Over 100 Cities Plan To "Occupy The Courts" On January 20, 2012

movetoamend.org

Inspired by our friends at Occupy Wall Street, and Dr. Cornel West, Move To Amend is planning bold action to mark the second anniversary of the infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision!

Occupy the Courts will be a one day occupation of Federal courthouses across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Friday January 20, 2012.

Move to Amend volunteers across the USA will lead the charge on the judiciary which created — and continues to expand — corporate personhood rights.

Americans across the country are on the march, and they are marching OUR way. They carry signs that say, “Corporations are NOT people! Money is NOT Speech!” And they are chanting those truths at the top of their lungs! The time has come to make these truths evident to the courts.

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A Culture of Resistance is Born in 2011: the People United in an Independent Movement

owsnews.org/

In 2012, the Real Conversation will be in the Occupations, while Corporate Candidates have a False Conversation 

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

The Occupy Movement that developed in 2011 profoundly shook the foundation of the 1%.  Almost instantly a new form of political power was created, all truly grown from the grass roots, and handed the 99% some REAL political capital for the first time in decades, and installed the Occupy Movement as a force to be reckoned with. Next spring promises to see more growth of this movement as the economy continues to stagnate and the government continues its dysfunction. Already, the Occupy Movement it showing its political independence: protesting candidates from both parties who are part of corrupt money-based elections.  The irrelevance of the political debate, primarily between two-corporate approved candidates, will become more evident as the voices of the people grow.

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Elites Launch Another Dystopian Mindbender

 

Before It's News

Zen Gardner

How's that for cognitive dissonance? After outright media blackout, ridicule, and violent police oppression, this mind-bending "honor" arises. Smell anything fishy here?

AFP - Time magazine named the collective 'protester' around the world as its person of the year Wednesday, citing the change brought by street demonstrations from Arab countries to New York.

The shared honor for protesters beat the traditional individual contenders, who included Admiral William McCraven, commander of the US mission to kill Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.

'There's this contagion of protest,' managing editor Richard Stengel said on NBC television. 'These are folks who are changing history already and they will change history in the future.' Source

When the PTBs honor demonstrators on one of their flagship publications, and globalist Richard Stengel publicly endorses these "folks changing history", you know you're being "teed up".

You also now know that, yes, they were behind much of this international movement, which has worked very nicely to dismantle one government after another in their march toward World War 3 and world domination.

Or so they hope.

Is this a change of strategy?  Why?

Some Reasons

• If you can't stop it, steer it. Manipulate the message to meet your needs. In this case, appear to be the "good guy" and proponent of freedom for the underdog. Old saw, but works.
• Encourage more public dissent. Why? The game's changed. Thanks to our traitorous government, with the recent draconian developments in not only warrantless detainment but internet intrusion and soon free range censorship, these wicked minions appear to be in a rush to the goal line. And they'd no doubt like to give these news powers a test drive.
• Timing. For some reason they feel the urgency to put the clamps on hard, and quickly. Is something coming down the pike?
• Fear. Do they sense a real awakening amidst their manipulating and want to seal the pot before it boils over? You know what that will only do. So, is that their intention?

The Dystopian Freedom "Front"

At the very least, to so-called honor the "demonstrator" while telling your robocops to spray mace in their faces and club and arrest them is along the lines of Obama's Nobel Peace prize. Only screwier.  For these self-appointed, self-righteous media moguls to completely about-face is another effort to mess with our heads.

We get it, but the rest of the world is being led by the nose down a path to complete chaos.

This is similar to the whacked-out power freak Hillary going around preaching human rights and democracy, while planting subversives and handing out weapons like Halloween candy. For some hypnotic reason, the masses will fall for these false fronts of words and erudite rhetoric even while their eyes tell them the opposite. Nothing like a regular dose of cognitive dissonance to keep the masses mindnumbed.

But such is our Orwellian dystopia.

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The Way to Occupy a Bank is to Own One

 

 Lloyd-Blankfein CEO Goldman-Sachs

Web of Debt

Ellen Brown

The campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support. Having greater impact would be to "move our money" -- move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly-owned banks.

Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform.  But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the 99% Declaration which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia.  The 99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Fed to eliminating censorship of the Internet.  But none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place – a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%.  To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%. 

Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed at doing just that.  In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled “Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea,” David Weidner writes:

[P]rotesters in the Bay Area, especially Occupy San Francisco, have something their East Coast neighbors don't: a realistic plan aimed at the heart of banks. The idea could be expanded nationwide to send a message to a compromised Washington and the financial industry.

