In a new 132-page report — Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street — members of a national consortium of law school clinics, lawyers, law professors and other legal experts “catalog 130 specific alleged incidents of excessive police force, and hundreds of additional violations, including unjustified arrests, abuse of journalists, unlawful closure of sidewalks and parks to protesters, and pervasive surveillance of peaceful activists” in New York City. The experts note that, to date, only one police officer is known to have been disciplined for misconduct related to Occupy Wall Street protests in NYC. Read the full report here.
Tracks
Twitter is appealing a judge’s decision requiring the social media company to turn over an Occupy Wall Street protester’s tweets and account information to Manhattan prosecutors.
In June, Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino ruled that releasing Malcolm Harris’s tweets would not violate his privacy, since he had posted them on a public website.
Harris, a Brooklyn-based writer, was arrested with hundreds of other Occupy members during a mass march across the Brooklyn Bridge last fall.
The case has focused attention on a number of murky legal questions surrounding the use of social media, including whether users own the content they post publicly and whether companies like Twitter can prevent authorities from using that information to prosecute social media users.
READ ON: Twitter appeals ruling to hand over Occupy protester’s tweets
Horror Novelist Stephen King Tells The 1% To Stop Being Selfish Pricks
Preach it, Stevie. Tell it like it is, my main man.
I got my first job mowing lawns when I was 13. I went to work for the Federal government, laying fences, when I was 15. At 17, I left home and put myself through college and law school, without my parents’ help. Yes, I had student loans, and yes, I paid them.
I lost my job in 2009. Despite hundreds of phone calls, resumes, and a few interviews, it seems I am now “overqualified,” at age 50, to be employed. I am coming to grip with the fact that I will never earn what I took for granted, just a few years ago.
I have run through my savings, my investments, and my retirement accounts. I lost my house. My wife left me a year ago, and cancelled my health insurance. My heart medications, insulin, and related supplies, not to mention ADD meds for my teenager, total $3500 a month. I don’t have $3500 to spend on meds, so I take a daily aspirin, and my kid is suffering in school. I’m waiting on the word that I have renal failure. A vial of insulin, that used to cost $15 a few years ago, now costs $80. Big pharma is gouging.
Now, I am facing eviction. My two children have never seen daddy without money. I am facing the grim fact that my life insurance policy and social security death benefits may provide my kids better financial security than I can. Like George Bailey, I am “worth more dead than alive.” I AM THE 99%
Jack
Austin, Texas
New York City: Zuccotti Park has been re-occupied tonight, the half-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. March 17, 2012
Why We Must Occupy Our Food Supply
Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed a massive consolidation of our food system. Never have so few corporations been responsible for more of our food chain. Of the 40,000 food items in a typical U.S. grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations. Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of all U.S. beef, Tyson, Cargill and JBS. More than 90 percent of soybean seeds and 80 percent of corn seeds used in the United States are sold by just one company: Monsanto. Four companies are responsible for up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.
What does this matter for those of us who eat? Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, the destruction of soil fertility, the pollution of our water, and health epidemics including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even certain forms of cancer. More and more, the choices that determine the food on our shelves are made by corporations concerned less with protecting our health, our environment, or our jobs than with profit margins and executive bonuses.
This consolidation also fuels the influence of concentrated economic power in politics: Last year alone, the biggest food companies spent tens of millions lobbying on Capitol Hill with more than $37 million used in the fight against junk food marketing guidelines for kids.
On a global scale, the consolidation of our food system has meant devastation for farmers, forests and the climate. Take the controversial food additive palm oil. In the past decade, palm oil has become the most widely traded vegetable oil in the world and is now found in half of all packaged goods on U.S. grocery store shelves. But the large-scale production of palm oil — driven by agribusiness demand for the relatively cheap ingredient — has come at a cost: palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia are razing rainforests, releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases and displacing Indigenous communities.
All Hail Super-PAC’s: Would You Like to See the 1% Buying Our 2012 Election?
The 2008 presidential election was the most expensive on record, with candidates, parties, and outside groups dropping $5.3 billion. This year’s contest promises to break that record, due in part to the new rules of political fundraising: Donors can pour unlimited cash into outside-spending groups that can freely boost or attack the candidates of their choice. Which means that wealthy donors who have maxed out on their gifts to candidates or just want a lot more bang for their political buck can write massive checks to any of the new super-PACs that are popping up as proxies for politicians and parties.
Throughout the year, we’ll be keeping tabs on these superdonors (many of them couples who double up or spread out their gifts). As primary season heats up, we’ve tallied the current top 20 political givers based on donation data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Here’s a quick look at how they’re giving, starting with their partisan tilt: 17 out of 20 are giving to Republican or conservative groups and candiates.
And half of the top 20 are major donors to the pro-Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future:
The full list (don’t worry, I’m sure your vote will have just as much influence on the results of the election and, subsequently, the policies that follow):
people call the protesters anarchists, dirty hippies, socialists, free-loaders, and class warriors. I prefer to call them Americans.
(Source: iwakeupanddream)
We Occupy Nations. Not streets.
1. How does one determine who is an “enemy” worth fighting to the death? What makes the people of Iraq or Afghanistan (many of whom were innocents caught in the crossfire) more worthy of the title “enemy” than, say, a corrupt corporation without loyalty to any nation that sells harmful products to people through deception and manipulation or dumps waste into our ecosystem or hijacks our “representative” government or exploits millions of unprotected and desperate human beings at home and abroad all in the name of money profit?
2. What right do we have to occupy other nations and dominate other people? How is colonization, imperialism, and world-domination something, as a compassionate and rational species, to be proud of or smug about? Why is one group of humans more worthy of prosperity and protection from the evils of the world than another group of humans? Who makes that judgment call?
*I respect a soldier’s oath and willingness to serve and protect; I simply ask soldiers to please not do so blindly. First ask who are you serving, who you are protecting, and who you are harming in order to do so.
Occupy Philadelphia. These photos were taken by Michael Albany at Occupy Philly’s protest against backdoor anti-abortion legislation and in support of women’s healthcare rights on January 17th.
Check out Michael’s official website and his Tumblr!
You can view the rest of The Political Notebook’s project to gather photography, documentation and experiences from the OWS movements nationwide. (I love photos of protest signs…) Check out the Call for Submissions page and email your photos to me at torierosedeghett@gmail.com!
Capitalism: It’s ALL mine, mine, mine!
A member of Occupy London walks outside the High Court in London January 18, 2012. A court ruled that a protest camp denouncing economic inequality should be removed from its site outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Dozens of protesters from the Occupy London movement have been camping outside St Paul’s, one of London’s top tourist attractions, since October. Their original target was the nearby London Stock Exchange but police did not let them camp there.
REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth
Supporters of Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, or Indian Workers Group, raise slogans at a protest rally in New Delhi, India, Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011. The supporters demanded that the government protect workers rights in the ongoing economic reform process as well as the financial crisis. (Gurinder Osan)
Occupy Wall Street protesters read books in Zuccotti Park, Tuesday, Jan.10, 2012, in New York. Barricades were removed by Brookfield Properties, the owners of the park, allowing access once again into the park by the protesters. (Louis Lanzano)