United Steelworkers union, North America's largest, joins Occupy Wall Street

★
Leadership of the United Steelworkers (USW), with 1.2 million active and retired members, issued a statement on Friday in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
"[The USW] stands in solidarity with and strongly supports Occupy Wall
Street. The brave men and women, many of them young people without jobs,
who have been demonstrating around-the-clock for nearly two weeks in
New York City are speaking out for the many in our world."

Writing in The Nation, Allison Kilkenny offers an angry rebuttal to Ginia Bellafante's NYT
article on the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, which paints the
protesters as "scatterbrained, sometimes borderline-psychotic
transients." Kilkenny attended the same demonstration, and while she
also saw "super-loud and eye-catching" demonstrators, she mostly found
herself talking to everyday people who'd lost everything, like Matthew, a
40 year old father of two: "My home has been seized, I’m unemployed,
there’s no job prospects on the horizon. I have two children and I don’t
see a future for them. This is the only way I see to effect change.
This isn’t a progressive issue. This is an American issue."

While the left loses the valuable organizational mechanism of unions,
the right has gained corporate masters like the Koch brothers to
disseminate millions of dollars into astroturfing campaigns to organize
and destroy on their behalf. While the left makes signs, the right has
already deployed troupes to scream at town hall events.

These are the kinds of massive oppositional forces activists find
themselves facing these days: an incredibly oppressive police state and a
corporate cash monster bearing down on them from the right. Meanwhile,
their union support army is either in retreat or preoccupied fighting
other battles on other fronts in Wisconsin or Ohio, or one of the other
forty-eight states where anti-union legislation was introduced this year
courtesy of ALEC, a front group that serves as proxy for corporate
interests.

Instead of bemoaning the fact that protesters haven’t arrived in
matching uniforms with a coherent PowerPoint presentation, these are the
issues we should be addressing. Of course the majority of Zuccotti Park
occupiers are young, brash and lost. They’d have to be to do something
like this, and risk getting hypothermia for the chance to be ignored and
belittled by the media. Young people are always the first ones willing
to risk comfort and security for the romantic vision of a better
tomorrow.

http://boingboing.net/2011/09/29/whos-occupying-wall-street-and-why-is-the-nyt-only-interested-in-the-kooks.html

NYTimes isn't going to survive this protest. They gonna come out as stooge for the status quo after this is over.

• Brooklyn Bridge occupied. Protesters marched to the Brooklyn Bridge, occupied car lanes and shut down all traffic:
  
  
  

  (@jopauca/Twitpic)

  
  
  
  
• Mass police arrests in response. Police made, and are
  continuing to make, mass arrests on the bridge in response to this
  occupation. One of the arrests appears to have been of an underage girl.
  From the Gothamist:
  

  Update 4:26 p.m.: Police have no arrived on the scene and have started arresting protesters en masse [...]
  

  Update 4:40 p.m.: Protesters are chanting "Let us go" as police seem
  to be going around arresting people at random. Police could be seen
  arresting a very young looking girl (15-17 from what we can tell), and
  people are screaming that they are arresting a "little girl" for no
  reason.

  
  

  
  

  Here's a screencap. The girl in question is in the yellow hat:

  
  
  

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/01/1021936/-Occupy-Wall-Street:-Brooklyn-Bridge-occupied,-mass-arrests,-solidarity-events?via=blog_1

NYTimes get cought working for the man.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/02/1022016/-New-York-Times-changes-its-story-on-blame-for-Brooklyn-Bridge-arrests?via=siderec

FreakOutNation has posted a couple of screen shots
to show that the New York Times has changed its story about the
Brooklyn Bridge arrests in a subtle but important way to shift the blame
to protesters:

After allowing them onto the bridge, police cut off and arrested dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters.

became

In a tense showdown over the East River, police arrested
hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they marched onto the
bridge's Brooklyn=bound roadway.

That change (and at least one other) took place over the course of 20 minutes. Check out the original story.

At one stage 500 protesters were blocked off by police on the bridge. At
least one journalist, freelancer Natasha Lennard for the New York
Times, was among those arrested. "About half way across the group of
people who wanted to occupy the bridge launched their action and stepped
into the road. They wanted to get arrested. It was sort of the idea,"
said Yaier Heber, one of the marchers.

