Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future. 

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke. 

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, ...

Just 12 hours after police dismantled the Occupy Oakland tent city in a peaceful predawn raid, about 700 protesters returned to the civic center plaza Monday evening, vowing to keep their movement alive but undecided about whether to defy police and retake the site of their month long protest.

"Regardless of what they do to that encampment, this awoke something in all of us," said Iris Arcenciel, 26, of Alameda, a member of Occupy Oakland's media committee who advocated for retaking the plaza. "The important thing to remember is civil disobedience."

Protesters kept talking late into the evening Monday, planning their next moves as police officers stood by and vans filled with law enforcement backup waited around the block, poised for problems. Most protesters leaned toward re-occupying the plaza while others pressed for taking over foreclosed buildings.

Unlike recent Occupy Oakland efforts, the demonstration was not marred by violence.

Thirty-two protesters who refused to leave the encampment after they were ordered to disperse were taken into custody in the early morning darkness Monday by officers in riot gear. One more was arrested later in the day on charges of spitting at police.

In their second attempt to evict Occupy Oakland from the civic center plaza since it was erected Oct. 10, officers from about a dozen agencies gathered at 2 a.m. Their staging area was the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, about seven miles away.

By 5 a.m., they were at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, the heart of downtown Oakland, dismantling tents and arresting protesters. Streets surrounding the civic center were blocked. Downtown Oakland awoke to helicopters hovering.

Protesters were warned that "absolutely no lodging" would be permitted on city property moving forward. By daylight, the plaza had been cleared of live-in demonstrators. Tents - minus their poles - sagged in the former encampment that once was ...

When Egyptians stood up to Mubarak they were met with tear gas and clubs. Once upon a time America had freedom of assembly, speech and protest. Even now, as long as protests don't take on the 1%, they are OK. But in today's America-for-the-1% protests, assemblies and speech against plutocatic, 1% rule are met with tear gas and police batons to the head.

Occupy Movement camps around the country follow strict practices of nonviolence and democracy. As with any diverse community of people, there are troublemakers who take advantage of loose organization and predators who prey on others. This is why we have police departments in every city and town. But plutocratic government response is to discourage the Occupy Movement, so government services are denied these citizens. Instead of helpfully serving communities, the frown of disapproving authority is cast upon their activities.

Disgust and fear are powerful propaganda tools, and there has been a remarkable "soften up public opinion" media drumbeat using repeated accusations of bugs, thugs, drugs, muggings, disease, rats, filth, and other disgust and fear-invoking imagery. (Perhaps worst of all in the "shame them" index, even beards and general non-consumerism and non-conformity are described!) So with the ground prepared and the way paved for police actions, Occupy camps in Portland, Oakland, Chapel Hill, St. Louis, Albany, Salt Lake City, ...

At 18, Valerie Klinker was kicked out of her grandmother’s house in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. Despite being without a roof, alternating from parks to cars to SROs, Klinker says she never identified as homeless, a fact that, in the eyes of the city, made her all but invisible.

Indeed, advocates for homeless people here say there is a growing number of young African Americans who, like Klinker, are becoming homeless as the ongoing recession and nationwide trend of urban black flight erodes access to traditional safety nets. It’s a trend, they add, that’s happening largely under the city’s radar.

“Today, 55 percent of [our clients] are black, compared to 1998, when that number stood at about 15-20 percent,” said Rob Gitin, director of At the Crossroads (ATC). The outreach program, based in San Francisco’s Mission District, primarily serves transitional age youth (TAY) between the ages of 18-24, too old for foster care but too young for many of the city’s homeless programs.

Falling Through the Cracks

Coming from historically poorer neighborhoods in the city or from communities across the bay, such as Oakland and Richmond, many young people shy away from identifying as homeless, Gitin explained.

“But if you ask them where they’re spending the night,” he noted, “most couldn’t say.” In large part that’s because the people they once relied on, such as family or friends, are no longer in a position to help, or just aren’t there anymore.

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, the recession has inordinately affected blacks and Latinos. African Americans have seen a widening of the income gap compared to whites from 11 percent in 2004 to 20 percent in 2009. U.S. Census figures for 2010, meanwhile, show that San Francisco’s black population has plummeted from 12 percent to just over three ...

