Million Mask March Activists Clash With Police In London, Russell Brand Joins Crowds

Thousands of anti-capitalist activists took to the streets of central London on Bonfire night to protest against "political oppression", with ten people arrested as masked marchers clashed with police.

Demonstrators wearing Guy Fawkes masks and carrying banners and placards descended on Trafalgar Square before marching towards Parliament Square at 6.30pm. Protesters chanted anti-establishment slogans as they milled around, and some who had climbed on to the base of Nelson's Column let off fireworks.

Occupy Wall Street Buys, Then Cancels, Student Debt

Some 40 million Americans collectively owe nearly $1.3 trillion on their student loans. On Wednesday, a small group of volunteers announced they helped reduce unpaid student bills by a smidgen, thanks to public donations and a desire to help Americans live debt-free.

Strike Debt, a group of anti-debt activists born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, said it purchased $3.9 million in delinquent private student debt and immediately canceled it.

They Can’t Outlaw the Revolution

RIKERS ISLAND, N.Y.—Cecily McMillan, the Occupy activist who on Monday morning will appear before a criminal court in New York City to be sentenced to up to seven years on a charge of assaulting a police officer, sat in a plastic chair wearing a baggy, oversized gray jumpsuit, cheap brown plastic sandals and horn-rim glasses. Other women, also dressed in prison-issued gray jumpsuits, sat nearby in the narrow, concrete-walled visitation room clutching their children, tears streaming down their faces. The children, bewildered, had their arms wrapped tightly around their mothers’ necks. It looked like the disaster scene it was.

Cecily McMillan's Occupy trial is a huge test of US civil liberties. Will they survive?

The US constitution's Bill of Rights is envied by much of the English-speaking world, even by people otherwise not enthralled by The American Way Of Life. Its fundamental liberties – freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom from warrantless search – are a mighty bulwark against overweening state power, to be sure.

But what are these rights actually worth in the United States these days?

Ask Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student and activist who was arrested two years ago during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan. Seized by police, she was beaten black and blue on her ribs and arms until she went into a seizure. When she felt her right breast grabbed from behind, McMillan instinctively threw an elbow, catching a cop under the eye, and that is why she is being prosecuted for assaulting a police officer, a class D felony with a possible seven-year prison term. Her trial began this week.

Nikki Haley May Have Violated Occupy Protesters' Free Speech Rights, Court Finds

A group of Occupy protesters suing South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) over their ejection from the State House grounds have a "viable" claim that she violated their First Amendment rights, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday.

Nineteen Occupy Columbia protesters were camped out on November 16, 2011 when Haley had them arrested on two hours notice. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found Monday that their arrest may have been unconstitutional, because they were arrested without a formal rule change banning sleeping, and so their lawsuit can continue.

How 7 Occupy Wall Street Issues Stack Up 2 Years Later

Two years ago today, demonstrators descended on Zuccotti Park in New York City's financial district. Their focus, economic injustice, was clear in the name the movement would take: Occupy Wall Street.

Breaking Up With Occupy

Sandy Nurse seemed to have lost what tolerance she once had for long meetings. Even though the basement of the DeKalb Library in Brooklyn was air-conditioned on an especially sticky July day, and even though the meeting’s agenda was only partly finished, she told the handful of other eco-activists there that she was sorry, but she had to go build some compost bins, and she left.

Nurse never really looked all that happy in meetings. As one of the earliest members of Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group—as well as one of the last—she attended a lot of them, including a lot of quite horrible ones. She could often be seen sitting at the far end of the oblong circle, away from the fray but guiding it nonetheless with her formidable evil eye. Where she would come alive was in the streets, leading marches through the winding canyons of the Financial District or tricking the cops with an unexpected reversal of course to get the march to where it wasn’t supposed to go: Wall Street.

On 5th Anniversary Of Lehman Collapse, Americans Still Angry

NEW YORK, Sept 15 (Reuters) - A few years ago, Larry Summers, then the director of President Barack Obama's National Economic Council, held a private meeting with some of Wall Street's top bankers and executives.

Although the worst of the financial crisis was over by then, Summers - now seen as a candidate to be the next chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve - chastised bankers for being out of touch, saying they didn't understand how angry average Americans were with them, according to a participant in the meeting.

N.H.'s Capital City Labels Occupy and Free State Project As Terror Threats

After the public release of a document in which he suggested that Occupiers and libertarians pose a domestic terror threat to Concord, New Hampshire, the city's police chief has backed away from the claim.

In an application to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seeking more than $250,000 to purchase an armored police vehicle, the capital city of New Hampshire specified the local branch of the Occupy movement and the Free State Project, an effort to recruit "liberty-loving people" to relocate to the Granite State, as potential sources of terrorist action.

Redacted FBI Documents Show Plot to Kill Occupy Leaders If ‘Deemed Necessary’

“Did the FBI ignore, or even abet, a plot to assassinate Occupy Houston leaders?” asks investigative reporter Dave Lindorff at WhoWhatWhy. “What did the Feds know? Whom did they warn? And what did the Houston Police know?”

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Washington, D.C.-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund yielded an FBI document containing knowledge of a plot by an unnamed group or individual to kill “leaders” of the Houston chapter of the nonviolent Occupy Wall Street movement.

Harper is “venal”, U.S. politics is “totally rigged”

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco is one of the infernal documents of our new century. With Sacco providing vivid illustrations and Hedges furnishing the fearsome prose, they visit four of the most devastated communities in the U.S. and uncover what unfettered corporate capitalism has done to American life, finding despair, blight, poverty, crime, addiction, violence, and environmental degradation on an inconceivable scale, in all cases enabled by the total corporate takeover and corruption of government at all levels.

