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

[Peter Lemkin]

I've mentioned it once before...but this thread is large [with only a few following faithfully]....but there is a regular show on WBAI Radio [streaming on internet and available in their archives] called Occupied Wall Street News. Very good. Here is the latest show.

[Peter Lemkin]

[/url][url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UG8RowZcks&feature=youtu.be]

[Peter Lemkin]

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[Peter Lemkin]

NYPD Brands Occupy Wall Street Couple 'Professional Agitators'

NYPD Brands Occupy Wall Street Couple 'Professional Agitators'
Allison Kilkenny on July 5, 2012 - 10:15 AM ET

The New York Daily News recently exposed a story centered around two Occupy Wall Street activists, Christina Gonzalez and Matthew Swaye, who have been targeted by the NYPD.

In speaking with Occupy activists, it quickly becomes clear that protesters are extremely paranoid when it comes to the topic of the police. Many activists, based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, believe undercover police are constantly in their midst, or target demonstrators perceived to be the "leaders" of Occupy, even though, as the group has emphatically stated since its inception, the movement has no leader.

These suspicions are not without foundation. Undercovers do attempt to infiltrate Occupy, and most recently, two agents did so quite quite successfully in the case of the NATO 3.

Gonzalez and Swaye are a unique example of police harassment because they weren't exactly perceived as leaders, and they weren't suspected of committing a crime. Rather, the NYPD branded them "professional agitators," whatever that means. Police have been circulating flyers that look suspiciously similar to wanted posters, featuring the couple's mug shots (the two have been arrested for civil disobedience in the past), warning officers to "Be aware that above subjects are known professional agitators," and notes the "subjects' MO" is to videotape officers "performing routine stops and post on Youtube."

Gonzalez frequently videotapes police activity, such as stop and searches of vehicles, and other actions she perceives as police harassment. Here is video of Gonzalez filming police who are idling in front of her home.


Download Video as MP4



It's not a crime to videotape police officers in New York City, and the "routine stops" detailed on the flyers is a departmental euphemism for the controversial Stop and Frisk action, a policy of racial profiling Gonzalez expressed her disdain for to me back in January at an Occupy protest in Harlem.

The mood at the protest that day was tensenot in the usual melodrama played out between police and protesters but between pro-Obama supporters and those criticizing the president's policies.

However, Gonzalez did not seem intimidated by the uneasy environment and she certainly didn't mince words. First, she criticized the president for attending a swank fundraiser.

"I'm outraged that the president of my country, who I voted for, who hasn't done a damn thing for this country, has the nerve to come to the iconic Apollo Theater in Harlem and charge $100-to-$25,000 for a seat to hear him speakabout what, I don't know, because I can't afford to get inside."

Then, she moved on to criticizing the NYPD's policy of stop-and-frisk.

"Meanwhile, in this city right now, the NYPD are using these [Stop And Frisk US 250] forms, which is basically the new Jim Crow, which says that they have the ability to go out and stop people in the streets, almost 700,000 people they stopped in 2011, 85 percent of them were black or brown men. There's something wrong with that."

Here's Gonzalez discussing Stop and Frisk with Democracy Now!:


Download Video as MP4



At the risk of stating the obvious, I feel it's important to stress that filming police officers and peacefully protesting (even when using a loud, authoritative tone) is perfectly legal. Gonzalez and Swaye weren't secretly recording police, but rather exercising their rights as citizens.

Yet, now the couple is being treated as criminals.

New York Daily News:

"What we do is not a crime," said Swaye, adding that the NYPD flyer looks more like a "wanted poster" than a police department advisory.

"It's more insidious than a wanted poster because it's undefined," Swaye said. "People can take their pick: Are we dangerous, criminal, insane?"

Of course, this wouldn't be the first time the NYPD treated a citizen filming their activity as a criminal.

In 2009, police arrested blogger and freelance photographer Antonio Musumeci on the steps of a New York federal courthouse for the crime of "unauthorized photography on federal property."

The result of his arrest was the NYPD issuing him a citation, and the NYCLU countering with a lawsuit that resulted in a settlement in which the federal government agreed to issue a directive acknowledging that it is completely legal to film and/or photograph on federal property.

NYCLU:

On Oct. 13, 2010, a federal judge signed a settlement in which the federal government agreed that no federal statutes or regulations bar photography of federal courthouses from publicly accessible property. It agreed to issue a nationwide directive to members of the Federal Protective Service (the agency responsible for all government buildings) instructing them about the rights of photographers. Since Musumeci had been charged with violating a regulation that applied to all federal property, not just courthouses, the NYCLU hold the position that the settlement in effect covers photography og all federal buildings.

NYPD spokeswoman Inspector Kim Royster denied the poster was an attempt to silence the couple, and told the New York Daily News it was designed only to alert officers at the stationhouse.

