withheld some records, but took issue with its use of Exemption 7 under the FOIA, which protects from disclosure "records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes."
Collyer dismissed the lawsuit on Feb. 2 after reviewing the documents in her chambers.
Shapiro challenged the FBI's withholding of the names of its murder plot sources, claiming there is no privacy expectation for people who could be called to testify as trial witnesses.
But Collyer found the FBI correctly invoked FOIA exemption 7©, which shields law enforcement records from disclosure if they could constitute an invasion of personal privacy.
The judge also agreed with the FBI that exemption 7(d) applied to the case. It allows records to be withheld if they "could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source."
Citing a declaration from FBI agent David Hardy that said the confidential sources are "individuals who are members of organized violent groups," Collyer said the likelihood of retaliation justified keeping the sources' identities under wraps.
Shapiro vowed to keep fighting for the records.
"I'm of course disappointed in, and disagree with, the judge's ruling. I'm now conferring with my attorney to determine next steps," Shapiro said in an email.
He said he is concerned that the FBI collected dossiers on Occupy protestors while publicly denying it.
"The FBI even flatly asserted in a separate FOIA lawsuit of mine that, '(T)he FBI determined that it had never opened an investigation on the Occupy movement,'" Shapiro wrote.
"Yet, in the course of my FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for records about the sniper plot against Occupy Houston, the FBI contradicted its own position."
Shapiro said that with recently released FBI documents about Occupy Chicago, "We are coming ever closer to finally forcing the FBI to concede it actually possesses a large volume of documents about this FBI-coordinated nationwide investigation of political protesters as supposed terroristic threats to national security."

[Albert Doyle]

When the people call these bastards on their dirty corruption of America they are labeled "terrorists and threats to national security".


It's about time Americans woke up and realized national security is a euphemism for American National Socialism.

[Peter Lemkin]

The FBI and Occupy: The Surveillance and Suppression of Occupy Wall Street

February 16, 2016 by Susan Gaissert

We know when the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest movement began. On September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, approximately 1,000 activists gathered to "occupy" the space for a peaceful protest against the economic and social inequality suffered by "the 99%" and caused by the corruption and greed of "the 1%." The planning for OWS began months earlier. In July of 2011, Adbusters Media Foundation, a not-for-profit anti-consumerism magazine based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, published a poster calling for a demonstration against Wall Street, and the international precursors of the movement go back even further. We even know exactly when the FBI became involved.
Government surveillance of the OWS movement started before anybody showed up in Zuccotti Park. In late 2012, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) obtained FBI documents and reported them as "showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011." That is when the FBI met with the New York Stock Exchange and began notifying businesses that protests against them were imminent. The PCJF report also states that the Department of Homeland Security was part of the coordinated effort to warn corporate America about OWS.
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies conducted preventative actions in cities throughout the United States. Some were wholly unnecessary: "The FBI's Indianapolis division released a Potential Criminal Activity Alert' on September 15, 2011, even though they acknowledged that no specific protest date had been scheduled in Indiana," the PCJF report states. Other actions were entirely misplaced: the Richmond, Virginia FBI communicated information about the local OWS protest to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI obviously had not been there listening when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in a press conference held two days before the OWS demonstration began in Zuccotti Park, said, "People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we'll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it." To their eyes, the protestors were potential, and likely, terrorists.
In January of 2013, The Huffington Post reported reported on the FBI's surveillance of OWS, telling the story of Tim Franzen, a member of Occupy Atlanta who was investigated by the FBI to determine whether he "might have a cache of weapons for a future violent revolution." The Huffington Post article implies that the FBI targeted Franzen, who was 35 years old and a Quaker community organizer when he participated in OWS Atlanta, because of his past arrests and imprisonment for teenage drug use and involvement in robberies, stating that "the feds interviewed three different activists at their homes about his activities and beliefs." (Watch a live television interview with Tim Franzen after his arrest along with the other occupiers at Woodruff Park in Atlanta.)
The FBI took full advantage of its resources to investigate what it saw as the terroristic implications of OWS. The documents uncovered by PCJF show communication between the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), the Federal Reserve, and the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC). DSAC describes itself as "a strategic partnership between the US government and the US private industry that enhances communication and promotes the timely and effective exchange of security and intelligence information between the federal government and the private sector."
What timely security and intelligence information did DSAC feel it needed to communicate to Wall Street businesses about a nonviolent protest? According to Nicole Colson in a January 2013 article for The Socialist Worker, "despite the Occupy movement's nonviolent practicethe FBI labeled Occupy protests as potentially violent criminal actions (often by simply using the shorthand label of anarchist') or even terrorist threats. This later helped justify the police assaults on Occupy encampments in cities across the U.S."
The FBI's efforts paid off in just a few short months. On November 15, 2011, the New York Police Department began to evict the occupiers in Zuccotti Park after "a judge upheld the city's move to clear the park and bar the protesters from bringing back their tents or sleeping overnight," according to a New York Times article. The article includes Mayor Bloomberg's statement at the time; he said, "New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself . . . What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that."
What was really happening, though, and not just in New York, but in Occupy demonstrations all across the country, according to Naomi Klein, writing in The Guardian in December of 2012, was an FBI-instigated, big bank-coordinated, top-down crackdown that included "violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves." She states that the FBI documents "show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens."
The lesson here: when the authorities tell you "People have a right to protest," they don't really mean it. Your protest is very likely to be investigated and, as Mara Verhayden-Hilliard, executive director of PCJF, was quoted in The New York Times in December of 2012, "The collection of information on people's free-speech actions is being entered into unregulated databases, a vast storehouse of information widely disseminated to a range of law-enforcement and, apparently, private entities . . . people do not know when or how it may be used and in what manner." This must be stopped.