The Best Among Us

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 Anarchy Project

In The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013), David Graeber’s engaging new book on Occupy Wall Street, the author writes of the dismal culture in Washington during the summer of 2011, a few months before the occupation of Zucotti Park:

    Republicans were threatening to cause the US government to default in order to force massive cuts in social services intended to head off a largely imaginary debt crisis…President Obama, in turn, had decided the way to appear reasonable in comparison and thus seem as his advisors liked to put it ‘the only adult in the room’ was not to point out that the entire debate was founded on false economic premises, but to prepare a milder, ‘compromise’ version of the exact same program—as if the best way to expose a lunatic is to pretend that 50 percent of his delusions are actually true…. This is how a ragtag group of anarchists, hippies, unemployed college students, pagan tree sitters, and peace activists suddenly managed to establish themselves, by default, as America’s adults in the first place.

Paint Bombs -- David Graeber’s “The Democracy Project” and the anarchist revival

In the summer of 2011, when David Graeber heard rumors of a mobilization against Wall Street, he was hopeful but wary. Graeber is an anthropologist by trade, and a radical by inclination, which means that he spends a lot of time at political demonstrations, scrutinizing other demonstrators. When he wandered down to Bowling Green, in the financial district, on August 2nd, he noticed a few people who appeared to be the leaders, equipped with signs and megaphones. It seemed that they were affiliated with the Workers World Party, a socialist group known for stringent pronouncements that hark back to the Cold War—a recent article in the W.W.P. newspaper hailed the “steadfast determination” of North Korea and its leaders. As far as Graeber was concerned, W.W.P. organizers and others like them could doom the new movement, turning away potential allies with their discredited ideology and their unimaginative tactics. Perhaps they would deliver a handful of speeches and lead a bedraggled march, culminating in the presentation of a list of demands. Names and e-mail addresses would be collected, and then, a few weeks or months later, everyone would regroup and do it again.

Seattle May Day Rally Turns Violent

SEATTLE — Police used "flash bangs" and pepper spray against some protesters who pelted them with rocks and bottles late Wednesday, as violence erupted during May Day in Seattle.

Several dozen protesters, many using bandanas to cover their faces, began clashing with police in downtown Seattle hours after a peaceful immigrant-rights march ended.

Protesters threw rocks and bottles at police officers and news crews. As they moved through downtown Seattle to another nearby neighborhood, they flung construction street barriers, trash cans and newspaper bins on the streets in an attempt to block advancing police officers. Windows of local businesses were broken and vehicles with people in them were banged around.

Occupy Draws a Bead on the NRA

Demonstrators protesting the US Senate's inaction on gun violence gathered in Washington's McPherson Park on Thursday before marching to the front doors of five lobbying firms that have worked on behalf of the National Rifle Association. The payments those firms received from the NRA in 2012 were displayed on giant novelty checks that demonstrators held up for photo-ops in front of police officers guarding the entrances.

That wasn't the original plan, exactly. The protest's organizers, which included Occupy the NRA, Public Campaign, and CREDO*, had intended to drive a hearse full of caskets to the firms back on April 16. That was the day before the Senate rejected the watered-down background check compromise bill brokered by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). It was also the day after the Boston bombing, after which the organizers decided to postpone the march and tone down the imagery.

Mounties snooped on Occupy protesters in nation's capital: documents

OTTAWA - The Mounties compiled a dossier on the Occupy Ottawa movement, scouring social media sites and even quizzing campus security after protesters held planning sessions at a university, newly released documents show.

Meeting notes show there were also plans to monitor the Confederation Park protest site using a camera mounted to the nearby offices of the National Capital Commission.

FBI Surveillance Of Occupy Wall Street Detailed

WASHINGTON -- Was Tim Franzen stockpiling weapons? What was Tim Franzen's philosophy? What was his political affiliation? Did Tim Franzen ever talk about violent revolution?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to know. In late 2011, an agent or agents -- Franzen still isn't quite sure -- began trying to find out. It was during this time that Franzen became a well-known and central presence in Occupy Atlanta. He helped start the Occupy Wall Street offshoot, and had been arrested when police razed their encampment in a downtown Atlanta park.

'Fort Hernandez' Evicted And Occupy LA Protesters Removed From Home

After spending four months camped out in front of the house dubbed 'Fort Hernandez' in an effort to save it from foreclosure, Occupy LA activists were removed from the property, and the family was evicted. The Van Nuys house, where the Hernandez family resided but hadn't paid a mortgage on for about five years, is now surrounded by a chain link fence and is the property of Bank of America.

Nearly 100 personnel from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department removed 18 Occupy LA protesters and five dogs at about 5 a.m. Thursday morning, KPCC reports. Six to eight family members were living in the house and are now locked out.

The FBI vs. Occupy: Secret Docs Reveal "Counterterrorism" Monitoring of OWS from Its Earliest Days

Once-secret documents reveal the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street from its earliest days and treated the nonviolent movement as a potential terrorist threat. Internal government records show Occupy was treated as a potential threat when organizing first began in August of 2011. Counterterrorism agents were used to track Occupy activities, despite the internal acknowledgment that the movement opposed violent tactics. The monitoring expanded across the country as Occupy grew into a national movement, with FBI agents sharing information with businesses, local police agencies and universities. We’re joined by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which obtained the FBI documents through the Freedom of Information Act. "We can see, decade after decade, with each social justice movement, that the FBI conducts itself in the same role over and over again, which is to act really as the secret police of the establishment against the people," Verheyden-Hilliard says.

Original Article
Source: Democracy Now!
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