Occupy blogger fighting subpoena
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts is fighting on behalf of a blogger with apparent Occupy Boston ties who has been subjected to a subpoena that authorities filed through a social media site.
Peter Krupp, an attorney from Lurie and Krupp LLC, who is working on behalf of the ACLU, said the ACLU has moved to have the subpoena, sent to Twitter, quashed on First Amendment grounds. A hearing has been continued to today in Suffolk Superior Court.
Suffolk court is occupied by Twitter
A judge is expected to decide today whether to unseal court documents involving prosecutors’ attempts to obtain Twitter user information – including from an account linked to Occupy Boston – as part of a probe into the alleged hacking of Boston police email.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Carol S. Ball temporarily sealed the case yesterday during a brief conference requested by Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Benjamin A. Goldberger.
http://tinyurl.com/cahke6p
Twitter Subpoena Reveals Boston PD Is After User Information
It appears as though Twitter has ignored request from the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk Massachusetts District Attorney’s office that a subpoena for user information be kept under wraps.
http://tinyurl.com/cab8ncs
Occupy the future – As it evolves, the movement is building on a network laid down in the encampments
After barreling straight ahead for more than three months, Occupy is at its first fundamental turning point. Encampments in city after city have been eviscerated and plowed under. In Boston, after a judge ruled that the Dewey Square Occupation wasn’t protected as free speech, protesters – with the help of police – broke camp and dispersed. All this while critics say the movement has to either take a new form or perish.
But in fact, Occupy has been moving toward that new form for months. Since early October, hundreds of activists from Occupations nationwide have been building connections by phone, e-mail, and Internet relay chats. Now, despite lower public visibility, this network is metamorphosing into something stronger and more sustainable – approaching what renowned group dynamics guru Clay Shirky calls “movement nirvana.”
http://tinyurl.com/bq3poal
Small Occupy Movements Across the Country Accumulate Victories
Occupy Riverside activists helped an ex-Marine reoccupy the home that he and his family were evicted from as a result of foreclosure. Occupy Petaluma protesters successfully petitioned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to suspend evictions during the holidays. Occupy Redding is supporting postal workers who are protesting job cuts.
UC Riverside researchers conclude that these actions, along with the recent port shutdowns, prove that “this movement has broad support and is capable of powerful collective action.”
http://tinyurl.com/7emzk4j
San Diego Police Cite Marine Corps Vet for Carrying American Flag
The cops saw this as a chance to say ‘we’re not afraid to go after a veteran,'” the young Marine said. “It was a chance for them to say ‘we’re in charge.'”
Following the incident, calls went out on the Occupy San Diego Facebook page for an impromptu rally to, as described by rally organizers, take the American flag back from SDPD.
At 4 p.m., Dec. 23, protestors from Occupy San Diego, Veterans for Peace and MoveOn.org rallied at the corners of 4th Avenue and B Street in downtown San Diego. Nearly all of the protestors, numbering more than 70, carried American flags on illegal sized poles while others draped the flag around their necks.
http://tinyurl.com/c7khqjj
Protesters are arrested outside of Mitt Romney’s Iowa campaign headquarters
Des Moines police today arrested a total of 10 protesters at Mitt Romney’s campaign offices and a Wells Fargo branch office.
The protesters, all part of the Occupy Des Moines movement, demanded that Romney and Wells Fargo release their tax returns and that Romney return money donated to his 2012 presidential campaign from Wells Fargo PAC and Wells Fargo employees.
Iowa Republicans move vote counting operation to ‘undisclosed location’ to avoid Occupy protesters
The Iowa Republican party is moving its caucus night vote counting operation to an undisclosed location because of planned “Occupy Iowa Caucus” protests.
http://tinyurl.com/blr7g9t
The Iowa Occupiers’ Chilling Plot to Engage in Participatory Democracy
Will the Occupy movement destroy the comely state of Iowa? Considering that they plan on interrupting a few caucuses and hollering in some offices, one can safely assume… no. But whatever they’re planning on doing, it’s apparently enough to scare the Iowa Republican party into secret bunkers, where they’ll be safe from this nefarious grasp of “political activists.”
http://tinyurl.com/bvsbnn9
Republicans don’t require a photo ID to vote in Iowa caucuses
Republicans participating the the Iowa caucuses will be able to cast a ballot for the presidential candidate of their choice without presenting a photo ID, according to voting watchdog Brad Friedman.
