Occupy Homes and Occupy DC

Here are excerpts from Washingtonsblog.com. Full story here.

Occupy Movement … Stronger than Ever?

Posted on December 6, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog

OWS: Down, But Not Out …

While some might assume that the Occupy movement is dead – given that scenes of large protests have been absent from the news recently – but the truth is quite different.

As Zero Hedge notes today:

The city of Cleveland has passed a resolution endorsing the Occupy movement, calling on congress to reform financial regulations, and to prosecute the big banks. The vote passed 18-1. Other cities have passed similar resolutions.

Here is Cleveland City's resolution: 

(C OF C 125-174
Resolution No. 1720-11
Council Members Cummins, Westbrook,Zone, Cimperman, Cleveland, Mitchell,J. Johnson, Brancatelli, Brady, Polensek,Pruitt, Conwell, K. Johnson, Dow.FOR ADOPTIONDecember 5, 2012
AN EMERGENCY RESOLUTION
Recognizing and supporting the principles of theOccupy Movement and the peaceful and lawful xercise of the First Amendment as a cherished andfundamental right in the effort to seek solutions for economically distressed Americans at the federal,state and local levels; committing to work with the Jackson administration to take steps to minimize economic insecurity and destructive disparities in theCity of Cleveland; and requesting our County, Stateand U.S. elected leaders generate solutions for economically distressed Americans.) 

(Seattle Joins Los Angeles, San Francisco and Buffalo In Supporting Occupy Protests

The Seattle Times reports today:

The Seattle City Council on Monday unanimously adopted a resolution in support of Occupy Seattle that calls on the city to examine its banking and investment practices, home-foreclosure patterns and the financing of local elections.)

Richard Eskow writes:

Widespread criminality … created the Wall Street mortgage boom and led to our ongoing financial crisis. [There is] overwhelming evidence of illegal activity on the part of big banks, [yet] none of those banks’ executives have been prosecuted.

As ugly as the situation is, there is some logic behind the government’s actions — and its inactions. They’re acting on a tragically incorrect (but internally coherent) set of assumptions that can be summed up in one sentence. It goes something like this:

“To preserve the health of the American economy, banks must be allowed to keep preying on their consumers.”

That’s it. That’s the logic.

But there are two exciting ‘Occupy’ developments this week that could change the equation — ‘Take Back the Capitol’ in the District of Columbia, and Tuesday’s ‘Occupy Our Homes’ events around the country. Think of them as complementary actions: One is taking place at the site of our greatest government power. The other is bringing the action to homes where people have been victimized by bankers.

***

The thinking goes something like this: Our largest banks are too big to fail, and since we lack the will or the motivation to break them up or regulate them we must protect them at all costs. We’ve propped them up with TARP, quantitative easing, and $7.7 trillion in secret Federal Reserve loans, but they’re still shaky as hell. If we prosecute any of their executives, their stock prices will fall and they’ll collapse again. And they’ll take the entire economic system with them.

That leads to some grotesque miscarriages of justice. Nobody at Wells Fargo has been indicted for money laundering, for example, despite the fact that the bank has paid millions to settle charges of laundering cash for the Mexican drug cartels that have murdered more than 35,000 people. As an experienced bank investigator working for the Senate observed, “There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure.”

***

Some powerful folks are afraid the banks will fail if they’re forced to write off the bad loans on their books, or to stop profiting from loans sold deceptively or irresponsibly.

TARP may be over, but there’s another massive bank rescue going on. Who’s funding it? We are. Every time we pay a usurious interest fee on a credit card, we’re propping up the banks. Every time we make another month’s payment on an underwater mortgage, we’re propping them up too. Every time we pay an overpriced consumer loan of any kind, we’re making another payment into the consumer-funded bailout that’s keeping the big banks afloat.

It would be great if politicians in Washington stopped using American consumers to subsidize banks that shouldn’t even exist. But they haven’t. That’s where “Occupy Our Homes” comes in.

It’s also a day for helping people in our communities who have been victimized by predatory lending, criminal bank forgery, unfair or illegal foreclosure practices, and other bank abuses that victimize the public. Occupy Minnesota has already occupied an illegally-foreclosed home, and plans to do the same thing with another home tomorrow. Here in Los Angeles, where an inspiring victory has already taken place, OccupyLA will help two brave families re-occupy their illegally foreclosed homes.

What will happen if consumers stopped blaming themselves? What if they demanded that the banks take responsibility for their irresponsible and/or predatory lending? What if they refused to stop this country’s perverse economic role reversal, where customers have become the ATMs while banks keep making the withdrawals?