But others said the sit-down protest appeared to happen only after the
protesters were deliberately blocked off by police after actually being
allowed onto the roadway. "They met the police line and ended up being
arrested one by one," said Damon Eris, another protester.

The march ended in chaotic scenes with police buses driving up the
bridge to be filled with arrested marchers. The packed buses then drove
off to central booking. Meanwhile, other marchers waited at the bottom
of the bridge's Manhattan side and cheered as some released protesters,
or those who had escaped being blocked off, came back down. "Let them
go! Let them go!" was a frequent chant.

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/01/more-than-700-occupy-wall-street-protesters-arrested-on-brooklyn-bridge.html

These people obviously still doesn't grasp the basic method and strategy, which is to make sure  how the  coopted and broken system is exposed. That the public will notice the degree of corruption. Can't wait until they finally figure out these type of protest will last months if not years.

Bloomberg can play the game, but he will have no say how it will end.

http://www.businessinsider.com/video-of-police-walking-in-front-of-protesters-on-the-brooklyn-bridge-2011-10

So far we've seen no evidence of police actually encouraging protesters to go on the road, but there are videos that show police walking in front of the protesters, as they go up onto the road.

This isn't the same as encouraging them to go on the road, but on the
other hand, you could see why people in a crowd would think that going
on a bridge is kosher if the police are calmly walking in front of the
crowd as they go up the road.

Here are two videos. The first, via Andrew Krucoff, is very short and shows the police clearly leading the way at the very start of the protesters entering the bridge.

The Marines are about to Occupy Wall Street

Well, the unemployment rate never been as high and so long as this since the 60's. (Rock n' Roll, Woodstock. era)  Most of the unemployed are the 20's. And this is the most globally aware and informed group of people ever coming out of school. The primary new group on the ground in last election. So, nobody takes political bullshit for an answer.

Right now it's still a copy of egyptian protest which is really a standard freedom house/regime change crap. Only initial opening. Primarily by people who see how bad things are on the ground. But soon basic true political narrative will emerge once the A-brain type see that the current system fail to adapt, in fact fairly thuggish. They conclude massive protest is the only solution and decide to join the crowd. So watch what's coming out of congress. See if the idiots get the message or not. I think they will keep aggravating the public with piecemeal/petty bickering legislative move ...

In NYC, it's probably pretty standard, CUNY, SUNY, NYU and finally Columbia U. That's pretty much everybody with functioning brain/who is who in NY.

I for one think, if the crowd on the street can keep it peaceful for few more weeks longer, the NY police Union will finally caves and join the crowd. Being called 'pig' and laugh at by even corner drugstore kids for next 30 yrs are not going to be pleasant. Then Bloomberg will really have to start worrying what he gonna do next...(probably start yapping on fox News)

This is last winter before election is coming, once election season hit full force, everybody know it's all Television bullshit and mud slinging. Full retard clown show.

By January 2013 or so, people are going to start protesting on congress steps and ready to take over the building and kick out every assholes in there.

garg, i can't stand this part. Won't somebody stop manual method of transmitting audio in large crowd for complicated speeches?

Complex speech can't happen using this method. Just let the man speak, record it fully and spread it digitally on the net. ffs. Every single schmo out there has digital media player (go to J&R and got yourself a mini video player for $50 already)

Make each speech with 10minute pause per video.

Create digitizing group, responsible for making, loading and archiving as many speech and event electronically.

Like watching theater of fools. Why does everything look the same everywhere?

Let's see how quickly they bring out the tear gas. Then in NYC, fatal shooting.

I for one am counting on the protest keep being peaceful, and NYC police finally breaking down after getting massive bad rap from public. Few more of this, even they can't stand it themselves.



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/05/1023257/-Video-of-Baton-Beatings-1-Hour-Ago-OccupyWallStreet-UPDATE:-Officer-Connolly-is-The-Cop?via=siderec

http://www.businessinsider.com/wild-footage-of-cop-swinging-billy-club-at-protesters-at-occupy-wall-street-2011-10

It’s brutally important that we, as members of the Democratic Wing of
the Democratic Party, speak up about these “bipartisan” travesties.
Otherwise, at the end of the day, we’re just another bunch of
hypocrites—doing exactly what the wingers and the MSM do—spewing forth
political propaganda.

As Bill Moyers recently noted it, "America Can't Deal With Reality -- We Must Be Exposed to the Truth, Even If It Hurts.”

