U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit

Scott Olsen went out there wearing a bike helmet lol

This is a great read.

“We intentionally chose a different path based on a longer trajectory and rooted in a set of shared experiences that emerged directly from recent struggles. Vague populist slogans about the 99%, savvy use of social networking, shady figures running around in Guy Fawkes masks, none of this played any kind of significant role in bringing us to the forefront of the Occupy movement. In the rebel town of Oakland, we built a camp that was not so much the emergence of a new social movement, but the unprecedented convergence of preexisting local movements and antagonistic tendencies all looking for a fight with capital and the state while learning to take care of each other and our city in the most radical ways possible.”

anticapitalist:

New Police Strategy in NYC - Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protesters

Horrifying

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.”

“Again?” someone said.

We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.

“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken. She proceeded to launch into a careful, well-nigh clinical blow-by-blow description of what had happened. An experienced activist, she knew to go limp when police seized her, and how to do nothing that could possibly be described as resisting arrest. Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist—at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it. After that they put me in plastic cuffs, as tightly as they possibly could, and wouldn’t loosen them for at least an hour no matter how loud I screamed or how much the other prisoners begged them to help me. For a while everyone in the arrest van was chanting ‘take them off, take them off’ but they just ignored them…”

Boots Riley of The Coup talking about Occupy Wall Street, on whether it’s working, and on what needs to be done

enlighteningnews:

 (05-01) 19:30 PDT Oakland —

Oakland police clashed repeatedly with Occupy activists Tuesday, firing tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades at several hundred protesters near City Hall in brief but volatile skirmishes that escalated as quickly as they dissipated.

Some protesters shoved against police lines with black shields bearing an “A” for anarchy. Some threw objects at officers, surrounded police cars and pounded on them. In one case, a protester dressed in black threatened an officer with a pole.

But many protesters remained peaceful, throwing flowers at the cops’ feet or marching peacefully with children in the Fruitvale District, vowing to avoid the violence downtown.

The daylong series of events on May Day was held throughout parts of Oakland, San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area by a wide range of protest groups, including Occupy, to honor International Workers’ Day and denounce economic inequities.

In Oakland in particular, the mood was tense from the beginning, despite the range of events that went from peaceful rallies to confrontations and vandalism.

“The tempo of the crowd was a lot more assertive, a lot more aggressive” than in past demonstrations involving Occupy groups, Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said in an afternoon press conference. He said the mood was so volatile that by 9 a.m. he had called for mutual aid from about a half-dozen area law enforcement agencies.

Read the rest…

inothernews:

BEAT COP   A police lieutenant swung his baton at an Occupy Wall Street protester on International Workers’ Day, or May Day, in New York Tuesday. The protests were the most visible organizing effort by anti-Wall Street groups since Occupy encampments were dismantled in 2011. (Photo: Mary Altaffer / AP via The Wall Street Journal)

Some things never change.

Black bloc <3

trillabstract:

Occupy the Justice Department.

April 24, 2012

(via oldenough2burmom)

He has a new book out too.

(via threetabsofmescaline)

barefootwarriorqueen:

racismschool:

thisissade:

racismschool:

In the beginning, I was on board. Things happened, things I am not going to get into in this particular post, that made me want to post less and keep a certain amount of distance.

Still, I wanted to believe in the overall cause.

I can no longer make excuses. I can no longer pretend that they represent anything of value.

I just finished speaking with a friend of mine. He was at the Million Hoodie Rally in NYC last night. He was telling me all about how emotional it was. How beautiful it was that people were coming together for something so important. Everything he said sounded amazing and almost spiritual.

My friend is a dreamer. He is a “Glass half full” kind of man. He has a strong belief in Christ and because of this, chooses his words and actions in a way that he believes would make the Lord proud. He believes in leading by example.

I tell you this because one of the topics he and I disagree on is “Anger.” He works diligently to never let his anger show. I believe that to be unhealthy.

When he was finished telling me what he saw and what he did, I told him that I tried to watch the live feed. I told him that I’d only watched for a few minutes because I saw something happen that I could not handle. 

I saw OWS people trying, not to integrate with but to change the direction of the route. I saw OWS people screaming for everyone to go to Zuccotti Park. After seeing this and then seeing the arguments of people saying that this was not about OWS, only to have the OWS people say that it WAS, I became physically ill. If there was ever a time when you should have worked to keep the focus on the actual cause, this was it.

I mentioned this to my friend. He went silent. He said nothing. He said nothing for a long while. I could just hear him breathe.

I knew he was angry.

He tried to remain calm while he explained what he saw. He saw the same thing that I did. Only in a different form and at a different location. He saw OWS people yelling that it wasn’t about race and that it would be best to incorporate this into the OWS movement. This man who I love with my entire heart but often feel is far to kind said…

“They wanted us to be unified but only if unity happened in their yard. They are not good people.”

I’ll leave you with that.

i was there and i literally flipped out on a group of them. i asked them what they were doing here. i asked them why they kept trying to get us to chant “this is our streets.” i asked them if they bothered to read the signs about trayvon. i asked them if they even shouted his name once. they kept trying to turn it into a general issue and i was appalled. i asked them how dare they march and wear their ignorance like a badge of honor? how dare they (all white) say this is an issue of justice for ALL when the reason why trayvon is dead is because that “justice” that our country leans on applies to them and them alone? and not one of them, NOT ONE, could give me a valid response. they kept yelling at me to stop making it a “race issue.” ugh, i have a LONG write up about the march (the actual event and the news coverage of it) and all the things i saw that moved me and disgusted me.

Bold mine.

AGAIN, OCCUPIERS UP IN MY BOX

STOP. TALKING.

This is disgusting.

(via barefootwarriorqueen-deactivate)

iambradleymanning:

My name is Scott Olsen. I served in the USMC for 4.5 years and deployed twice to Iraq. Manning brought the truth home for the world to see. I had access to many of the same files he released, some of the events referenced by the Iraq war logs are events that I personally experienced. A few different choices, and I could easily be in Leavenworth instead of Manning.

oldenough2burmom:

As someone who fervently supports Occupy, I think some folks need to step forward and say something about the appropriation of last night’s action. I know the OWS tumblr. addressed it last night but probably much more needs to be said.

aaronleaf:

I went down to the Trayvon Martin solidarity march last night. It went well. I’ve got to say though, and I’m not one to harp on this usually, but those mainly white OWS types trying to explain “crowd tactics” to everyone with their mic checks, their pot and their occupy banners came across as crazy condescending. This was a majority black and latino crowd holding a very serious protest about police and racist vigilante killings in their communities—Trayvon’s parents were there!—not about some NYU student getting pepper sprayed in the face.