It's called a municipal bank. Simply put, it would transfer the City of San Francisco's bank accounts—about $2 billion now spread between such banks as Bank of America Corp., UnionBanCal Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co.—into a public bank. That bank would use small local banks to lend to the community.

The public bank concept is not new.  It has been proposed before in San Francisco and has a successful 90-year track record in North Dakota.  Weidner notes that the state-owned Bank of North Dakota earned taxpayers more than $61 million last year and reported a profit of $57 million in 2008, when Bank of America had a $1.2 billion net loss.  The San Francisco bank proposal is sponsored by city supervisor John Avalos, who has been thinking about a municipal bank for several years.  

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Hundreds Temporarily Shutdown Access to Port of Long Beach US

 

On Monday morning, around 500 protesters gathered in the early morning at the Port of Long Beach to block traffic in and out of SSA Marine, a shipping company partly owned by Wall Street investment firm, Goldman Sachs, joining in solidarity with protesters up and down the West Coast.

President Obama Richly Deserves to Be Dumped

Harpers

John R. MacArthur

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Elizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

A former aide to Lyndon Johnson who knows politics from the inside, Moyers then delivered the coup de grace: “[Lease] should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.”

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Bankers are the Dictators of the West

One of Fisk's best articles yet. 

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Independent
Robert Fisk

Suggested Topics Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense. 

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. 

Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940? 

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?

Police go military

US police officers have used heavy-handed techniques and high-tech weaponry to take down alleged criminals, as most evident in the brutal beat-downs of Occupy Wall Street protesters. An onslaught of attacks with pepper-spray, tear gas guns and batons are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the arsenal of arms that the police are pulverizing peaceful protesters with. Is freedom of speech worth pursuing when those that supposedly allow it are destroying demonstrators with blow after blow?

Police arrest OWS protesters at World Financial Center

Occupy London's anger over police 'terrorism' document

Occupy London activists are angered at a police document that lists them 

with terrorist organisations. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

Guardian

Police have angered Occupy London activists after listing the movement among terrorist groups in an advisory notice sent to the business community in the City.

The document issued by City of London police, headed "Terrorism/extremism update for the City of London business community", included a detailed account of recent and upcoming Occupy London activities and was sent to "trusted partners" in the area.

The document, dated 2 December, which was passed on to Occupy London's Finsbury square encampment over the weekend by a local business owner, gave an update on foreign terrorist activities including that of Farc in Columbia, al-Qaida in Pakistan and the outcome of a trial into the Minsk bombing in Belarus.

Below that, a section headed "Domestic" was dedicated wholly to the activities of the Occupy encampments and singled out anti-capitalists as a cause for concern.

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Occupy Movement … Stronger than Ever?

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.

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.

The “Occupy Our Homes” campaign started today...

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Max Blumenthal: How Israeli Occupation Forces, Bahraini Monarchy Guards Trained U.S. Police For Coordinated Crackdown On “Occupy” Protests

Exiled Online

This article is cross-posted from Al-Akhbar.com with permission from the author Max Blumenthal

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield.

The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote "mutual response," collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent "Occupy" movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured.

According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, "Law enforcement agencies responding to...Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.  

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La longue durée

 Morris Berman / Dark Ages America

La longue durée is an expression used by the Annales School of French historians to indicate an approach that gives priority to long-term historical structures over short-term events. The phrase was coined by Fernand Braudel in an article he published in 1958. Basically, the Annales historians held that the short-term time-scale is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist, whereas la longue durée concentrates on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures. Thus beneath the twists and turns of any economic system, wrote Braudel, which can seem like major changes to the people living through them, lie "old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic." An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular.

The “arc” of capitalism, according to WSA, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. In the classic study of the period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga depicted the time as one of depression and cultural exhaustion—like our own age, not much fun to live through. One reason for this is that the world is literally perched over an abyss (brilliantly depicted at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest). What is on deck, so to speak, is largely unknown, and to have to hover over the unknown for a long time is, to put it colloquially, a bit of a drag. The same thing was true at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire as well (on the ruins of which the feudal system slowly arose).

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Some thoughts that OCCUPY my mind

killinghope.org

William Blum

When the Vietnam War became history, and the protest signs and the bullhorns were put away, so too was the serious side of most protestors' alienation and hostility toward the government. They returned, with minimal resistance, to the restless pursuit of success, and the belief that the choice facing the world was either "capitalist democracy" or "communist dictatorship". The war had been an aberration, was the implicit verdict, a blemish on an otherwise humane American record. The fear felt by the powers-that-be that society's fabric was unraveling and that the Republic was hanging by a thread turned out to be little more than media hype; it had been great copy.

