Occupy Wall Street [OWS]

The Crime Of Peaceful Protest

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TruthDig  April 28 2014

Occupy Wall Street activists Eric Linkser, center left, and Cecily McMillan, far right, take turns shouting information to fellow protesters preparing to return to Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15, 2011. AP/Bebeto Matthews
Occupy Wall Street activists Eric Linkser, center left, and Cecily McMillan, far right, take turns shouting information to fellow protesters preparing to return to Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15, 2011. AP/Bebeto Matthews

NEW YORK—Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

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Locking Out The Voices Of Dissent

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TruthDig  July 16 2013

A Veterans for Peace demonstrator at a Sept. 15, 2012, rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park.

NEW YORK—The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny.

If the state is ultimately successful in preventing us from mobilizing in public spaces, then dissent will mutate from nonviolent mass protests to clandestine and perhaps violent acts of resistance. Some demonstrators have already been branded “domestic terrorists” under the law. The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny. This is why the New York City trial last week of members of Veterans for Peace, along with other activists, took on an importance that belied the simple trespassing charges against them.

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The Federal Reserve’s Latest Scam: QE Shell Game

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theintelhub.com | September 24 2012

Ben BernankeNow you see it. Now you don’t. QE III is the Fed’s latest scam. A previous article quoted PIMCO’s Bill Gross. He called it money printing “till the cows come home.”

Doing it won’t resolve festering economic problems. They’re getting worse while Bernanke, the ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Congress, Obama, and like-minded world leaders fiddle.

After crisis conditions erupted in fall 2007, one scam followed another. Occupy Wall Street is right. “Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.” It hasn’t stopped and won’t until either people rebel or the whole house of cards Greenspan/Bernanke built collapses.

Helicopter Ben operates by Abraham Maslow’s maxim that “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

Hammering all day won’t help. He’s buying time. Little else. An eventual day of reckoning looms. The longer it’s delayed, the greater the collapse when it comes.

It’s not if, just when. Bad policy assures bad results. It’s not rocket science. It’s simple truth.

If properly used, QE could have worked and still can if redirected to where it’s needed. It’s not and won’t be. For nearly five years, credit went for speculation, big salaries and bonuses. It hasn’t been for the economy to stimulate growth and create jobs.

Financial warfare rages. America and other societies are affected. Ordinary people are hurt most. Hard times keep getting harder.

Since September 2007, the Fed cut interest rates from 5.25 to .25%. Surviving investment banks became commercial ones to get free money unavailable to ordinary folks.

They scammed trillions. How much is kept secret. It’s at least $9 trillion and may be up to two and half times that much.

Hundreds of billions went to Fannie, Freddie, AIG, the automakers and others. At the same time, millions lost jobs, homes and futures. Who cares about them when only money power and helping corporate favorites matter.

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Be The Change You Desire: Walk Away. Refuse To Participate In Your Enslavement

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The Jeenyus Corner | August 20 2012

The master manipulators who direct the trolls have devised yet another new way to deal with damning information that is factual and undeniable. With claims of fatigue over our problems, and that people don’t want to hear the bad news, they demand that I put forward solutions. Perhaps they are right.

The Buddha said that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. We can’t force feed people. Indeed, so many are so dependent upon the system, so inured by it that they will fight to protect it even though it ultimately denies most of them a better life. No one can teach people what they refuse to hear and not all trolls are mere operatives. Many are true believers.

I honestly believe few of us will change until a collapse forces people to acknowledge their enslavement. And even then, not til after the first winter when millions will die. This is why I keep telling all those Second Amendment supporters (of which I am one) that firearms are important yes, but don’t think the government isn’t prepared because we outnumber their alphabet agency apparatchiks.

They control the food.

These criminals have used illusion to coerce the masses into believing that government, in the way they have used it, is beneficial and even a good thing. Counter to what the founders understood – that at best its a necessary evil.

Today, 45.7 million Americans are receiving food stamp benefits and very near half of US citizens do not owe federal income taxes. We’ve allowed ourselves to be deceived into an almost narcotic dependency on the state for almost everything from the delusion of safety to basic needs of sustenance. Deliberately so, that we’re past the point of no return: its now quite impossible to convince a majority to vote away these ‘benefits’. Witness the violent response to that idea in Southern Europe these last months or the wails of doom in the mind control media whenever Medicare or Social Security is discussed.

No election is going to change anything; your candidate will not make a difference. Thus it should be clear that working within the current paradigm will do nothing at all to alleviate the pain that that very same paradigm is responsible for inflicting on us. It hasn’t before, why would it now?