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/06/1023345/-NYT’s-Editors,-Yves-Smith,-et-al:-It’s-Time-For-Democrats-To-Take-A-Good-Look-In-The-Mirror?via=siderecent

And make no mistake about the role of Third Way. Third Way
runs the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party. In Congress, staffers
attend regular Third Way policy briefings, where the group hands out
pre-packaged legislative amendments in legal form, generic press
releases, polling around those policy ideas, and talking points. It’s a
soup-to-nuts policy apparatus. Most of these ideas are harmless – like
increased volunteerism – but some are not, like various tax proposals.

The group has enormous juice. On the Congressional side, it has six honorary Senate co-Chairs,
and seven House-side co-Chairs. Jim Clyburn, a co-Chair, is in the
House Democratic leadership. Two current cabinet members are former
co-Chairs. Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip, held regular briefings
for the freshmen member staff in the last Congress.

On the administration side, former Third Way board member Bill Daley
is now White House chief of staff. Ron Klain, who was Biden’s Chief of
Staff, is now with Third Way. The White House is pretty much full of Third Way-style apparatchiks.

Third Way also echoes, nearly entirely, the White House’s political
line (though it is slightly ahead on gay rights). Here’s Third Way
praising the Gang of 6 talks, opposing cut, cap, and balance, encouraging entitlement cuts, pushing various free trade agreements.

Finally, most of the Board members are from the FIRE Sector (Wall Street and real estate), including the head of equity trading for Goldman Sachs and one of the heads of investment banking for Morgan Stanley.

It’s a highly optimized political operation for the White House and
Congressional Democrats, with PR muscle, elite validators, access, and
policy-making infrastructure.

By Stuart Zechman, an entrepreneur and technologist, co-founder
with Jay Ackroyd of the blog “Political Lagoon, and a frequent commenter
at TIME Magazine’s political blog “Swampland”.

Well, well, well.

It seems as if some of you purists out there have been grumbling again about the President’s latest “jobs legislation,” even though his recent speech to Congress contained some cautiously populist rhetoric designed to get you to clap, vote and give your hard-earned money to his re-election campaign. How predictable of you movement liberals, never giving Our President credit for anything. What exactly do you people want, a Works Progress Administration, or something equally rife with New Deal orthodoxy?

Don’t you movement liberals understand that our neoliberal, Third Way program is the least rightist agenda that can ever be achieved in the United States? Haven’t you been listening to Dem-leaning pundits? Are you still insisting that there could actually be a separate, distinct, movement liberal, political-economic philosophy than what is currently held by the “center-left coalition” that runs the Democratic Party and its associated message shops and think tanks? Don’t you get that, if you’re anywhere left of movement conservatives, we’re all there is?

What is wrong with you magical-thinkers? Why can’t you accept that political reality dictates that you not exist!

The youth behind the original movement are organized into factions or committees,
including legal, medical, and finance, and they are pulling away from
association with the union protest movement now. The people behind the
original movement recognize that their strength is in their youth, and
we found little evidence to confirm reports that they're not organized.

They now have $40,000 in the bank, in an account at Amalgamated Bank.

"At first, Victoria [Sobel, one of the movement's unofficial leaders]
was sleeping with $10,000 in the park," says Darrell Prince, who works
on the finance team. He and others on the team wear a gold "$" sign as
an elbow patch to identify themselves.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-occupy-wall-street-protesters-have-40000-in-the-bank-2011-10

ryan_meets_wall 4 points 54 minutes ago

Discipline Needed

It isn’t hard to see what Republican-controlled
legislatures are trying to do. They want to make sure that the kind of
free-floating anger expressed by Occupy Wall Street doesn’t end up
helping Obama’s reelection. The claim that the purpose of the new
election laws is to prevent voter fraud is itself a fraud, given that
there’s no widespread evidence of ballots cast under assumed identities.