Alert them of what?

Surely, police officers know there are individuals who call themselves activists who use all kinds of tools to monitor police behavior (not just videotaping, but Twitter too).

While it's illegal to arrest anyone for filming police in New York City, the NYPD have circumvented those inconsequential legal barriers to launch a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Gonzalez and Swaye, who simply attempted to hold police accountable for their actions. That duty doesn't make them professional agitators but rather concerned citizens.

The couple, who met at a Pace University rally in December and shared their first kiss on New Year's Eve at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, told the New York Daily News, "There's nothing radical about us."

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As the 2012 presidential election season heats up, new campaign finance figures reveal Wall Street is heavily investing in President Obama. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the Democratic National Committee and Obama have together raised more than $14 million from the securities and investment industry, compared to nearly $9.5 million contributed to his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. This makes Wall Street the third most generous industry donating to Obama's re-election efforts. The news comes amidst ongoing investigations by the Justice Department into massive financial fraud by some of the nation's largest banks. Yet four years after the 2008 economic crisis, not a single top Wall Street executive has gone to jail.
Well, to look at how the politically powerful enjoy virtual immunity from the consequences of even the most egregious crimes, we're joined here in New York by Glenn Greenwald. Familiar to all Democracy Now! viewers and listeners, he's a constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com. He writes about Wall Street's impunity in his book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, which was released in paperback this week.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Always great to be back.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Before we go to the bankers, it's the 10th anniversary of President Bush's signing of the PATRIOT Act, and your book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, comes out this week, as well [Correction: The PATRIOT Act was signed into law on October 26, 2001]. Talkyour reflections after 10 years of the PATRIOT Act, what it's done to the civil liberties of Americans?
GLENN GREENWALD: This is the most remarkable thing, to me, about the PATRIOT Act. When the PATRIOT Act was first enacted, it was obviously in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And even with the sort of fear and hysteria that was prevailing in the country at the time, the PATRIOT Act was considered remarkably controversial, even for that time period. When it was enacted, there were all kinds of editorials warning about the surveillance capabilities that we were investing in in the United States that were unique, warnings and concerns about how pervasive the surveillance would become, about how it could be conducted without oversight. It was really a very controversial provision. The PATRIOT Act had become sort of the symbol of Bush-Cheney radicalism and the way in which the fears of 9/11 and terrorism were being exploited.
Fast-forward 10 years later, we haven't had another single successful terrorist attack on American soil, and yet now the PATRIOT Act is completely uncontroversial. It gets renewed every four years. Even in the wake of 9/11, the warnings and concerns of it were sufficiently strong that they put in sunset provisions, saying we don't want this to be a permanent state of affairs, it has to be renewed every four years. It now gets renewed with no debate. The votes are something like 89 to 10 in the Senate to renew it, with no reforms, even though there's mass of evidence of systemic abuse. The Democrats and Republicans both renew it when they control Congress. Obama's administration demanded its renewal without anywithout any modifications. And it just goes to show how quickly what's conceived as radical and what is radical becomes so normalized and a permanent fixture in our political landscape. That, I think, is the really disturbing lesson about the PATRIOT Act.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I wanted to ask youwe've just been talking with Amy about the situation in Spain with Bankia, which looks like it's becoming a combination of Bank of America and Countrywide all rolled into one
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: in terms of its responsibility in the mortgage crisis there in Spain, as well. But I want to read through some of the recent settlements that some banks in the United States and in other parts of the worldBarclays. Barclays, less than a week after, agreed to pay to $450 million to settle accusations that it had tried to manipulate key interest rates. Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550 million to settle charges of securities fraudone of the largest penalties against a Wall Street firm by the Securities and Exchange Commission. June 2011, Bank of America announced it would pay $8.5 billion and set aside an additional $5.5 billion to settle claims by investors who bought toxic mortgages from the banking giant. One after another, these banking companies and Wall Street companies keep paying these apparently huge fines, but no one goes to jail.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: No one is prosecuted criminally for these actions.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, I think it's important to realize that, although these figures sound large, in one sense$200 million seems like a lot of money, $500 million seems like a lot of moneyin the scheme of what these banks are earning across the globe and the magnitude of the fraud, they're really little more than blips on their balance sheets. I mean, they basically end up writing these things off as a cost of doing business, or really, more accurately, a cost of doing fraud. The amount of money they've made on their fraudulent activities vastly outweighs the amount they paid in fines. Now, some of those fines are more significant than that. They're certainly not negligible once you get into the billion-dollar range. But even so, these banks are still extraordinarily profitable. They're in fact making more money in some cases than they even were prior to the 2008 crisis. And so, when you look at what the institutional incentives are for banking executives, it is still very much to take these huge risks and gamble, as we saw with, you know, JPMorgan, and there might be $9 billion trading losses that were undetected by regulators.