Republicans have pushed for stricter voting regulations, such as voter ID laws, to protect against alleged voter fraud. More than 30 states have changed voter laws since 2008, including requiring voter identification cards, eliminating same-day registration on voting day, prohibiting ex-felons from ballot access, restricting early voting and requiring proof of citizenship.
http://tinyurl.com/c9mtl7k
Massachusetts Senate race tests feelings about Wall Street
The race is for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, but it’s really a referendum on Wall Street.
. . .
Even as Warren gains traction in the polls, most Democrats have been hesitant to embrace the Occupy protests. But her message could appeal to Senate candidates in New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Rhode Island, states in which the Occupy message carries greater appeal, said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Every candidate’s watching her because she’s something of a phenomenon,” Duffy said. “They’re not so ready to embrace the protests, but they’re certainly ready to embrace the idea of the 99 percent – the middle class – being left behind, specifically at the hands of Republicans.”
Wall Street – a raw deal for the 100 percent
The stunning reality is that five years into the financial meltdown, it’s business as usual on Wall Street – outlandish rewards for insiders with downside for almost everyone else. Occupy Wall Street protesters are right – something is wrong – but they’re not sure what. Here’s what I say: A rigged game affects not just the 99 percent, but everyone, and with global repercussions.
http://tinyurl.com/cvsnjmh
Occupy L.A.: Free speech is free
There is something unseemly about charging people for exercising their 1st Amendment rights on public property, even if that protest was confrontational or illegal. Would we have expected the federal government to charge Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for trampling the grass on the National Mall during the 1963 March on Washington?
http://tinyurl.com/cqob5y9
Occupy and the hostile media – The mainstream press is always on the wrong side of history (Boots Riley)
Every progressive movement in U.S. history was portrayed negatively by mainstream media at the time it was happening. It’s no surprise that the media portray the Occupy Wall Street movement in the same light.
During the Montgomery bus boycott, mainstream media outlets interviewed black folks who were against it and talked about how the boycott was misguided and hurt the local economy. The day after the boycott started, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a story featuring the manager of the bus lines saying that bus drivers were being shot at and rocks were being thrown at them.
During the rest of the civil rights movement, protesters who were fire-hosed and otherwise brutalized were called “violent protesters” in the mainstream media, which again featured interviews with people saying that the protests were wrongheaded.
http://tinyurl.com/d5swgtt
In San Francisco: A Political Counter-Offensive by the One Percent
A political campaign by San Francisco’s well-heeled “property owners” was launched to influence police and politicians to aggressively demobilize Occupy SF and to dismantle their encampments. And, there are documents to prove it.
How Banks Cheat Taxpayers
There is absolutely no good reason why all debt issues are not put up to competitive bids. This is not like defense contracting, where in some situations it is at least theoretically possible that X or Y company is the world’s only competent manufacturer, say, of armor-plated Humvee doors, or some such thing. It’s still wrong and perverse when companies like Halliburton or Blackwater get sole-source defense contracts, but at least there’s some kind of theoretical justification there.
But this is a bond issue, not rocket science. In most cases, all the top investment banks will offer virtually the same service, with only the price varying. Towns and cities and states lose billions of dollars every year allowing financial services companies to overcharge them for underwriting.
http://tinyurl.com/cz5uf8x
How the bankers win
If bankers can get us to believe that a contract signed by a politician to pay the bankers debts is above the will of a people to decide their own future then the bankers will have definitely won. Democracy will have ended and so will your children’s hope of a better future.
As long as the bankers can keep their debts in our future to be paid off by us, the tax payers, for as long as it takes – then today, here, the bankers can make money and live it up. Jam today for them, misery for the rest of us stretching away in to the future. Our future,not theirs.
http://tinyurl.com/dxhpsy4
Mass. foreclosures surge 70 percent in Nov.
Foreclosures in Massachusetts rose more than 70 percent in November from the same time last year, a real estate tracker reported today.
http://tinyurl.com/c6ak9q5
Middle-aged borrowers piling on student debt
Middle-aged borrowers are piling up student debt faster than any other age group, according to a new analysis obtained by Reuters.
Educational borrowing is up for every age group over the past three years, but it has grown far more quickly among those between 35 and 49, according to the analysis of more than 3 million credit reports provided to Reuters by the credit score tracking site CreditKarma. That group saw its school debt burden increase by a staggering 47 percent, according to the analysis.