To make something lasting of this movement, the
left must move from legitimate moral outrage to a disciplined approach
for electing candidates who want to make Wall Street more answerable for
the mess we’re in. Even as they’re outspent by the Koch brothers and
their corporate ilk, the 99 percenters will make 2012 a helluva lot more
compelling.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-06/why-occupy-wall-street-should-scare-republicans-jonathan-alter.html

yadda yadda bla bla... (The TV people still can't figure out why they can't find coherent message. heh. keep looking and print it all out... )

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/07/1023952/-Nate-Silver:-“Police-Clashes-Spur-Coverage-of-OccupyWallStreet”?via=siderec

The protestors aren’t necessarily anti-capitalist or anti-corporation
per se.  They are anti the current system.  The system that they have no
influence over and yet controls their lives.  The system that has seen
average real wages remain flat for decades while inflation slowly exacts
its insidious costs.  The system that pushes forward fake politicians
with movie star smiles, populist rhetoric and polished speaking styles,
whose sole mission once elected is to maintain the status quo for the
wealthy individuals and corporations that got them elected.  The system
that prints out of thin air and borrows from third world China and
elsewhere trillions of dollars to bail out the wealthy while sending the
bill the average taxpayer.  The system that will produce, for the first
time in the history of the United States of America, a current
generation of young citizens who will be worse off than their parents
were before them.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-economic-punctuated-equilibrium

It will be fairly standard co--intelpro type of stuff at the opening. That's why at the opening, it is useful to have establishment think this movement can give them political gain of some sort.

next... it is  important to have as many people with camera and point it at "media" when they start manufacturing story. ... This will start soon. (The guy who start acting funny, and the media who manufacture narrative.)

http://my.firedoglake.com/spocko/2011/10/06/techniques-the-corporate-powers-will-use-to-destroy-the-ows-movement/

Yesterday morning a retired military officer friend (RMOF) and I were
conversing about what might happen next with the Occupy Wall Street
movement. Since Michael Westen of Burn Notice or Annie Walker from
Covert Affairs weren’t available, he offered some thoughts from the
point of view of a non-fictional character who studies this stuff. I,
as a media watcher and activist wanted to talk about how the media and
power players will deal with the various actions and what we can do to
predict the media’s actions so we can get ahead of news and prepare. I
also have delusions of influencing the narrative, but I’m afraid that
shuttle craft might have left the ship.

Here are a few of his thoughts and some of my questions, predictions and suggestions.

RMOF:    I expect “trouble” soon. I don’t expect it from the protestors, but plants put in by the plutocrats or by violent individuals.

Spocko:    Definitely. The media LOVE plants because they will create the kind of action that makes for good TV.
What they are not good at is tracking down who has started the action
and just how connected they really are to the movement. Today our new
media can help. We already identified Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna,
the cop who pepper sprayed the penned in girls. I doubt the MSM have
diligently tracked him down if only they had the footage. Even if they
did it would be days later and they would have had to go though official
channels.

– Bank profits are highest since before the recession…: According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., bank profits in the first quarter of this year were “the best for the industry since the $36.8 billion earned in the second quarter of 2007.” JP Morgan Chase is currently pulling in record profits.

– …even as the banks plan thousands of layoffs: Banks, including Bank of America, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse, are planning to lay off tens of thousands of workers.

– Banks make nearly one-third of total corporate profits: The financial sector accounts for about 30 percent of total corporate profits, which is actually down from before the financial crisis, when they made closer to 40 percent.

– Since 2008, the biggest banks have gotten bigger:
Due to the failure of small competitors and mergers facilitated during
the 2008 crisis, the nation’s biggest banks — including Bank of America,
JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo — are now bigger than they were pre-recession. Pre-crisis, the four biggest banks held 32 percent of total deposits; now they hold nearly 40 percent.

– The four biggest banks issue 50 percent of mortgages and 66 percent of credit cards: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup issue one out of every two mortgages and nearly two out of every three credit cards in America.

– The 10 biggest banks hold 60 percent of bank assets: In the 1980s, the 10 biggest banks controlled 22 percent of total bank assets. Today, they control 60 percent.

– The six biggest banks hold assets equal to 63 percent of the country’s GDP:
In 1995, the six biggest banks in the country held assets equal to
about 17 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Now their
assets equal 63 percent of GDP.

– The five biggest banks hold 95 percent of derivatives:
Nearly the entire market in derivatives — the credit instruments that
helped blow up some of the nation’s biggest banks as well as
mega-insurer AIG — is dominated by just five firms: JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo.

– Banks cost households nearly $20 trillion in wealth: Almost $20 trillion in wealth was destroyed by the Great Recession, and total family wealth is still down “$12.8 trillion (in 2011 dollars) from June 2007 — its last peak.”

– Big banks don’t lend to small businesses: The New Rules Project notes that the country’s 20 biggest banks “devote only 18 percent of their commercial loan portfolios to small business.”