And the reason is exactly what you said, which is what is supposed to deter true securities fraud is not that these banks may end up paying some fines institutionally, because that really doesn't provide enough of incentive, obviously, as that list of yours proves. What is really supposed to deter systemic violations of the securities laws is the fact that they're criminal offenses. I mean, Congress made them into felonies in the wake of the Great Depression. And yet, there has been zero legal criminal accountability from the financial crisis. And that's the reason that this behavior continues. It's exactly because these executives knew that they could take these huge risks and even break laws and pay no real price, and that's what happened. And it's not just a travesty of justice that we haven't punished them for past transgressions. The real danger is that we're continuing to send the signal to the world's most powerful financial actors that they don't have any fear of criminal accountability when they commit these obvious crimes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I want to play a comment by President Obama on why his administration has not prosecuted any senior financial executives. He was speaking at a White House press conference in October of last year.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, first, on the issue ofon the issue of prosecutions on Wall Street, one of the biggest problems about the collapse of Lehmans and the subsequent financial crisis and the whole subprime lending fiasco is that a lot of that stuff wasn't necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless. That's exactly why we needed to pass Dodd-Frank, to prohibit some of these practices. You know, the financial sector is very creative, and they are always looking for ways to make money. That's their job. And if there are loopholes and rules that can be bent and arbitrage to be had, they will take advantage of it. So, you know, without commenting on particular prosecutionsobviously, that's not my job, that's the attorney general's jobyou know, I think part of people's frustrations, part of my frustration was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren't necessarily against the law, but they had a huge destructive impact.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama on why his administration has not prosecuted any senior financial executives. Your response?
GLENN GREENWALD: That answer is incredibly deceitful and misleading in several important respects. First of all, the massive orgy of deregulation that took place that let Wall Street do many things that for decades had been criminal, took place in the 1990s during the Clinton administration and under Democratic Party control and was led by people like Larry Summers and the whole acolytes of Robert Rubin, such as Timothy Geithner, who ended up being empowered by President Obama at the highest levels of his economic policy team. So this idea that he is somehow disturbed by or in opposition to the kind of deregulation that made a lot of this behavior un-criminal is incredibly misleading, given that those are the people who continue to run his administration.
Secondly, you notice that he said "some of this behavior" was not criminal. The unspoken implication of it, though, is that much of it was criminal. And, in fact, I just did an interview with Eliot Spitzer, who of course was probably the only elected official in the last two or three decades to put serious fear in the heart of Wall Street, when he was a prosecutor and attorney general and then governor. And I had said, as part of this interview, you know, I know that there's this notion that prosecutions might be difficult of Wall Street executives, but that's not a reason to refrain from doing them. And he actually objected and said, "You know what? Prosecutions would not be difficult." And he's right. We have emails from Wall Street executives where internally they're mocking the assets that they're representing to the public as being these sterling assets, and they're mocking them as garbage and junk. They knew that they were committing fraud. Credit agencies were purposely shielding these assets, knowing that they were junk, as well.
And then a third issue that he said was, you know, "It's not my job to comment on prosecutions." That's particularly ironic, given that President Obama expressly argued and instructed the Justice Department not to prosecute Bush officials for the crimes that were done as part of the war on terror. He's made comments about Bradley Manning's prosecution and decreed him guilty in public. And yet, suddenly, when it comes to Wall Street executives, who funded his 2008 campaign and are funding his 2012 campaign, he suddenly becomes very shy and reticent and says, "It's not my job to comment on prosecutions." He is the leader of the party. He's the leader of the country. And the fact that we haven't prosecuted Wall Street executives is one of the greatest national disgraces. You see in Spain, as we heard in that report, some effort to move away from that. That is his responsibility to demand that justice be applied equally. The vow that he made when he announced his presidencyrun for the presidency, in the first paragraph of his announcement, he said the era of Scooter Libby justice would be over. Scooter Libby justice means, if you're sufficiently powerful, you don't pay a price for your crimes. That was the promise that he made when he ran, and that's the promise that he's so woefully failed to fulfill.