On Nov. 2, the day of Occupy Oakland's General Strike, the streets were filled with chants and music and the sounds of people speaking in the many tongues of Oakland residents.

There was poetry, a children's brigade, uplifting speeches and triumphal marches that shut down banks, major downtown arteries and the nation's fifth-busiest port.

Protesters almost believed the 99 percent could triumph over the greedy one percent.

The day was mostly peaceful.

But in the afternoon, black-clad protesters wearing bandanas shattered bank windows and spray-painted storefronts, and late in the evening they built bonfires in the streets and tried to occupy an empty building. There were arrests; one protester was hospitalized from what he said was a police beating.

Though relatively few demonstrators took part in the vandalism, next- day news stories featured smashed windows, graffiti, and protester stand-offs with police.

No individual or group has taken public responsibility for the vandalism. Many believe agent provocateurs are responsible. Whether these are government agents or young people who believe destroying property builds the Occupy Wall Street Movement - or both - the question discussed since the General Strike is key: how should the movement respond to acts of property destruction and violence by those in its ranks?

A sharp disagreement exists among those who say there's no room in the movement for people who won't protest peacefully; those who want to embrace protesters who destroy property and at the same time encourage them to behave "responsibly;" and those who say they meet police violence with their own, while building a movement.

One group of people responded by writing a resolution to present to the Nov. 9 general assembly that says: "Those who launch physical attacks on people or property are not welcome to do so at or near Occupy Oakland events and ...

The Rev. Faith Ballenger wears her collar at Zuccotti Park in New York City. Amidst the banging of drums, chants for change, and urban noise, she talks with protesters about their politics, their economics, and especially about their spirits.

Ballenger is the interim pastor at Transfiguration Lutheran Church in Harlem. She knew right away she’d be spending time at Occupy Wall Street, which is, she says, a tense place to be—there is a heavy police presence and the occupiers are often very tired.

“Clergy should be down there,” Ballenger says. “When people don’t go to church, you go to where the people are.”

Ballenger encourages religious communities to join the movement and spend time on Wall Street or in the financial districts in cities across the world. “Faith is an action word,” she says. “This is what faith in action looks like.”

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From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended.  The massive popular protests that shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of the reporting on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.   

Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting.  They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas, and squares to protest against the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity of the white-collar criminals who have run riot in societies everywhere.  They are objecting to high rates of unemployment, reduced social services, blighted futures, and above all the substitution of the market for all other values as the matrix of human ethics and life.

Pasha the Tiger

In the “glorious thirty years” after World War II, North America and Western Europe achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and relatively low levels of inequality for capitalist societies, while instituting a broad range of benefits for workers, students, and retirees.  From roughly 1980 on, however, the neoliberal movement, rooted in the laissez-faire ...

Here's a surprise that the power elites really hate to see: Many members of the 1 percent are joining the "We are the 99 percent" movement in various Occupy  READ FULL POST 1 COMMENTS

Listening at last to his inner FDR, President Barack Obama is going straight at the Know-Nothing/Do-Nothing Republicans in Congress.

At a rally in September on a bridge connecting Rep. John Boehner's state of Ohio to Sen. Mitch McConnell's state of Kentucky, Obama challenged the two GOP leaders to back his plan for repairing and improving our country's deteriorating infrastructure. "Help us rebuild this bridge," he shouted out to Boehner and McConnell. "Help us rebuild America. Help us put this country back to work."

Yes, let's do it!

However, in addition to the usual recalcitrance of reactionary Republican leaders, another impediment stands in the way of success: many of the infrastructure jobs that would be created could end up in China.

Holy Uncle Sam! How is this possible?

It's due to a trap door that was built into the Buy American Act. This 1933 law gives preference to U.S. companies bidding on major infrastructure projects. However, it allows the general contractor to opt out of this requirement if the difference in U.S. and foreign bids is significant. This is no theoretical concern, ...

Video has emerged of Oakland police using a rubber bullet to shoot a protester as he was filming them. The incident apparently occurred after midnight on November 3rd, the night after the general strike activists had called for.

The second Iraq war veteran hospitalized after a confrontation at an Occupy Oakland protest wasn't participating in the demonstration when he was injured and arrested, a friend and colleague said Saturday.