[Peter Lemkin]

What Micah White learned from the failure of Occupy Wall Street

Ahead of this week's appearance at the Toronto Reference Library, the Occupy co-instigator and author of The End Of Protest: A New Playbook For Revolution shares his ideas for the future of activism

by Adria Vasil
March 16, 2016
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Micah White




MICAH WHITE interview with NOW's Susan G. Cole at the Toronto Reference Library. Thursday, March 17. 7 pm.

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Micah White has been conducting experiments in revolutionary activism since he was 13, beginning with his refusal to stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an Equal Access Act fight to form an atheist club in high school. That last one landed him on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect.
Now the former Adbusters editor and co-instigator of the Occupy movement has some choice words for today's activists: protest is broken. It's time to revolutionize the pathway to social change.
NOW chatted with White about the power of spiritual epiphanies and the future of protest ahead of his appearance at the Toronto Reference Library on Thursday (March 17).
Not everyone knows that the Occupy movement started as an idea developed at Adbusters by you and Kalle Lasn....
Kalle and I wrote a tactical briefing that called for American activists to bring the tactics of [the Tahrir uprising in Egypt] and [the anti-austerity movement] in Spain to Wall Street to break the stranglehold that money has over our democracies. Our briefing captured the imagination of activists, and events quickly spiralled out of our control. Occupy Wall Street spread to 82 countries because few people knew the true origin of the movement. This was both an intentional strategy and a by-product of the horizontal and leaderless structure of the movement we'd called for in the original tactical briefing. The participants, and not the creators, controlled the destiny of the movement.
You say Occupy was a gift to global activists, both in its success and its failure. What illusions did it help bust up?
Occupy Wall Street was a nearly textbook example of a social movement that should have worked. But it didn't. That is why I call Occupy a constructive failure. The movement taught us that contemporary activism has been chasing an illusion: the idea that the most effective form of protest is to get millions of people into the streets because then our elected representatives will be forced to heed the wishes of the people. The first goal of my book is to shift the paradigms of protest by challenging activists to question this dominant theory of activism.
Organizers of recent climate marches would counter that the presence of millions on the streets around the globe pressured world leaders to take action on climate change. Do you totally reject that?
I certainly reject the notion that single-day, large-scale, docile marches exert any real pressure on global leaders. On the contrary, these events have become an integral part of the political spectacle designed to distract the people from pursuing an actual revolution, dissipating their energy and wasting their time. Rather than trying to build movements that "pressure" global leaders, it's time for activists to imagine how a social movement could replace global leaders.
You've said newer protest methods like the Clicktivism of Avaaz are ruining left-wing activism, too. Are you seeing any signs of innovative activism percolating?
I see signs of innovative activism happening at the edges of politics both on the left and the right. Social movements require a willing historical moment, a contagious mood and a new tactic. A new tactic can be consciously created by importing new protest behaviours from abroad, like we did with Occupy Wall Street. I just returned from Bali, where I gave a talk to 250 international high school student activists from across East Asia. I was amazed at the sophistication of their thinking about activism, especially the students from Singapore and China. I also met with some of the organizers of Tolak Reklamasi, a social movement whose impetus to stop the destruction of a grove of trees I found eerily similar to Turkey's Occupy Gezi. The innovative aspect was the movement's use of pre-existing indigenous local governance structures at the neighbourhood level to quickly scale up the protests.
Your book is surprisingly spiritual. Your "unified theory of revolution" suggests that prayer, ritual and faith in divine intercession may be one of the most effective forms of revolutionary activism. That's quite a shift from your early days fighting for -atheist rights.
Social movements are a collective awakening, or a contagious epiphany, that spreads throughout society. Anyone who has experienced one of these magical moments has felt this. The spiritual side of protest was openly discussed by many participants of Occupy Wall Street. My shift away from strict atheism is motivated by the experience of Occupy and the conviction that secular materialism has dominated leftist revolutionary theory for too long, preventing activists from developing new tactics that go beyond physical action.
A palpable spiritual vibe is definitely spreading in parts of the activist community. But a lot of activists are staunch atheists. What is the big spiritual epiphany that you hope to see become an "emotional contagion"?
The epiphany that changes the world is the loss of fear. This spiritual sensation of fearlessness, of submission to a higher purpose, quickly inspires people to break their old habits and start living without dead time. Atheists can rationally resist the spiritual side of social movements, but they still experience it emotionally and benefit politically. Creating epiphanies is a form of warfare that all activists, religious and secular, must learn to master.
You write that environmentalists have fallen down a rabbit hole of computer modelling and proving climate abstractions, and that there's a direct line between today's "technocratic environmentalism" and a future hijacked by disaster capitalism and authoritarianism. Could you explain?
Environmentalism is overly dominated by scientific empiricism. This has led to an arguably failed activist approach based on abstract goals, like 350 ppb of CO2 in the atmosphere. I see the potential for technocratic environmentalism to be used to justify totalitarianism, or eco-fascism. Given the dramatic scale of the problem, and if the apocalyptic storms continue to grow in strength, we may see the rise of dark forces that cynically use the crisis to gain power. Ultimately, only a planetary social movement can mitigate climate change in an equitable way. And I believe it is important to resist efforts by leaders who may use environmentalism as an excuse to restrict civil liberties. The true revolutionary goal for environmentalism therefore ought to be a global people's democracy capable of mitigating the climate catastrophe and facilitating the resettlement of climate refugees by breaking down borders.
How can a shift to "mental environmentalism" save the movement?
The pollution of our minds is the source of the pollution of our world. The biggest pollutant of our mental environment is advertising that poisons our collective unconscious with the vices of consumerism.
Your Boutique Activist Consultancy offers full-service social movement creation. Can you talk about some of the campaigns you're working on?
Our model is unique: we rely on people worldwide who contribute a small amount of money each month to empower us to work on the campaigns that matter most. Instead of becoming beholden to clients who dictate our aims, we rely on patrons worldwide who free us to follow our passions. The End Of Protest is the first major result of this crowd-patron model. Going forward, the birth of a women-led World Party is the main revolutionary scenario we're working on and the one I'm most excited about.
What gives you hope for the future?
Revolution is one of the most complex, recurring phenomena of human social existence. Although revolutions have been happening nearly every two or three generations since the dawn of civilization, they remain very difficult to predict. In fact, revolutions often occur when they appear least likely. I'm optimistic about the future of protest because I know that revolution is an indispensable part of being human and it is one of the only ways that the people can inaugurate new eras of history.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