[Peter Lemkin]

Protesters in Spain are celebrating a major victory after the country's high court opened a criminal investigation into Rodrigo Rato, the former head of Spain's biggest mortgage lender, Bankia. Rato, also the ex-chief of the International Monetary Fund, has been ordered to appear in court to face criminal fraud accusations related to the downfall of Bankia, a banking giant at the center of Spain's economic meltdown. The news marks a rare case where a former bank executive is facing a criminal probe related to the global financial crisis. Reporting from Madrid, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman speaks with Madrid-based activist Olmo Gálvez, an organizer with ¡Democracia Real YA!, or Real Democracy Now!, part of the May 15 movement in Spain.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Amy Goodman is in Madrid, Spain, where protesters are celebrating a major victory after that country's high court opened a criminal investigation into the former head of Spain's biggest mortgage lender. Rodrigo Rato, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, has been ordered to appear in court to face criminal fraud accusations related to the downfall of Bankia, a banking giant that has sought tens of billions of dollars in bailout money. The news marks a rare case where a former executive is facing a criminal probe related to the global financial crisis.

In addition to Rato, 32 other former banking officials and executives have been accused of fraud, price fixing, and falsifying accounts in a lawsuit brought by one of the country's smaller political parties. Spain's attorney general also announced a probe into Bankia last month.

The bank's failure led to a government takeover, so hundreds of thousands of small investors lose their savings. At a shareholder meeting last week, protesters condemned Rodrigo Rato, who was forced to resign in May.

PROTESTER 1: [translated] When you held your speech and you talked about Rodrigo Rato, you said he was very professional regarding Bankia. I can only ask you for one thing as a shareholder: please, don't be a professional.

PROTESTER 2: [translated] A lot of people are struggling, not only with their mortgage, but with their savings. And this is a frantic fight. No one knows the answer to who or how, but everyone is losing their money.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: For more, we're joined by Amy Goodman in Madrid by Democracy Now! videostream.

Welcome, Amy. Tell us what the latestthese latest developments have been in the unfolding Bankia scandal.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is extremely significant, Juan. The people who helped to make this happen, this momentwell, while people in the United States were celebrating Independence Day, the word came down that the head of Bankia, which may be responsible for the largest banking fraud scandal in Spain's historyand as you pointed out, he's the former head of the IMF before Strauss-Kahn. This is a very significant figure. He's a close ally of the current prime minister of Spain, the party, the PP, or PP party. This is a scandal that's rocking the country.

But who made this happen, to begin with? And this is who we're going to hear from today, are members of the equivalent of the U.S. Occupy movement who got so frustrated with the 1 percent not being held accountable, in light of the numbers of evictions in this country and the financial crisis that they, like we in the United States, based here in Spain, they decided to fund a lawsuit that ultimately led the attorney general to open this investigation, which is close to an indictment of Rodrigo Ratoextremely significant. In fact, just this morning, I was speaking with the former attorney general of Spain, and I said to him, "How significant is this?" And he said, "Ah, this is just the beginning."

So, let's turn first to a young man I interviewed yesterday, as the news was coming down. His name is Olmo Gálvez. He is with the M15 movement. That's for May 15th. May 15, 2011, was the day protesters came into the streets here in Spain. He was profiled when Time magazine named protester as Person of the Year. He was the person they profiled in Spain. This is Olmo Gálvez talking about the significance of Rodrigo Rato being called into court, facing criminal charges that could land him in jail for years. And a message to people in the United States, a real message from the protesters here, the Occupy movement here, is this is the kind of action that Occupy movements can be involved in around the world that can shake the 1 percent. This is Olmo Gálvez.

OLMO GÁLVEZ: Rodrigo Rato was a very important person of the PP, now the ruling government in Spain. And then he became the head of the IMF before Strauss-Kahn. Then, when he left the officehe was kind of kicked out somehow, or at least he lefthe came back to Spain, and the PP, the same political party, they put it as the head of this merger of seven banks. Actually they were called bajas de ahorros, thatthey wouldn't recognize that they were bankrupt or that they were going through very strong financial difficulties. And what they did is they kept moving forward with their agenda. So they put Rodrigo Rato to make sure that everyone trusted that that was going to be a very good conglomerate.

And they started sellingwell, one of the things they did is they went public. And there are evidences that the numbers that they showed their investors, which were normally very small investorsthere were no big institutional investors or international investors because no one believed those accounts. So they sold their shares to their own depositors in the bank. And two years later on, they recognized that the whole group was bankrupt, that they had no money. The other thing they did was selling smallwell, they were selling it as a deposit, but they were selling a product. It's quite complicated. It's called a perpetual debt. A perpetual debt is not a deposit. It's capital of that corporation. But they were selling it to peoplesome of them couldn't read; some of them had, well, difficulties understanding the product; and many elderlies. And that was a big scandal that wasn't in the media. They were not covering that.

And we were pointing at Rodrigo Rato, saying that what youwell, it wasn't only him, of course. Now, just today, Rodrigo Rato and another 30 people from this Bankia, a now bankrupt public corporation, theythe fiscalía general said that they are investigated them.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say "we" were investigating them

OLMO GÁLVEZ: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: describe who "we" are, you are.

