What a difference a few short weeks can make. The early word on Occupy Wall Street was that it was a motley collection of flakes and fools. “Purpose in 140 or less,” tweeted CNN financial correspondent Alison Kosik, “bang on the bongos, smoke weed!” (She’s since deleted that tweet.) New York Times financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail, asked on CNBC’s Squawk Box, “Do we think that the whole Wall Street protest is overdone, real, not real? Were there really a lot of people down there? Were there a lot? I could never tell.” In a Times human interest column the archetypal OWS protester was “a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka.” Arch condescension was definitely the dominant tone of mainstream coverage, and maybe a bit of it was even deserved: if you’re going to protest the policies of the Federal Reserve, you should probably know what it is, and speaking just for myself, the sooner the Zuccotti Park encampment loses the drum circle, the better. Men thumping away for hours on end, girls in tank tops vaguely dancing about—it’s just not the look you want for a movement that claims to be about getting rid of hierarchy.
In any case, Zuni Tikka is definitely having a good laugh now. Eight hundred New York City arrests later, Occupy Wall Street has gone national, from LA to Phoenix to New Haven, and global too, with demonstrations and encampments in Europe, Latin America and even Australia. In London protesters camped out at St. Paul’s Cathedral. In Hong Kong dozens slept overnight in a foyer beneath the headquarters of HSBC. In Rome some 200,000 people marched, and a few smashed windows and set cars on fire. This caused Prime Minister Berlusconi to take time out from having sex with teenage prostitutes to fulminate against the violence as “a worrying signal for civil coexistence.” Hmmm, maybe he should have thought about civil coexistence before he got legislators to pass a law immunizing himself from prosecution for misdeeds in office. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? All those pundits and politicians going on about how bankers are just people, and traders have feelings too, and why don’t the 99 percent appreciate what the 1 percent has done for them, are just not looking at the world we live in now. Anyone who isn’t entirely insulated from such mundane realities as unemployment and underemployment, foreclosure, student debt and the serious increase in poverty knows what OWS is talking about: rising inequality, the impunity of the people who caused the crisis and the failure of politicians in both parties to grapple with a situation both parties helped create. OWS doesn’t need a list of demands to paint that picture. As (of all places!) the Times editorial page put it on October 8, “protest is the message.”
Over the weekend, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman visited demonstrators at Occupy Louisville, a protest inspired by Occupy Wall Street. They’ve set up an encampment right across the street from a local jail. We hear from veterans, students, social justice activists, and other community members who spent the night at the protest.
Princeton University professor and renowned civil rights activist Cornel West was arrested Friday afternoon during a demonstration in Harlem against alleged racial profiling by the New York City Police Department. West joined a protest against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, which critics say disproportionately targets people of color. New York City police carried out 600,000 such searches last year, with 87 percent of the targets being black or Hispanic. West’s arrest in New York City comes just a week after he and 18 others were arrested on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court during a protest against the increasing role of money in politics, the same day that the new Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was dedicated. A professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University, West is the author of numerous books, including his memoir, "Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud."
Occupy Chicago protesters are angry and plan to make their feelings known to Mayor Rahm Emanuel after many of their supporters spent 24 hours or more in jail over the weekend for refusing to leave Grant Park when it closed Saturday night. 
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and her husband, Marcus Bachmann, sought to clarify their position on gays and lesbians in a new interview with People Magazine.
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is introducing a new program on Monday designed to lower monthly mortgage payments for more troubled homeowners.
The great thing about Herman Cain is that he's a straight-talker who shoots from the hip. What's wrong with America? Stupid people are ruining it. How to fix the economy? 9-9-9, my friend. What's wrong with politics and media? People need a sense of humor. 
A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don't exist—even when they do.
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided—to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1 percent. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?
As Occupy protests against inequality and corporate greed continue across the United States and around the world, we’re joined by Michael Moore, Academy Award-winning filmmaker and activist, and Princeton University Professor Cornel West. "We expect [President Obama] to do the work of the people," Moore says. "The people are not going to go away. So he can either go down as a historic president, who become the FDR of this century, or he can be remembered as the man who was in the pocket of Goldman Sachs." West added, "What we’re trying to do is connect what’s going on on Wall Street with what’s going on in Harlem... If in fact we continue to have this kind of magnificent movement here and around the world, we want to be able to connect the corporate greed not just on Wall Street, but in the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and the corporate-media multiplex." 
This is the first in a new column series on "national security" and civil liberties in Canada and abroad that seeks to focus on specific cases as well as the overall framework in which serious human rights abuses have been justified in the name of security.
As a Canadian paratrooper in the former Yugoslavia, Pascal Lacoste learned to hold in his pain. But even today, sometimes the pain is just too great.
Officer Michael Daragjati had no idea that the FBI was listening to his phone calls. Otherwise he would probably not have described his arrest and detention of an innocent black New Yorker in the manner he did.