I mention this to explain why I've been reluctant to jump with both feet on the Occupy bandwagon. I first thought that if nothing else the approaching winter would do them in; if not, it would be the demands of their lives — they have to make some money at some point, attend classes somewhere, lovers and friends and family they have to cater to somewhere; lately I've been thinking it's the police that will do them in, writing finis to their marvelous movement adventure — if you hold the system up to a mirror the system can go crazy. 

But now I don't know. Those young people, and the old ones as well, keep surprising me, with their dedication and energy, their camaraderie and courage, their optimism and innovation, their non-violence and their keen awareness of the danger of being co-opted their focusing on the economic institutions more than on the politicians or political parties. There is also their splendid signs and slogans, walking from New York to Washington, and not falling apart following the despicable police destruction of the Occupy Wall Street encampment. They've given a million young people other ideas about how to spend the rest of their lives, and commandeered a remarkable amount of media space. The Washington Post on several occasions has devoted full page or near-full page sympathetic coverage. Occupy is being taken increasingly seriously by virtually all media.

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Police set up barricades at ‘Occupy San Francisco’ site

 

Raw Story

Police erected barricades on Thursday around a San Francisco park where hundreds of anti-Wall Street protesters braced for eviction two days after failing to agree to a city plan for relocating their camp.

Occupy San Francisco is believed to be the largest of a dwindling number of West Coast protest settlements aligned with the 2-month-old national movement protesting economic inequality, after a larger group in Los Angeles was evicted earlier in the week.

The purpose of the fencing put up around Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco’s Financial District was not immediately clear, but most police officers left after it was installed, and a raid on the encampment there did not seem imminent.

Shortly after police installed the barricades along three sides of the park, protesters bandied together to haul away the fencing from one of those sides as more than a dozen officers stood by watching. Protesters then chanted “Cops go home.”

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The moment protesters found a plain-clothes cop in their midst

Considering what the police have been doing here and abroad I think these protesters were extremely restrained.

Independent

Usually, it is the police who kettle protesters. The tables were turned, though, when demonstrators unmasked and surrounded a plain-clothes officer who had infiltrated their midst during this week's public sector protests.

The hoodie-wearing interloper was discovered by protesters from the Occupy movement from St Paul's while they were attempting to take over a building near Piccadilly Circus in central London on Wednesday.

The incident, which occurred outside the offices of the mining company Xstrata, was captured on video by The Independent (above, left). Protesters asked the man whether he worked for the Metropolitan Police. He can be seen in the film nodding and answering: "Yeah, I'm a Met Police officer, yeah."

At that, one of the group said: "Right, let's circle him so he can't go anywhere." Protesters duly surrounded the officer, chanting "shame on you". Within moments the chants turned to "scum, scum, scum". One protester was heard to say: "He has no uniform and no [badge] number... we have no way of identifying him, so how are we supposed to complain about him."

The officer was allowed to reach the line of uniformed police who were kettling the protest, and they let him through. Protesters have complained recently about a perceived increase in the number of plain-clothes or undercover police officers at protest marches. Videos of people suspected of such a role have surfaced online, and cards with images of those thought to be police officers have reportedly been distributed among demonstrators.

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More activist photos from Zoriah

Occupy Wall Street Photos - Part 2

Gerald Celente talks to Lew Rockwell: "The entire global economic system is collapsing"

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Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking, and publisher of The Trends Journal.

Video of LAPD late night raid on Occupy LA

They are only going to come back ....You can't stop this.

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Military Industrial Complex: Full Fruition

 

The Military Industrial Complex Logo

disclose.tv

Dissident Voice

Kathleen Wallace Peine

This week Congress is expected to vote on a bill advanced by John McCain and Carl Levin, a Republican and Democrat who united to bring us the foundation needed to propel us fully into a militarized nightmare state similar to what we have been exporting these last few years. It is the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act.

In case you haven’t heard the details (which is likely if you have spent much time watching traditional news), the bill essentially labels every spot on this earth as a battlefield, including the United States. It’s a telling moment when they concede, or, in fact, advance a never ending war, and its present under each rock, according to these lawmakers. It’s certainly the stuff of 1984 (we’ve always been at war with Eastasia). From this notion springs the advancement of military tribunals dealing with all citizens of the globe (once again, Americans included) without the bother of transparency. Detention and disappearance could be the order of the day.

The secretive nature and broad sweeps have already been used on those they deem foreign enemy combatants around the world. As if by fascist playbook, this sort of thing is trial ballooned on “the other” and then brought home for the enjoyment of those who didn’t complain the first time around.

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