OLMO GÁLVEZ: Well, I normally talked about "we" because this is not something one person is doing. It's a whole movement of people. The action against Rodrigo Rato, the ex-head of the IMF who is now in Bankia, that's how it took part. It was a group of lawyers and activists from different groups. They thought that they wouldwe could sue Rodrigo Rato. And then they started distributing the message. Most of the people agreed that it was a good thing, that we should support it. So, we did it all together.

AMY GOODMAN: I don't think people in the rest of the world and the United States understand that it was grassroots movements, it was the activists, that actually got Rodrigo Rato indicted today.

OLMO GÁLVEZ: Yes. Well, actually, not today. Today it was institutions always come a few months or a few weeks later. But the fiscal general del estado, theor, public general attorney

AMY GOODMAN: The attorney general of Spain.

OLMO GÁLVEZ: The attorney general, he started investigating Rodrigo Rato, or he said publicly that he was investigating Rodrigo Rato, one day after we put the legal suit. And

AMY GOODMAN: One day after you sued him.

OLMO GÁLVEZ: Yes. In order to finance that, we did it through a crowd funding platform.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

OLMO GÁLVEZ: We needed about 15,000

AMY GOODMAN: Crowd funding platform?

OLMO GÁLVEZ: Yes. We needed about 15,000 euros for legal proceeds. And mostwell, all the lawyers are working pro bono, but they still neededthere are still some expenses to do that. That's a very expensive trial. And in order to get that money, what we did is open a crowd funding platform, and we asked everyone for, well, a little amount of money, from five euros, 20 euros, 30 euros. And in less than 24 hours, we were able to raise the money.

AMY GOODMAN: How much were you able to raise?

OLMO GÁLVEZ: It was aboutI think it was about 15,000 euros. And all the accounts are disclosure, and you can see what are the expenditures going and everything. So it's part of this collective movement, this collective action.

AMY GOODMAN: It's about 20,000 U.S. dollars that you raised.

OLMO GÁLVEZ: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Olmo Gálvez, an organizer with the ¡Democracia Real YA!, or Real Democracy Now!, part of the May 15th movement in Madrid.

[Magda Hassan]

Did NYPD Manufacture a Murder Tie to Occupy Wall Street because Its Terror Myth Is Dying?

Posted on July 11, 2012 by emptywheel
Let's start with this. NYPD got its ass handed to it yesterday.
Specifically, Justin Elliott provided thedefinitive debunking of Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly's repeated claims that their multimillion dollar Muslim profiling program has done anything to thwart the 14or rather 3terrorist attacks on NY since 9/11.
That wasn't the end of the ass-handing, though. After Elliott's piece, NYPD's spokesperson Paul Browne started trollingElliott's comments, pretending the NYPD hadn't repeatedly claimed to have stopped 14or rather 3terrorist attacks with their vast counterterrroism apparatus.
Elliott debunked that, too.
Mayor Mike, meanwhile, was backtrackingor perhaps forwardtrackingwildly, in another attempt to pretend the NYPD's core terror myth wasn't a carefully crafted myth.
And Ray Kelly? He hasn't been seen to ask him about this ass-handing; maybe he was crying in a bar somewhere?
Meanwhile, last night, during the All Star Game, a new myth started.

Murder! DNA! Occupy Wall Street!

Starting with NBC, followed by a slew of other predominantly NY outlets, the press reported a flimsy storysourced to law enforcementclaiming that DNA found on a chain left at an Occupy-related protest earlier this year matched DNA found at the site of a murder of a Pretty White Woman. Most of the stories didn't include a caveat until the last paragraphs of the story that there's no evidence suggesting the DNA belonged to any of the people who left the chain.

There's no immediate evidence that the DNA belongs to the protesters who chained open the gates.

And none of them pointed out that the chain of custody suggested by the stories made the evidence useless in a trial (NBC, though, noted that NYPD has a suspect whose DNA doesn't match any of this).
In short, it was facially a ridiculous smear, leaked by law enforcement (cough, NYPD), made to suggest in the press something NYPD has no evidence for in realitythat OWS are murderers.
No one, by the way, led with what should have been the blaring headline.

NYPD collects DNA at sites of civil disobedience

In short, the press got their asses handed to them.
Just so the NYPD would have company, I guess.
But then, later today, the NYT (which has was slow in covering Ray Kelly's Muslim profiling, but has pointed to other problems with Kelly's NYPD), did some rather interesting reporting.

The DNA that investigators initially believed was recovered from skin cells on the slain woman's portable compact disc player and from the chain found after the March protest came from a laboratory supervisor at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the person briefed on the matter said.
"The O.C.M.E. tainted the samples and it was the O.C.M.E. supervisor's whose DNA was on both," the person said.
But Ellen S. Borakove, a spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner's Office, said, "We've excluded all medical examiner personnel." She added that the office was still working on the test.