If 10% of America’s homeowners declared a mortgage strike it would rock the banking world. If everybody paying exorbitant credit card interest declared a moratorium on payments all at once, Wall Street would change forever.

Think about it: “Occupy ALL Our Homes.” “Occupy Our Credit Cards … Our Payday Loans … Our Buy-and-Drive Loans …” I’m not saying these are necessarily the right tactics, although they very well may be. But what’s most important is that we understand that consumers have far more power than we usually realize – provided we act together.

Many of Washington’s leaders will cringe at the thought, of course. “That could hurt our biggest banks,” they say. It would be tempting to reply, You say that like it’s a bad thing. Here’s a better response: Then start planning to break them up in an orderly fashion. We’re done living a life of indentured servitude just so we can subsidize their greed.

Those are the discussions that we should be having. If powerful people on Wall Street and in Washington aren’t worried about Occupy Our Homes , they’re not paying attention. But with any luck, they soon will.

(If you are understandably squeamish about deadbeats not honoring their debts, please read this.)

Occupy is also attempting to shut down all West Coast ports on December 12th.

Occupy protesters have started to arrive in Washington, D.C. to protest political corruption, and are aiming for one million tents set up by January 17th.

A top Republican strategist – and the world’s top expert on framing mainstream Republican ideas in language which persuades people, Frank Luntz – said (via Think Progress):

Luntz told attendees that he’s “scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death.” The pollster warned that the movement is “having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.” So the pollster offered some advice for them about how to fight back. Here’s a few snippets of what he said [:]

***

Luntz instructed attendees to tell protesters that they “get it”: “First off, here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ … ‘I get that you’re. I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.”

(The other top framing expert – George Lakoff, a liberal – supports OWS.)

And Democrats are feeling the anger of the Occupy protesters as well, given their complicity in selling out the people to benefit the big banks and support for police state tactics against the American people.

While police have resorted to brutal military tactics to try to shut down the protests, such tactics have drawn world-wide condemnation, including condemnation from the United Nations, former police chiefs (and see this), and the inventor of pepper spray.

And do you know how the police have denied protesters the use of megaphones as a way to try to silence them (hence the famous “Human Mic”)? There’s a new iPhone App the ‘Inhuman Microphone’which circumvents the megaphone ban by unifying all the smart phone speakers into one voice.

So Occupy is down, but not out … and arguably growing stronger than ever.

While the general media may be ignoring the latest peculiar twist on the “Occupy” theme, or in this case the “occupyourhomes.org“, Bank of America is taking it quote seriously. As a reminder, “Tuesday, December 6th is the National Day of Action to stop and reverse foreclosures.

The Occupy Homes movement is holding actions around the country in support of homeowners and people fighting to have a home. Find an event near you and join in our day of action tomorrow!. There are actions happening in over 20 cities nationwide. Events are taking place in Brooklyn, Buffalo and Rochester New York; Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, Petaluma, Sacramento, Paradise and Contra Costa California; Lake Worth, Florida; Atlanta, Fayetteville, and DeKalb Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Bloomington, Indiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Cleveland, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Detroit and Southgate Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington.” And if you have not heard about today’s protest on the conventional media that is understandable: as BAC says internally, this event “could impact our industry.” ........

here is more from Washingtonsblog.com. This is why we have Occupy Wall Street--

60 Minutes: Fraud Caused Financial Meltdown, But There Have Been No Prosecutions

and----

Is The Amount of Energy Put Into Mining, Processing, and Shipping Uranium, Plant Construction, Operation, and Decommissioning GREATER than the Energy a Nuclear Plant Can Produce In Its Lifetime?

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

U.N. Envoy: U.S. Isn't Protecting Occupy Protesters' Rights

From Huffington Post and Dan Froomkin 12-2-11

WASHINGTON -- The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities.

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. "special rapporteur" for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

"I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order," he said Thursday. "But on the other hand I also believe that the state -- in this case the federal state -- has an obligation to protect and promote human rights."

"If I were going to pit a city ordinance against human rights, I would always take human rights," he continued.

La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it's clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces "as long as that doesn't severely affect the rights of others."

In moments of crisis, governments often default to a forceful response instead of a dialogue, he said -- but that's a mistake.

"Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension," he said.

"One of the principles is proportionality," La Rue said. "The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order -- but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger."

And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don't work anyway, he said. In Occupy's case, he said, "disbanding them by force won't change that attitude of indignation."