Should Student Loans be Dischargeable in Bankruptcy ?
Don’t be distracted by the sophisticated, confusing rhetoric being forced into this debate by those who would maintain the status quo no matter what the cost, or those who would end public support for higher education altogether. Neither extreme has the interests of the citizens at heart. Remember only that really, this is not a difficult problem. Congress created it by removing fundamental, free-market consumer protections from student loans. Congress can and must fix it by essentially undoing what they did. Quite simply, it begins by returning, at a minimum, the bankruptcy protections that were removed without rational basis (when bankruptcy was the same for student loans as all other loans, far less than 1% of federal loans were discharged this way). With this fundamental, free market mechanism returned, the Department of Education will have a vested interest in compelling the schools to provide a high quality product at a low cost, and at reasonable debt levels.
Five ways to re-Occupy in 2012: Messaging, street theater, political action, ‘go corporate’, occupy campus
POLITICO asked cultural critics, advertising and messaging gurus, activists and others for their ideas about how Occupy can stay relevant.
Occupy Facebook, Social Network For The Protesting Generation
The idea might be a benignant one to start with, but there might be complexities involved in creating such a loose, open source project. Keeping such risks in mind, the platform will attempt a ‘friend of a friend model’ to instigate trust and limit spying or sabotage. Full user access will not be given to a member without a sponsor, unlike Facebook, Twitter or Google +. Still, an extensive and focused development is required to make this project tick and provide a safe and operational platform to unify protesters across the globe.
http://tinyurl.com/d2kycjl
Boycott against godaddy.com catches fire for its support for Stop Online Piracy Act
There’s no denying the company has been floored by the negative response its received for its initial support of the piracy legislation currently worming its way through Congress (a response perhaps exacerbated by fact that GoDaddy helped craft the legislation and would be exempt from takedown notices and liability for failure to takedown as the legislation is currently written, which critics have been quick to point out).
GoDaddy not only dropped its support for SOPA and PIPA, but has been reportedly having representatives call and plead with customers not to switch because of its waffling political position on the bill.
http://tinyurl.com/cuw9s45
Prediction: Online and real-world activism will begin merging in 2012
According to McAfee, physical and digital actions will be planned simultaneously. The Occupy movement will start to take direct digital actions, possibly exploiting vulnerabilities in systems that control the infrastructure. “We expect hard-line hacktivists supporting the worldwide Occupy movements will drop the Anonymous label and soon operate as ‘Cyberoccupiers,'” the report says.
Ethnic studies in Tucson ruled illegal
A witness for the school system argued that teaching students “historical facts of oppression and racism” was less likely to promote “racial resentment” — something specifically banned by the 2010 law — than ignoring that history.
In Tuesday’s ruling, administrative law judge Lewis Kowal said the auditors observed only a limited number of classes. He added, “Teaching oppression objectively is quite different than actively presenting material in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.”
Poll: ‘Capitalism’ slipping in the U.S.
Capitalism is on the decline in America. The word, that is. A new poll found 50 percent of those surveyed had a positive reaction to “capitalism,” while 40 percent said they see the word negatively. That’s a dip from 2010, when capitalism polled at 52 percent positive and 37 percent negative.
Conservative is a more popular word than liberal, with 62 percent positives. The term progressive, however, ranked more positively among Americans than liberal, with two-thirds having a positive reaction to progressive and just half saying they react well to liberal. Socialism is still a dirty word in American politics, Pew found. Six in 10 say they react negatively to the word, while just 31 percent have a positive response.
No Such Thing As Radical Center Party
A well-funded, faux-reformist group known as Americans Elect is promoting a third party presidential candidacy and anticipates qualifying its candidate to be on the ballot in nearly all states. It is doing this by collecting millions of petition signatures, over 2.2 million so far, taking advantage of voter frustration with political blockage in Washington. The actual candidate will be decided later, by Internet Convention.