Dr. King, Gandhi, the 1960′s anti war movement, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street… Understand who and what we’re dealing with – that attempts to organize against the criminals within the system have each been systematically met with either subversion or failing that, violent force.

Yes, occasionally the power structure has been forced to give, but most always on their terms and usually with any gains only perceptual and hardly significant to the long term. The power structure has proven itself quite adept at diverting, silencing or co-opting opposition when it has presented a problem to them.

So its not possible to use the force of our collective will to destroy a system based upon the collective insanity of a nation. Therefore no protests, no movement, no sort of group organizing around collective action can ever work. And since every effort using this methodology has thus far failed, why should we continue? Because as Einstein warned us: this is insane, repeating a task and expecting a different result each time.

Its time to change the way we deal with the forces of oppression and tyranny but it won’t be simple. It took 150 years to destroy the Republic that the founding fathers created and at this point is beyond redemption. Therefore the violent and tyrannical beast that the national government has grown into cannot be remedied by votes or even (and especially) by force.

We absolutely MUST remain non-violent.

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Uranus Square Pluto And Generational Tension

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Barbara Hand Clow | June 21 2012

[This is an update of an article by Barbara Hand Clow published in Welcome to Planet Earth (1991) titled, “Will the Pluto in Leo Generation Heal Itself?” During 2012-15, we will be living through seven squares between Uranus and Pluto, which will radically change our lives. When this article first came out twenty years ago, it flew all over the place and had a big impact because it spoke to people about their family relations. So, in light of the upcoming squares, this article is updated to our present times. Next comes an article on how to best utilize the power of the first square between Pluto and Uranus on June 24, 2012. Get ready!]

The seven squares between Uranus and Pluto—2012 through 2015—will create a revolution in global industrial, financial, and social structures. We know this because when the square was first drawing close during 2011, the ideals of the 1960s countercultural revolution surfaced within Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the European financial crisis. Uranus rules radical structural changes, while Pluto destroys anything in the way of change. When they work together as a team as they are now, watch out! This is especially true with erratic and shocking Uranus in its most forceful sign—Aries—while ruthless Pluto is in it most determined sign—Capricorn. During the counter-cultural revolution, Uranus and Pluto in Virgo—the sign of healing, orderly living, and ecology—set the themes for transformation all the way up through 2104: During the 1960s for example, people rose up and demanded an end to corporate control and war, and soon these seven squares will provide fuel to push this agenda along.

When two planets square each other after a major conjunction, the issues that surfaced during the conjunction return and push for resolution. With Pluto in Capricorn, we will witness a cleanout of financial, corporate, and societal structures. Many of us have not forgotten the wild and crazy 1960s, when youth movements demanded economic fairness, an end to war, and creative freedom for all people. This pressure for a more humane world has simmered just beneath the surface for more than forty years, and it came to a boil again in 2011—“power to the people” is the same as “power for the 99%”.

This article looks into how the 2012-15 squares will impact the Pluto generations that played major roles during the 1960s—those with natal Pluto in Cancer through Virgo born 1912-1972. It ends with the Cancer through Virgo transits of Chiron from 1988 through 1995, because the centaur generated a healing of these three generations. (1) Back in the 1960 during the Uranus/Pluto conjunctions in Virgo, the Pluto-in-Leo generation—born from 1937 to 1958—challenged the control of their Pluto-in-Cancer parents—born from 1912 to 1939. (Overlaps between generations are due to Pluto’s retrograde motion.) This younger generation’s refusal to support the status quo resulted in heart-breaking divisions in many families that may rip open again in 2012-15. Then because of this division, the Pluto-in-Virgo children and grandchildren—born 1956 to 1972—currently struggle with having enough resources. Let’s consider how these generations may respond to these upcoming squares.

Because of Pluto’s long stay in each sign, the sign that Pluto occupies expresses the deepest desires of each generation. These well up within people and eventually become the themes of collective movements, for example, the infamous “Make Love, not War” slogan of the 1960s. These plutonic desires become specific evolutionary urges that transform worlds, very much like extinctions that create space for new species. Pluto resides in our solar plexus (gut) where we hold the complexes of present and past experience. Like a volcano, when there is too much hidden material in our gut, Pluto compresses it and then explodes the contents in a wild eruption. Pluto is our emotional brain that holds the records of our karmic processes; we remember our deepest feelings by storing them plutonically. Pluto is also a compassionate and wise master, a teacher who allows us to learn the most about ourselves by forcing us to notice our behavior when our gut erupts. Just feel that area of your body when you get really mad at someone.

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