Kayvan Sabeghi, 32, had joined in a march the day before but was only trying to get home when he was beaten by police early Thursday, said Esther Goodstal, who co-owns a brewery with Sabeghi in nearby El Cerrito.

"I saw he had bruises all over his body, and that's not right," Goodstal told The Associated Press in a phone interview. "No one should treat another human being like this."

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After reporting on Occupy Oakland’s large and overwhelming peaceful protest yesterday, I woke up this morning to read about arrests, tear gas and vandalism. Yes, some property was destroyed. In the afternoon I saw a black-clad group smashing the windows of a Chase bank and a Whole Foods. Later in the evening, some occupiers took over an abandoned building that once housed a homeless advocacy group (since closed due to funding cuts). At some point, a bonfire was set, cops arrested plenty of people and more property destruction occurred. But the title of USA Today’s article, “Port of Oakland reopens after violent OWS protests,” misses what mainly happened, as did most of the mainstream media’s coverage.

There’s a lot to be said about the general strike yesterday in Oakland—in which thousands of people shut down banks and the fifth-largest port in the country—but here’s what I found especially striking about the strike: extreme message discipline. We usually think of message discipline in relation to political campaigns and the conscious attempt to mechanically repeat talking points. But here I found another kind of message discipline—of a more organic variety—in which people spoke about the same issue not out of a pre-designed plan but because their shared experiences were remarkably similar.

City workers complained about pay cuts; parents cited the recent announcement to close several Oakland schools; striking teachers ...

In mid-October I spent two days and a night with Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. Since then I’ve read a barrage of advice for what OWS and its companion movements around the world should be doing. But I’ve been haunted by another question: What should those of us who are sympathetic to OWS (according to polls, roughly two-thirds of Americans are), but are not going to relocate to a downtown park, be doing to advance the wellbeing of the 99 percent?

I got one part of my answer as I groggily logged on to the web at 5:30 the morning after I returned home from Zuccotti Park. When I left the park, its private owner Brookfield Properties had announced it would clear the park “for cleaning” and enforce rules preventing tarps, sleeping bags, and lying down. Mayor Bloomberg said the NYPD would enforce those rules, effectively ending the encampment.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the eviction. When OWS put out a call for support, thousands of people began to converge on the park for nonviolent resistance to eviction. Unions called on their members to protect the encampment. The president of the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor Council lobbied the city to cancel the crackdown. Lawyers prepared to bring suit to protect the occupiers’ first amendment rights. City council members and other New York politicians lobbied the mayor to halt the eviction. Against all expectation, Mayor Bloomberg announced that Brookfield was abandoning the “cleanup” plan and the company announced it would try to reach an accommodation with the ...

Thousands of Oakland workers and students left their jobs and walked out of schools on Wednesday as part of a general strike intended to “shut down Oakland." 

The groups converged on City Hall and joined with other protesters camped out at Frank Ogawa Plaza, recently renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the Occupy Oakland demonstrators.

Early in the day, the protests at City Hall were peaceful and the police presence was minimal. Later in the afternoon, protesters marched to the Port of Oakland in hopes of shutting down operations by blocking entrances and creating havoc. Though they succeeded in shutting down port operations on Wednesday night, the port was up and running by Thursday. 

Violence broke out in downtown Oakland later in the evening, after most of the protesters had left the port and returned to the plaza. By morning, 80 people had been arrested, and five civilians and three police officers had sustained injuries.

Young participants of the strike and walkout, interviewed by New America Media, had a number of issues on their minds, but education was at the forefront.

Michael Samson, 25, from Oakland, said he’d been waiting all of his life to see a protest of this magnitude.

“This is our future. If you’re graduating from college right now, you know what the situation’s like… For us, there’s nothing. We’re being hit with incredible amounts of student debt, in terms of loans.”

Samson said he has a friend who graduated from Stanford who is now over $150,000 in debt.

A group of students who participated in the walkout of Berkeley High School said they all worry about getting into college and finding a job after they graduate. One of the students, an 18-year-old who preferred to remain anonymous, held a sign that read, “My education is worth more than corporate profit!”