Despite the superficial populism, just about everything about this exercise is misguided.
http://tinyurl.com/d4xnejf
Glenn Greenwald: The Real Reason the GOP Primary Is a Pathetic, Incompetent Clown Show
In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party’s defining beliefs. Depicting the other party’s president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.
http://tinyurl.com/cl6p6lt
The Wasteland of Democratic Politics and the Appeal of Ron Paul
The Democratic Leadership Council, Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s 1980s scheme to diminish the growing influence of Black voters, has reached its ultimate success with Barack Obama, the second DLC president. To put it another way, “Obamaism is simply Clintonism with a darker face.” Three years of President Obama have left the Democratic Party with nothing to say worthy of hearing, in this election year. “Ron Paul’s foreign policy and civil liberties stance, as a Republican, is noteworthy only because of the contrasting light it shines on the vast desert that Democratic Party politics has become under the grip of militarists and Wall Street.”
http://tinyurl.com/cl8l6pr
The “No True Libertarianism” fallacy
Feudalism is the inevitable historical consequence of the decline of a centralized cosmopolitan state. That’s because the exercise of power by those in a position to wield it does not end with the elimination of federal authority: rather, it simply shifts to those of a more localized, more tyrannical, and less democratically accountable bent.
Urban street gangs in under-policed neighborhoods, mafias in under-taxed countries, and groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon invariably step in to fill the void where government fails. When the Japanese government wasn’t able to adequately help the population after the earthquake and tsunami, the yakuza helpfully stepped in to do it for them. The devolution of local authority and taxation into the hands of criminal groups willing to provide a safety net in exchange for their cut of the action is the invariable pre-feudal result of the breakdown of the government-backed safety net. It happens every single time. The people will want a safety net where utter chaos doesn’t prevent it: they’ll either get it from an accountable governmental authority, or from a non-governmental authority of shadowy legality. Both kinds of authority will levy their own form of taxation, be it legal and official, or part of an illegal protection scheme.
Author interview: ‘Pity the Billionaire’
S: Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, “We’re all socialists now.” What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?
TF: I saw that cover so many times [at Tea Party events]. For these people, that rang the alarm bell. I think the AIG moment [when the bailed-out insurance behemoth used taxpayer relief to dole out huge bonuses to its executives] was in some ways the high point of the crisis, when [the politics] could have gone either way. There was this amazing public outrage, and that for me was the turning point. Newsweek had another cover, “Thinking Man’s Guide to Populism,” and I remember this feeling around the country, that people were just furious. Somehow the right captured the sense of anger. They completely captured it. You could say they had no right to it, but they did. And one of the reasons they were able to do it was because the liberals were not interested in that anger.
Youth vote won’t return for Obama in 2012, report says
“Because Obama the president did not fulfill the hope invested in Obama the candidate, there has been an enormous sense of disappointment among those young who had been previously politically active and the current crop of college-resident young do not have the same compelling motivation to engage as those who preceded them,” Gans wrote.
Gans predicted that Latinos, who backed Obama overwhelmingly in 2008, would also show up in smaller numbers, in part because of increased deportations of illegal immigrants in Obama’s tenure. Gans said the only part of the Democratic base likely to retain its energy around the president are African-Americans.
http://tinyurl.com/c4mlyhb
2 Responses to “The OB Media Roundup 12/29/11”
You guys really have to credit the authors of the content you take directly after the title and before the content. Links are not good enough. Chris Faraone wrote the last one. I appreciate what you do, but it must sharpen up.
Actually, the link is sufficient.
I think you’re stuck in a pre-Internet paradigm. There is no possible way the text excerpted could be attributed anywhere else – or to anyone – other than the article at the publication written by the author on the other side of the link.
Visitors to the site will find out the author is Chris Faraone soon enough when they click that link. And if there are any visitors out there who have copped an attitude on Chris or his publication, maybe the decontextualized excerpt will allow them to get a reintroduction to his writing, reporting and ideas.
Other links are to MSM reports that are pretty worthless other than the small amount of text excerpted. My presumption here is that because OWS is a democratic movement we need information to make informed decisions, and the more information we have the better our decisions. Occupy Boston doesn’t have a news bureau in Athens, and the Occupiers in Greece are like soldiers on a battlefield who only see the piece of the action in front of them so their reports are limited too. What is important to Occupiers may be very different from what’s important to a New York Times reporter, so the information that’s valuable to us may be buried deep in an article under a whole lot of nasty propaganda. Sometimes the MSM is our only way to get information, and they otherwise are attacking us in the rest of their writing. For links like that, I deliberately don’t want to give them respect and fly their name all over the page while still meeting the ethical requirements of attribution. This format allows for that too.
To date, no reporter, writer, editor or pundit has ever contacted Occupy Boston and to express concern about the use of text excerpts in the OB Media Roundup.