Now, either something's funky with this report, or this is a giant scam. After all, wouldn't the match come from a database search? How would both samplespluralbe tainted unless they weren't working from a database match but rather from some invented reason to check the DNA samples side by side?
I don't know the answer to that, but this much we do know. The NYPD has been known to plant evidence before (in drug cases). The NYPD loves to engage in myth-making to justify its heavy-handed policing (not to mention its budget). And, the NYPD has tried to insinuate Occupy Wall Street were terrorists in the past.
Perhaps it's time for the press who reported this so breathlessly to start reporting on the underlying cop-work here?
Update: Thanks to Jay Ackroyd for the photo.
http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/07/11/did...-is-dying/

[Peter Lemkin]

:pointlaugh:In other words the headline should have run: NY Chief Medical Examiner [now Chief suspect] DNA found in two major NYPD cases!

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

Department of Homeland Catheters Spying on Occupy Wallstreet

By Tracy Turner

opednews.com

If you do a Google search for Department of Homeland Security spying on Occupy, it returns 886,000 results from the open Internet.

DHS is not tracking Bin Laden cohorts across America; Department of Homeland Security is tracking Occupiers. BTW, reading keyboard strokes from space is very old cold war technology. Warrantless, DHS sees everything electronic done by Occupy, absolutely everything. Read Jeffrey T. Richelson (1990). America's Secret Eyes in Space: The U.S. Keyhole Spy Satellite Program. The book is old, but it gives you a sense of what satellites can do now, like recognize your face and positively identify you when you look up; when the satellite is further towards the horizon, you don't have to look up to have face-recognition software pick your face out of a crowd of Occupiers. Just think of the Hubble Space Telescope pointed at the middle of a crowd of Occupiers.

The police, FBI and DHS don't follow you, anymore, they arrive ahead of you repeatedly, whether in black and whites or in unmarked cars. Just ordinary city cops or county sheriffs have been given both training and electronics surveillance equipment to LoJack our cars with GPS tracking devices and transmitters to transmit conversations from inside the car. The large masses of police in riot gear, arriving at the precise GPS coordinates where the Occupiers were planning to meet, the police mass-presence forming hours ahead of Occupy's schedule is anecdotal evidence of electronic surveillance, aka warrantless eavesdropping?

Shut off your cell phone, take the battery out? Not use a computer, pad, cell phone or palm device, ever, to communicate with other Occupiers? DHS has trained regular law enforcement with how to electronically bug your house, your car, your friend's houses and cars. Even local police have James Bond-like equipment and technology

The Department of Homeland Security and all the law enforcement agencies they have trained will go right through the open Internet, right through your firewall if you have one, right through your WEP encryption if it is turned on and read your data, monitor your keystrokes. When the first few people show up at your (our) massive Occupy event, the police will have "occupied" us first" they will have estimated crowd size, borrowed overtime officers from adjoining communities and will be standing there ready to break human heads. The event has been cancelled via warrantless surveillance before it started.


There have been numerous study groups and focus groups used to rank words; the word freedom is the strongest word in the English language. Bond, James Bond. How much DHS-James Bond hardware was out and about, listening, peeping, videotaping? How many DHS cyber-nerds are Telnetting into our email boxes, the Occupiers email boxes? Some freedom.

The so-called war on terror has become a pre-emptive war on all of us, particularly a pre-emptive war on Occupy. DHS cowards, fascist police doing thought control, trying to enforce the corporatist government agenda upon the unwilling" Couple that with the broken noses and broken jaws the Chicago Police inflicted on the NATO summit Occupiers and antiwar protestors, and you have a brutal, oppressive fascist regime. Don't American's overthrow brutal fascist regimes? When exactly did we become one?

DHS is touted in the biased news media as some kind of national heroes. Instead, they do the shadow covert warrantless coward surveillance" it gives the coward class a place to work in a so-called good job. DHS, Hitler's brownshirts" How does an ordinary citizen overthrow the brutality and oppression of DHS and the Chicago Police?

Corporations like an un-named college offer courses in National Security. Can't make it in Wal-Mart, rejected by the police and military recruiters? Department of Homeland Security is for you"

The military and the Police have benchmarks: physical training, IQ tests, psychological tests that people have to be capable of a certain level or standard. The Department of Homeland Security * is * a terrorist organization, waging a war of psychological terror on the American populace. DHS is a group, a class of cowards who wage war against Occupy or any subsequent group that arises like Occupy. How much of the MSM bias towards Occupy was and is instigated by DHS and the corporate loyalists? Patriotism circa 2012 is corporate loyalism masquerading as patriotism. My God, those occupiers and old hippie activists are having a leftward thought and using leftward words, let's go get them! The tools of the corporatists are mainly reading people's texts, emails and tweets; 98% of Americans think their lives are private, that they are using the Internetwork alone.