– Big banks paid 5,000 bonuses of at least $1 million in 2008:
According to the New York Attorney General’s office, “nine of the
financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal
bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008.”

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/07/338887/1-facts-biggest-banks/

http://twitpic.com/6x8hyh

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/greg-mitchell

Peter King (R-NY) says "we have to be careful not to allow this [Occupy Wall
Street] to get any legitimacy" because if it does, it might affect
policy.

But if Occupy Wall Street coalesces into something like a real
movement, the Democratic Party may have more difficulty digesting it
than the GOP has had with the Tea Party.

After all, a big share of both parties’ campaign funds comes from the
Street and corporate board rooms. The Street and corporate America also
have hordes of public-relations flacks and armies of lobbyists to do
their bidding – not to mention the unfathomably deep pockets of the Koch
Brothers and Dick Armey’s and Karl Rove’s SuperPACs. Even if the
Occupiers have access to some union money, it’s hardly a match.

Yet the real difficulty lies deeper. A little history is helpful here.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party
had no trouble embracing economic populism. It charged the large
industrial concentrations of the era – the trusts – with stifling the
economy and poisoning democracy. In the 1912 campaign Woodrow Wilson
promised to wage “a crusade against powers that have governed us … that
have limited our development … that have determined our lives … that
have set us in a straightjacket to so as they please.” The struggle to
break up the trusts would be, in Wilson’s words, nothing less than a
“second struggle for emancipation.”

Wilson lived up to his words – signing into law the Clayton Antitrust
Act (which not only strengthened antitrust laws but also exempted
unions from their reach), establishing the Federal Trade Commission (to
root out “unfair acts and practices in commerce”), and creating first
national income tax.

Years later Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked corporate and financial
power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek,
unemployment insurance, and Social Security. FDR also instituted a high
marginal income tax on the wealthy.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street and big business went on the attack. In
the 1936 campaign, Roosevelt warned against the “economic royalists”
who had impressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and
women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor …
these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by
this new industrial dictatorship,” he warned. What was at stake,
Roosevelt thundered, was nothing less that the “survival of democracy.”
He told the American people that big business and finance were
determined to unseat him. “Never before, in all our history, have these
forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They
are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred!”

By the 1960s, though, the Democratic Party had given up on populism.
Gone from presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen and
unscrupulous financiers. This was partly because the economy had changed
profoundly. Postwar prosperity grew the middle class and reduced the
gap between rich and poor. By the mid-1950s, a third of all
private-sector employees were unionized, and blue-collar workers got
generous wage and benefit increases.

By then Keynesianism had become a widely-accepted antidote to
economic downturns – substituting the management of aggregate demand for
class antagonism. Even Richard Nixon purportedly claimed “we’re all
Keynesians now.” Who needed economic populism when fiscal and monetary
policy could even out the business cycle, and the rewards of growth were
so widely distributed?

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-wall-street-occupiers-and-the-democratic-party-2011-10

http://www.businessinsider.com/alan-grayson-bill-maher-wall-street-protests-2011-10?op=1

…The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding
down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and
threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but
jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are
giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity…

…

…The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The
protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which
the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right
when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected
officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that
burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and
home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost
their belief in redress and recovery.

The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected
officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic
combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of
banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer…

…

…When the protesters say they represent 99 percent of Americans, they
are referring to the concentration of income in today’s deeply unequal
society…

…

…No wonder then that Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for
discontent…The country needs a shift in the emphasis of public policy
from protecting the banks to fostering full employment, including public
spending for job creation and development of a strong, long-term
strategy to increase domestic manufacturing…

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/09/1024419/-Reich,-Smith,-Dayen,-Krugman,-NYT,-et-al:-Why-OccupyWallStreet-Doesnt-Support-ObamaYet?via=siderecent


*chuckle* The idiot at NYTimes isn't as stupid as I thought. They are changing their tune. I guess they see how this protest going to evolve...

Stick around NYTimes. You might actually make money and restore some credibility if you keep it up.

You have some value, in that a lot of insular uptowners think people actually still read newspaper for news. ... The street needs away to prick their bubble somehow. You are the only crappy newspaper left before reaching Murdoch tabloit.

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/News/2008/12/Pages/The-Real-Cost-Of-The-2008-Recession.aspx