D.C. Court Rules Sidewalk Convenience Trumps Constitution

By Veterans for Peace

The D.C. Superior Court ruled last Friday that possible pedestrian inconvenience was more important than the US Constitution or stopping wars.

Arrested during a White House demonstration on March 19, 18 defendants, including 8 members of Veterans For Peace, were found guilty by Judge Canan, Friday, of “failure to obey” and “blocking/incommoding” and fined $150.

The defendants argued for their 1st Amendment right to petition their government for redress of grievances.

Occupy Wall Street Primer: Uniformed Thugs Are Not Legally Police

Oakland Use of Illegal Force

Why Wall Street Is Not Enough, This is War

By Gordon Duff
Veterans Today

The disease is police forces in a nation of laws violating those laws, those who are supposed to protect the public safety making it more than clear to us here at VT that they are willing to stoop to criminality to work for the 1%.

My point?  It isn’t just the banks.  We are no longer a nation of civil law, no longer a nation of accountability, and those who would limit OCW (Occupy Wall Street) to demonstrations against banks may very well be working for the other side.

Anonymous promises to take NYSE offline on Oct. 10

RECANTED: TheAnonPress recants Operation Invade Wall Street

By TheAnonPress

A new Anonymous statement to the media regarding a DDOS attack set forth to take place October 10th. DDOS information is annotated. (Transcript below.)

IRC LINK: irc.project-pm.org #invadewallstreet (or for NetTalk users, 85.115.208.246)

Against the Institution: A Warning for ‘Occupy Wall Street’

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

While I fully endorse the efforts and actions of the Occupy Wall Street protests, now emerging internationally, there are concerns which need to be addressed and kept in mind as the movement moves forward.

The process through which a potentially powerful movement may be co-opted and controlled is slight and subtle. If Occupy Wall Street hopes to strive for the 99%, it must not submit to the 1%, in any capacity.

The Best Among Us

By Chris Hedges
Truth Dig

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history.

Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

The ‘People’s Microphone’

By Pablo Ouziel
The Peoples Voice

With the current ‘Audacity of Hope’ entering its terminal phase, Americans engaged in social movement activity are finally catching up with their brothers and sisters in other parts of the World.  What took a long time to flourish – despite the numerous calls from academics and activists from within the United States and from outside of its shores – has finally erupted into what is rapidly becoming the turning point in the relationship between people and markets (and people and government), at the heart of America’s unstable empire.

Wall street is now occupied and global indignation against plutocratic rule has reached its climax, it has come face to face with its source.

Occupy Wall Street: Macing Protesters, Chris Hedges and Michael Moore

Olbermann interviews Michael Moore who says, “I think there needs to be a multi-pronged approach” urging civil disobedience locally as well as nationally, and refusing to move out under a foreclosure notice since no one owns your mortgage any more.  “The banks lost them,” he says, when they bundled them into their little Ponzie schemes.

Blackberry agrees to join UK censors during civil unrest

By Avril Ormsby
Reuters

BlackBerry said on Thursday it would close down its hugely popular messenger service in Britain if ordered to at times of civil unrest, after police singled out the system as a key tool used in last month’s riots.

Appearing before politicians investigating the large-scale disorder that swept Britain in early August, executive Stephen Bates of Blackberry-owner Research in Motion said the company would comply with orders given in special circumstances such as threats of terrorism or mass criminality.

New Homeland Security Report Sees “Evolutionary Shift” in Terror Threat

Image

By Activist Post

A new report issued by Homeland Security Policy Institute, a “think and do tank”, entitled “Counterterrorism Intelligence Law Enforcement Perspectives” calls for further centralization of the anti-terror apparatus inside the United States.

The changing, converging nature of threats faced today — especially those from terrorism, transnational crime and the use of technology to carry out criminal behavior — make it imperative that intelligence-led policing be integrated into the decentralized police structures and community policing principles of the United States.

The report lists a hierarchy of threats that include an overall “evolutionary shift” toward “a blended terror threat that unites foreign directed or inspired attacks with homegrown elements and operators.”

This policy paper forms the new narrative that could justify the continuing infiltration and crackdown upon peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and even the questioning of American foreign policy and Homeland Security directives, whether on the street or in cyberspace.

Save Our Schools; Let Us Never Forget the Mission, March, and Movement

copyright © 2011 Betsy L. Angert. Empathy And Education; BeThink or BeThink.org

Near a month has passed since the Save Our Schools storm swept through Washington District of Columbia. As with all squalls the effects of such an event linger long after the winds die down. A physical space cleaned-up after a tempest takes place does not erase the memory of what occurred. Be it a blast of air or an action, the calm does not close a chapter in our lives. The current, commitment, the cause, and our concern do not wane with time, that is, unless we choose to move on or tell ourselves that that is possible. I believe the notion the past is past is fallacious. Our past permeates the present and is a foundation for the future. Thus, for me, the thought, and the March to Save Our Schools are strong. It survives as is evidenced by the now named Movement.

Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery

By Naomi Klein
The Nation

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

BART Pulls the Kill Switch

Oh, here we go.  Sing it R.E.M…..     “It’s the end of the world as we know it”……………

What’s creepier than San Fran transit acting like the gestapo, are the comments that follow the article on yahoo.

http://news.yahoo.com/sf-transit-blocks-cellphones-disrupt-protest-180916272.html

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A decision by San Francisco Bay Area transit officials to cut off cell phone service at some of its stations to thwart a planned protest drew angry response Saturday from one transit board member who said she was shocked that officials acted as “this type of censor.”

Why London exploded last night (Plus videos)

How new media, old media and rampant unemployment combined to stoke the worst riots Britain has seen in years

BY Michael Goldfarb
Global Post

LONDON, United Kingdom — I knew we were in for a rough night here in Stoke Newington in the London Borough of Hackney when my wife called me at 5 p.m. from Sainsbury’s, our local supermarket, to say she was in a lock down. They were shuttering the place and the police were telling her trouble had already started outside the Hackney Town Hall. The cops told her to go home and stay off the streets.

I took her call as I was walking into the local library to return a book. Inside, the librarians were watching a BBC live feed on their computers of action a mile and a half away. One of the librarians explained he lived over there.

Jackboot North American strategy to deny right to mass protest

By The Real News Network

Michael Ratner: “There is a North America-wide strategy to take away the right to mass protest.”

Reform, Revolution or Radical Transformation?

By NoCureForThat.org

Israel fires on Golan border protesters, kills 23, wounds 50

Radio Netherlands reports:

Israeli troops opened fire on Sunday as protesters from Syria stormed a ceasefire line in the occupied Golan Heights, with Damascus saying 23 demonstrators were killed.

Hundreds of protesters rushed the ceasefire line, cutting through barbed wire as they tried to enter the Golan Heights in a repeat of demonstrations last month that saw thousands mass along Israel’s north.

Similar protests were held in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

Terrorists Attack Jefferson Memorial with Deadly Dance Moves

By lonelantern
The Reality Report

Terrorists struck the Jefferson Memorial on May 28th in an apparently coordinated effort. Early reports revealed this coordinated attack carries the signature of past Al Qaeda attacks using multiple targets and unrelated agents. However, it is unclear if dance attacks affected other national monuments but authorities have been placed on high alert.

Law Enforcement officers on duty at the time acted swiftly to diffuse the dance threat before damage could be done to the memorial and the tourists at the site. The terrorists are now in the custody of Washington DC officials and are being interrogated.

This Is What Resistance Looks Like

By Chris Hedges
TruthDig

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth.

The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

Wisconsin Firefighters Shut Down Bank That Funded Walker

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
AlterNet

UPDATE: Stranded Wind over at DailyKos has photos of the protest outside M&I, and says the ante has been upped to $600,000! ‘What these pictures show are six hundred ordinary citizens descending on the M&I branch near the Wisconsin Capitol after learning of their purchase of the gubernatorial election last November. Two firefighters with old school ideas about saving had over $600,000 between the two of them and they demanded cashier’s checks on the spot.’ See We’re Going To Destroy A Bank.

Everybody knows the GOP’s biggest weakness is money, so why not hit ’em in the sweet spot? That’s what many amazing Wisconsin firefighters did yesterday when they collectively began withdrawing their funds from Madison’s M&I Bank — whose executives and board members were among the highest donors to Governor Scott Walker’s campaign.

911 whistleblower blasts Patriot Act renewal

TEA PARTY CRASHES: THE MOST UNPATRIOTIC ACT

By Susan Lindauer
(9/11 Whistleblower indicted on the Patriot Act)

I confess that since November I’ve been holding my breath, watching the clock for how long Tea Party newcomers could hold out against the entrenched Republican elite on Capitol Hill. Collapse was inevitable, however I admit to feeling bitterly surprised at how rapidly they have thrown in the towel.

For the record, most of the Tea Party quit their principles of liberty on February 14, 2011—20 days into the new Congress—when Tea Party leaders abruptly abandoned their opposition to the Patriot Act and voted to extend intrusive domestic surveillance, wire tapping and warrantless searches of American citizens.  In so doing, they exposed the fraud of their soaring campaign promises to defend the liberty of ordinary Americans, and fight government intrusions on freedom. All those wide eyed speeches that flowed with such thrilling devotions, all of it proved to be self-aggrandizing lies.