Gerome, 23, from Oakland, goes to Holy Names College in ...

The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee” – six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings — will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.

Have your eyes already glazed over?

Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich – not even a tiny bit.

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time ...

It was an amazing thing to be part of, an entire city downtown occupied, then a huge march that shut down a major port. Oakland was #occupied! This was a game changer, a turning point. What happened in Oakland was a very big deal. On the same Wednesday there were big, big #occupy events in several other cities. But will Washington pay attention?

Occupy Oakland

I arrived at Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland yesterday about 11:30am. The streets were blocked off by police (a single police car keeping traffic out) a block or three out in all four directions, and a large crowd was gathered. The Plaza itself was surrounded by occupier tents, the surrounding street had several booths, and there was a bit of a festival atmosphere.

At the corner of 14th and Broadway there was a stage set up with speakers throughout the day. Hundreds of people milled about, many with signs saying everything from "We Are The 99%" to "Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out," "Tax The Rich," "Stand With The 99%," "We Get Cut, They Get Rich," etc...

There was a harmonious energy with people of all ethnicities, ages, cultures and from all over the area. People were friendly, helpful, welcoming, and overall supportive of each other. It was a very pleasant event on a ...

The early morning sun bounced off of the 150 or so multicolored tents that crowded into the re-populated Oscar Grant Plaza Wednesday, just one week and one day after police raided the Occupy Oakland camp and evicted its occupants using tear gas, batons and possibly rubber bullets.

By 9 a.m., a crowd of more than 1,000 had claimed the busy intersection near the plaza, halting the flow of traffic in the center of the city. A banner was strung across the intersection, proclaiming death to capitalism.

“Strike, occupy, shut them down, Oakland is the people’s town,” they chanted.

Towards evening, the crowd grew and thousands of people - reported variously between 4,500 and 15,000 - marched to the Port of Oakland, making it virtually impossible for dock workers and truckers to get to work, had they wanted to do so. Port Director Omar Benjamin announced that the port had been shut down.

Occupy Oakland’s general assembly, in a meeting of around 1,600 people, decided just last Thursday to attempt a General Strike. Skeptics said they should have waited longer to plan better. But people were so angered by the police action initially supported by the mayor – particularly in light of the Iraq veteran whose skull was fractured by a projectile thought by many to be a police tear-gas canister - that they did not want to delay.

While unions couldn’t formally endorse the day as they might a strike against the bosses, many did encourage workers to take vacation or furlough days and participate.

The Oakland Education Association supported the action and turned out in force. Michele Espino and Mitchell Singsheim teach at East Oakland’s Castlemont High. Teachers are overworked and underpaid, Espino said, crediting the underfunding of education.

Singsheim noted that, “We don’t have a single computer in our school.” And that’s where the digital divide and the 99 percent comes ...

Last night, as thousands of Oakland residents were in the streets as a part of that city’s general strike and mass protests, there was a tragic incident where a white couple in a car hit two African American protesters who were in the road.

Local blog Pythagoreanism was the scene and reports that after hitting the protesters, the car tried to get away. Demonstrators surrounded it and refused to let the driver get away, and a police officer was called over. After briefly talking to the officer, the car was then allowed to leave, reports Pythatgoreanism:

Eyewitnesses say that after hitting the pedestrians, the car accelerated, but was unable to break through a wall of other #occupiers, who were at critical mass. The angry crowd slowed the car to a stop, encircled it, coffee was thrown on the roof, and the driver of the white Mercedes (a white male, 18-24) switched seats with the passenger (white female, 18-24) in an apparent effort to disguise who was driving.

Once the police arrived, the crowd told the police of the drivers’ deception, and the pair sheepishly switched back to their original seats. After a moment, the driver took off. The crowd was surprised and immediately livid, shouting at the police officer, who left without addressing the crowd. Every single person at the scene was stunned that the driver could get away without being arrested. Why wasn’t the driver arrested?

The blog uploaded a video on YouTube where the cameraman goes around asking protesters what happened right after the incident. “So, tell me what happened?” asked the cameraman. “He ran over two people, because they were protesting, and the police let them go,” replied the protester. Another man, an African American, screamed at police officers, “If that was me, I’d be arrested!” 

The two protesters hit