Feds Helped Coordinate Occupy X Crackdowns 803
Lawrence_Bird writes "The Feds helped break up the Occupy protests by providing advice and assistance from the FBI and DHS. From the article: 'Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said on Monday that her city and others across the country coordinated their crackdowns of Occupy Wall Street camps. Rick Ellis, a Minneapolis-based journalist for Examiner.com, reports that these cities also had the help of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation." In related conspiracy news, apcullen wrote in with a story by Time Magazine guest columnist Naomi Wolf who claims: "Instead of imminent safety issues, the timing of the crackdown was far more likely to do with the fact that the Occupy movement was planning something media-savvy at last: a 'carnival' on Wall Street on Thursday in which protesters would telegenically tell their individual stories of hardship, job loss and disenfranchisement. It is that event that posed a 'safety risk' — to the efforts of Wall Street and the Bloomberg administration to manage the narrative."
Go with the simple over complex theory (Score:1, Interesting)
They Occupy protests were broken up for simple obvious reasons
1. They were planning disrupting Wall Street. In other words, they were threatening the economy and even Bloomy can't allow that.
2. The Occupy protests were jumping the shark and losing popular support as crime ramped up and local business suffered. So the mayors got together and did something about it all at once so no one would have to go first and get singled out for counter attack.
3. The Occupy folks themselves kinda wanted to get shut down for the winter and aren't likely to put up more than token resistence. Expect a resurgence in the spring.
Mayor Quan Denies This (Score:5, Interesting)
The question practically answers itself. (Score:5, Interesting)
How could crime have "ramped up" when there were so many cops standing around watching them?
Watch the videos from Oakland. The protesters viciously assaulted the police nightsticks, shields, tear-gas cannisters, etc. with military-grade abdominal muscles, heads, and faces.
I'd tell you to watch the New York videos, but the media blackout was quite effective.
Re:Go with the simple over complex theory (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who works on Wall St (in financial services, but not for a bank/hedgefund/trading desk of any kind), I can tell you definitively that they have not disrupted "Wall St" in any way, other than vaguely disrupting foot traffic on the street that is named Wall. The fundamental thing people seem to not understand is that Wall St is really just a tourist attraction these days. Only a handful of guys still work on the stock exchange floor and almost no trading is done there. And the banks all moved their offices to midtown, Jersey City or Connecticut years ago. If they go through with their Wall St Carnival or whatever the hell they plan, it will accomplish nothing but getting a bunch of people arrested, as they've been told repeatedly that will happen if they do anything on Wall St itself without a proper permit.
Re: Communism failed: class warfare alive and well (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a war between rich parents who created the wealth, and the rich children who cannot sustain it. All I have are anecdotes, but I saw a lot of people complaining about being $100K in debt. How the hell do you do burn that much cash if you're "lower class"? That's more than I earn in a year.
Re:Go with the simple over complex theory (Score:3, Interesting)
> I've never seen so much negative press directed at a group of Americans exercising their first amendment rights.
OWS has pretty much zero to do with the 1st Amendment. So there is your first mistake. Nobody denied them the right to protest. Squatting on property that isn't yours isn't a speech issue, it is a trespass or theft issue. As for negative press, see the Tea Party for a real example of negative press. And they did it all within the system. They bought permits, paid for portapotties, etc. Hell, most left the place cleaner than when they arrived. There were no arrests that I'm aware of at any "tea" event nationwide which is pretty remarkable. They had a coherent agenda that a child could understand though you would never know that from most TV accounts.
Compare and contrast to OWS. No permits, even when they camped places the Tea Party had to buy permits to use. Yea the government really oppresses OWS. Instead of showing up, rallying for an afternoon and airing their grievances they camp in their own filth and would have stayed there until they all died of plague or got chased off. Nobody can clearly say what OWS objected to or what they wanted changed except it smelled of cluelessness and marxism. Well there was one theme strong enough to stand out, most seemed to be losers who were stupid enough to rack up insane debt majoring in things with no market value and now want their debt wiped clean. To which most sane people say "screw you."