Occupy encampments across the country have been forcibly removed by police in full riot gear, and some protesters have been badly injured as a result of aggressive police tactics.

New York police staged a night raid on the original Occupy Wall Street encampment in mid-November, evicting sleeping demonstrators and confiscating vast amounts of property.

The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas, smoke grenades and bean-bag rounds at demonstrators there in late October, seriously injuring one Iraq War veteran at the Occupy site.

Earlier this week, Philadelphia and Los Angeles police stormed the encampments in their cities in the middle of the night, evicting and arresting hundreds of protesters.

Protesters at University of California, Davis were pepper sprayed by a campus police officer in November while participating in a sit-in, and in September an officer in New York pepper sprayed protesters who were legally standing on the sidewalk.

"We're seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation.

"The demonstrations are treated as if they're presumptively criminal," she said. "Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene."

What they should do, Verheyden-Hilliard said, is make it their mission to allow the activity to continue.

Using the same lens placed on the Occupy movement to look at, say, the protest in Egypt, Verheyden-Hilliard said, observers would have focused on such issues as "Did the people in Tahrir Square have a permit?"

La Rue said the protesters are raising and addressing a fundamental issue. "There is legitimate reason to be indignant and angry about a crisis that was originated by greed and the personal interests of certain sectors," he said. That's especially the case when the bankers "still earn very hefty salaries and common folks are losing their homes."

"In this case, the demonstrations are going to the center of the issue," he said. "These demonstrations are exactly challenging the basis of the debate."

Indeed, commentators such as Robert Scheer have argued that the Occupy movement's citizen action has a particular justification, based on the government's abject failure to hold banks accountable.

La Rue said he sees parallels between Occupy and the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests. In both cases, for instance, "you have high level of education for young people, but no opportunities."

La Rue said he is in the process of writing what he called "an official communication" to the U.S. government "to ask what exactly is the position of the federal government in regards to understanding the human rights and constitutional rights vis-a-vis the use of local police and local authorities to disband peaceful demonstrations."

Although the letter will not carry any legal authority, it reflects how the violent suppression of dissent threatens to damage the U.S.'s international reputation.

"I think it's a dangerous spot in the sense of a precedent," La Rue said, expressing concern that the United States risks losing its credibility as a model democracy, particularly if the excessive use of force against peaceful protests continues.

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman welcomed the international scrutiny.

"We live in a much smaller, connected world than we ever did before, and just as Americans watch what goes on in Tahrir Square and in Syria, the whole world is watching us, too -- and that's a good thing," Lieberman said.

"We're kind of confident that we're living in the greatest democracy in the world, but when the international human rights world criticizes an American police officer for pepper spraying students who are sitting down, it rightly give us pause."

* * * * *

Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for The Huffington Post. You can send him an email, bookmark his page, subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get email alerts when he writes.

Occupy LA Raid: Los Angeles Police Reportedly Went Undercover At Encampment Prior To Raid To Gather Information

From Huffington Post  12-3-11

The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Los Angeles police used nearly a dozen undercover detectives to infiltrate the Occupy LA encampment before this week's raid to gather information on protesters' intentions, according to media reports Friday.

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None of the officers slept at the camp, but tried to blend in during the weeks leading up to the raid to learn about plans to resist or use weapons against police, a police source told the Los Angeles Times. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.

The undercover work yielded information that some protesters were preparing bamboo spears and other potentially dangerous weapons in advance of an expected eviction by the LAPD, none of which were used, according to City News Service which first reported the story.

Police downplayed the significance of the undercover work since Occupy meetings were public and easily tracked.

LAPD Officer Cleon Joseph declined an Associated Press request for comment on the reports.

Occupy L.A. protester Mario Brito told City News Service he was not surprised by the revelation, but said it was "tantamount to 1950s McCarthyism."

Meanwhile, the city attorney's office filed criminal misdemeanor charges Friday against 27 more of the people who were arrested following the police sweep of the camp.

In all, 46 of the 291 people arrested during the raid have been charged with misdemeanor crimes of failure to disperse from an unlawful assembly. Some also were charged with resisting arrest.

The arrests came Wednesday during a pre-dawn raid on City Hall Park, where nearly 500 tents had been erected at the peak of an anti-Wall Street protest, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich said.

Fifty-eight posted bail or were released by police, Criminal Division Chief Earl Thomas told City News Service.

An additional 187 protesters were released without bail and without being charged, because they had no prior criminal records.

Bail amounts ranged from $5,000 for most of the defendants to as high as $20,000.

This Is Why We Have Occupy Wall Street!