Local law enforcement can, through Homeland Security, crack any password of any kind for Facebook, twitter, linked in, your email account or your web space. Most of America uses coke or Pepsi as their password, but even the most sophisticated, 16-digit password can be broken easily by the NSA; in our security-obsessed culture, Homeland Security can and does access NSA password cracking computers to Telnet into people's online accounts and read the messages.

The DHS spying, the police and sheriffs and state police spying, the DHS agents showing up and kettling the Occupiers is oppression of First Amendment rights. Romney said, "Corporations are people, my friend". The police kettling maneuvers are peopling my friend. Citizens' United money is free speech, but we are going to surveil, kettle, pepper spray and baton the free speech first amendment rights right out of you, because Corporations are people, my friend" The Supreme Court gives free speech to Monsanto and Bain Capital, but DHS surveillance and police kettling people like fish in a net are all the free speech the rest of us will ever have? Is that how it works, Romney?

America is a place, that even if you never finished High School and cannot read and write, you can sign on the dotted X, get a Federally insured student loan, and attend an un-named college and major in Homeland Security. America is like magic; you apply yourself and become a crotch groper at the airport for TSA. With a certificate from a certain private college, even if you cannot read and write, you can teach police and sheriffs to eavesdrop.

Police and Sheriffs have black and white cars, generally. Their motto is, "To Protect and Serve". Department of Homeland Security's motto is "Preserving Our Freedoms".

Does Preserving Our Freedoms mean preserving our expected right to privacy? DHS - Preserving Our Freedoms" What a misnomer. In 2011, Department of Homeland Security spy-hardware and local law enforcement listened in on a private conversation I had with a friend of mine. I'm an activist, a progressive-socialist; most of my friends are some form of liberal-brained people, some of them are as activist as myself or more so. Not me personally, but some of my friends were" how do you say this? Their actions were written memos on the mayor's desk, the police watch commanders desk, discussed privately by city council, one was even a phone call to the governor.

I met with a friend once when I suspected I was being surveilled. My friend was not aware we were being eavesdropped upon by local law. I was not sure, but suspected the police had bugged my car. Our eavesdroppers heard every word my friend said" He spoke openly and painfully about his HIV condition" He talked about the hassle of wearing catheters" He talked about how much he misses sex with women, how lonely he gets" He talked about how painful it is when he gets aroused while wearing a catheter. He talked about the expense of his HIV antivirals, the struggle to stay alive, financially; the financial struggle itself.

My car had been stolen three days earlier, had disappeared mysteriously then shown up just as mysteriously in a place where I shop. The police said they were doing a big favor to me, giving me back my car without any impound fees.

For the next three days, I saw more law enforcement in my vicinity than I've ever seen in my life. Right after my friends' "confiding" in me, law enforcement showed up at my house, told me they were impounding my car. I gave them my keys; they retrieved something from under the front seat and changed their mind about impounding my car. Words cannot describe the stress I felt about being surveilled. Words cannot describe how much I distrust local law enforcement. To Protect and Serve needs to be replaced with to oppress free speech, to obliterate all expectation of human privacy anywhere at any time. To serve the right wing corporate master and obliterate the US Constitution. To entice, entrap and manipulate the left into a for-profit-prison-industrial-complex.

DHS and local law enforcent use the Patriot Act and all their new hardware and warrantless surveillance laws in ways that have nothing to do with Arabic Terrorists or Randy Weaver groups. I'm aware of a man in my neighborhood that went to prison for making a terrorist threat; he will have the word terror etched into his criminal record even long after he dies. To Protect and Serve, Preserving Our Freedom" Two brothers drink beer and get into a fight. One of them goes to prison for over five years and becomes a registered terrorist. We used to send guys like that to a drunk tank overnight; sometimes they were not even finger-printed and booked.

Many articles on opednews.com are ultra-critical of the Democrats, of Obama. People want to blame Bush for everything, to pretend it is all okay now, just re-elect Obama. Please try to get past man drinks beer, man is a drunk and deserves what he gets. He said something vulgar when he was drunk, he's a terrorist? Really? A lot of America thinks just like that. If we are going to drop the bar that low with the Patriot Act, where do we lower the bar to, next? Congress and Bush passed the Patriot Act and formed DHS to stop terrorists; Mohamed Atta was used as an example of a terrorist, along with 18 other men used as our national excuse for passing the Patriot Act, forming up TSA and DHS.

