Update: Added Poll for all you poll lovers!
OPD Hunts Occupy With Guns Drawn Through YMCA While Members Work Out. Video link
Occupy Oakland Media
While there you can peruse the deliciously snarky letter to Mayor Quan:
These people ARE dangerous mayor Quan. I would know, I spent much of the week in their company. I witnessed them on multiple occasions, prepare to turn an unused building six years vacant into an productive, cost-free asset to the entire community in which it sits. Furthermore, I saw many crimes during my brief stay in your city, including but not limited to; conspiracy to feed the community, aiding and abetting empowerment, attempting to chalk, 1st degree planning to occupy a vacant building, attempted occupation, etc. If this isn’t felonious behavior, I don’t know what is. Only your quick thinking and in-depth awareness of the situation’s complexity & nuance saved the day.
The Oakland saga is so fascinating, frustrating and irritating all together. I am proud of Oakland Occupy. They have stretched the boundaries and accomplished a great deal even as they have been beaten, abused and denigrated by those who should had their backs. The closing of the ports was a breathtaking accomplishment. The picture of all those people on the bridge was unbelievably beautiful. They exemplify that rule: try everything.
The OPD are indeed, pigs and documented as pigs by the US Government no less. And like all the "crowd control" "riot squad" cops, they deck out with all the paraphernalia
of paranoia. Armor, guns, batons (big long things to supplement things not so long?), tear gas, grenades and their plastic handcuffs guaranteed to cause nerve damage especially after so many hours. They don't seem to care about lawsuits. Why not? Who has their back? Homeland Security? Big corporations?
The people of Oakland seem to be gutsy, diverse and angry and ready for change.
The mayor is totally out of her depth. And has taken on some adviser undoubtedly to help her through this. Who? (In this I wish we did have some inside source. maybe the fellow that resigned?)
Again from the letter:
I was not able to discern on my way out of the YMCA in the last group of kids just before the door slammed, imprisoning 24 other occupiers, if the four brave peace officers coming down the hall with loaded shotguns and closing fast clearly seen at the end of the enclosed video were the same cops shooting at the children unprovoked and laughing about it that afternoon, or perhaps the officers I observed before that hiding in the bushes, but still. Lotta’ bravery there. I hope you have awards.
Who is brave in this world? Not anybody from OPD. And I betcha the under served neighborhoods of Oakland would vouch for that!
New rules for radicals
The landscape is changing so fast that it is hard to keep track. We know that rethugs no longer care about their brand. So it must be they are now only trying to finish what the Kochs and others have tasked them to do: Dismantle our democracy. To keep this from being our demise as a democracy I hope you all hold fast to rule number three: Try Everything!
Another rule: Don't despair. Things are changing. People are not rushing to proclaim themselves Repubs any more, for one.
For another: The end of Wall Street as we knew it!
Now this article is really really hard for me to believe:
...headlines that flashed across Bloomberg terminals on the afternoon of January 17, when news leaked that Morgan Stanley would cap cash bonuses at just $125,000. A week later, Bank of America announced that it would be cutting the cash portion of its bonuses by 75 percent, giving the rest in stock. All across Wall Street, compensation is crashing. Goldman Sachs, coming off a lackluster fourth quarter, slashed compensation by 21 percent.
Go ahead read it. Even though it strains my credulity I loved the "Emasculation of Wall
Street" with the guy grabbing his crotch! Let me know what you think.
Disagreeable as it may be, goes this thinking, bankers have to go back to first principles, assess their value in the economy, and take their part in its rebuilding. No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers.
Color me skeptical.
H/T to Horace Boothroyd III