> OWS clearly scares a lot of people.
Doubtful. Repels perhaps, disgust or ridicule at best. I see em and say "get a job!" Almost all of em have a degree and the unemployment rate for college grads is only 4% so odds are they could be doing SOMETHING productive.
Re:"threatening the economy" (Score:3, Interesting)
Not too far off. I'm almost done with this book and I'm not quite sure what "value" these guys provide for the money they get:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_09/b4217086779050.htm [businessweek.com]
Re:Suprised they went on as long as they did (Score:5, Interesting)
No, but just because you are protesting doesn't allow you to violate the law. If there are laws in place restricting the ability to set up a camp in a park, bring in generators, create health code violations etc., it must apply equally to all citizens.
I see your point, and I concede. I approve of civil disobedience, but the disobedience in question should apply to laws you disagree with. Unless they're protesting against laws that restrict the ability to camp in a park, they shouldn't camp in the park.
Here's a few examples...Granted, these idiots are the 1% of the 99% that really give the well meaning protesters a bad name
Yeah, I agree with you completely. People start with the reasonable intent of trying to make themselves heard and then cross the line by wanting to drown out the voices of the opposition.
Re:Go with the simple over complex theory (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like they need to disrupt wallstreet digitally.
this would actually be something good for anonymous's army of script kiddies to apply themselves to.
Essentially, you flood the automatic trade daemons with false quote data. You don't do this the way your typical con-man does, which is to selectively quote false prices to change the aggregate stock prices in such a way as to sweeten his own investment opportunities; instead, you selectively quote false prices to initiate a bear market, and drive down trading, if not encourage wholesale shorting of major stocks. Banks create money from thin air, this would return that conjured money back to the void whence it came.
Alternatively, if you don't want to have a hand in destroying the world economy on such a drastic scale, you could instead work from the standpoint of simply creating congestion. Remember those stories of new fiber runs being laid for wallstreet traffic, because a few ms of latency can translate to millions of dollars of lost trades? Bingo. Latency would injure wallstreet.
Both approaches lend themselves well to scriptkiddies. Anonymous is missing an epic opportunity.
Re:This was a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm really getting tired of all these "ZOMG, Poop!" comments. The protesters tried to bring in porta-potties but were denied. If you want to bitch at anybody about the terrible health conditions, bitch at the city for not allowing the protesters to provide the sensible sanitation arrangements that they tried to.
Re:Protesting too much - (Score:4, Interesting)
That is definitely the right attitude, you absolutely need to keep an eye firmly on the goal of staying employed and benefiting your employer. It is important to make money from gainful employment so that you can spend it on products. Consume, do not reflect on your position in life. You should accept it, and ridicule anyone who tries to cast aspersion on the ruling class.
Re:Go with the simple over complex theory (Score:2, Interesting)
Give the money out every month as a "basic income" of $1000 to $2000 a month (Social Security for Medicare for all from birth), and things would settle down soon enough. http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ [basicincome.org]
Much addiction is just a sign of stress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park [wikipedia.org]
And can be overcome: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx [drfuhrman.com]
Good communities help with that: http://www.bluezones.com/ [bluezones.com]
Re:Protesting too much - (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a lot of people here who are going to scrape by on part time IT, freelance work and occasionally installing WiFi for the neighbors, and wish they had a 40-hour-a-week developer job with benefits and a path forward. (Or actually working that developer job, and finding out that to hold it really requires something like 60 hours a week.)
Heh. I think this is becoming one of those transatlantic divides, as strong as the attitude toward guns.
Here in the UK, a 40-hour working week is considered long. We have a thing called the European Working Time Directive that makes it illegal for your employer to ask you to work any longer than that, and I agree with it 100%. It blows my mind that Americans put up with 60 hours a week. Do you do anything but work? I'm not trying to insult anyone here, so please don't get the wrong idea - but is it just a cultural thing that makes you OK with 60 hours a week (and 3 jobs - WTF???) - or do you think about it the same way we would?
If you were asked to work 60 hours a week over here, you'd probably have good reason to sue your employer.