What was police DHS logic for charging an elderly grandfather with terrorism and sending him to the prison-for-profit-industrial-system? He is the father of a lady cop, the father in law of a man cop; he cannot afford a good lawyer so they put him in prison for terrorism. In our Orwellian and Huxley Brave New 1984 World, drunk in public or disturbing the peace will not suffice, charge him with terrorism so he can be compared to Mohamed Atta the rest of his life and even after that. Grandpa, who loves his grandkids to pieces, attends Catholic confession every week along with Mass, is a terrorist. Someone heard him say bad words when he was drunk on beer, lock him up for terrorism"


You too can go to private college; grope crotches for TSA, spy on HIV-infected men talking about catheter pain and romantic loneliness. We should all feel so free, so secure. Local law once could have let a drunk sleep it off and go home, given him a signatory card to go to AA meetings for 30 days to have his charges dropped. Does it matter whether he was charged with Terrorist Threat under Bush or Obama or Romney? Look at what we have become" Maybe we need a new reality show, where all of America can hear about Catheters on national TV, the DHS/Local Law Enforcement show, lets all listen in to Americans enjoying their freedom and rights to privacy" We could also have a show called Prison Via the Patriot Act, where we see people becoming brand new inmates, brand new terrorists because we convicted them for drunken, ugly speech. Why put them in a drunk tank overnight without booking, that would not make a good Hollywood reality show.

None of the characters, friends, enemies, acquaintances and people I barely know here in Pasadena, California has anything remotely in common with Ted Kaczynski, Randy Weaver, Tim McVeigh or Osama Bin Laden. Those surveilled are ordinary, unremarkable people, unless you want to talk about organic gardening. Those I have known the longest locally are botanist, organic gardeners, or born into a nursery family like I was. Descendents of farmers. The houses I visited while my car was bugged ended up under surveillance. July 2011 I was the focus of being investigated by laws covered under the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security.

A long time ago, every really big chain store had an inbred-looking security person at the front door; they were inevitably those rejected by both the police and the army. Now they just go to DHS and TSA and become supervisors and teach others to grab stranger's crotches in airports and "professionals" to eavesdrop on catheter conversations in a land known as freedom and democracy, the promised land of milk of amnesia. Everyone has either forgotten real freedom, or was born under the cloud of Bush and Obama. Spied upon Occupiers menaced with massive crowds of armed storm troopers waiting in advance has nothing to do with freedom.

First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What do catheter conversations have to do with "Preserving Our Freedom" as DHS uses for their logo? Department of Homeland Security and local cops: Preserving Our Catheters. There you go the local police and DHS need to paint Preserving Our Catheters on the door of every car in their fleets. Did you guys get that on tape clearly, or would you like me to type it in all caps? Preserving Our Catheters, one warrantless intrusion at a time"

What intimate, personal details of the Occupiers lives are being recorded and stored on a digital hard drive right now? Arguments with wives, are a terrorist act? Is local law enforcement and DHS recording a woman Occupier scolding her children for not doing their homework? Is that a terrorist act? The biased, presstitute news media uses the word anarchists regularly to objectify Occupiers to help taint the large public potential jury pool. My neighbor's jury was not even out deliberating five minutes before convicting him of terrorism, terrorist threat. His handlers, the cops and DHS employees who got him convicted would once have been unarmed security guards in a hardware store. Now they are in charge of convicting grandpa of terrorism. It is good work, lots of hours, health benefits, and it makes us all secure. Right now, as you read this, some Occupy Grandmother somewhere is in the cross-hairs of both the Sheriffs Department and Department of Homeland Security. If they can build any kind of bogus court case, her jury will put her away for terrorism. The thought police are watching. If you are discussing anything you wish to be private such as catheters, it is probably being recorded and saved to disk.

Time for Occupiers to organize via carrier pigeon" Local law and DHS are using e-surveillance to deny and dissuade Occupy from having First Amendment Rights. What does this have to do with keeping anyone safe from terrorism? Occupy could sue DHS in civil court for First Amendment violations, but the large jury pool is so media brainwashed it is doubtful 9 of 12 jurors would ever see things Occupy's way.

Corporations depend upon the spy-work of local "law" and DHS spy hardware and personnel, not to preserve our way of life, but to preserve the corporatists way of life. The oath taken by military, police and politicians needs to be changed to a swearing, an affirmation of upholding corporate profits. The three corporate owned branches are at the top; local sheriffs, police and DHS are the bottom-feeders, the bottom-of-the-barrel rule-of-not-law; rather they are the bottom-tier rule-of-profiteers, the mob enforces of today's Enron Corporations. Remember Enron and Junk-Bond-Traders? Circa 2012, those types of businesses do not go under, do not go to jail, do not collapse; circa 2012, local law and DHS simply surveil all who would expose the corporate-government symbiosis of malfeasance. DHS -- Preserving Our Pretenses, Lords of all whom they surveil.