[Peter Lemkin]

US judge orders FBI, CIA, NSA to disclose Occupy spying

US agencies have 60 days to turn over data related to surveillance of income inequality protesters in Philadelphia.

Demonstrators shout at police officers as the Occupy Philly encampment in 2011 [Joseph Kaczmarek/AP]A US judge has ordered the FBI, CIA, and NSA to turn over any potential evidence they spied on Occupy Philadelphia protesters.
The American agencies have 60 days to comply with the order from Senior US District Judge Berle Schiller. The order follows another right-to-know case that revealed the FBI was monitoring Occupy Wall Street activities in New York and spin-off efforts from Florida to Alaska.
Civil rights lawyer Paul Hetznecker hopes to learn if the agencies spied on demonstrators who camped outside Philadelphia City Hall for seven weeks in 2011 to protest against income inequality.
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"The government should not be investigating its citizens simply because they've raised their voices in dissent, whether it's against government or corporate policy," Hetznecker said on Tuesday.
The FBI has turned over seven redacted pages in response to his right-to-know lawsuit.
The judge plans to review the unredacted FBI document and information from the CIA and NSA to determine if the material should be made public.
Press investigations have shown that federal intelligence agencies have infiltrated Muslim groups, civil rights groups, and other lawful organisations since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hetznecker argued.
A right-to-know request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in 2012 led the FBI to disclose its efforts to monitor Occupy Wall Street activities.
Occupy Wall Street and democratic protest
The documents released showed the FBI sharing information about Occupy's plans with banks, businesses, and police, even as it acknowledged the protesters' non-violent mission.
The US Attorney's Office in Philadelphia, which is defending the government, declined to comment on the pending case. The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper first reported Tuesday on Schiller's order late last week.