A longstanding NC reader and lower Manhattan resident e-mailed me:
I was curious about the first couple of pictures in this set from the NY Times. How were they able to get pictures of the NYPD gathering by South Street Seaport, before the raid?
I was following the events closely on Twitter last night. the first notice of the pending love came from a tweet by the muscian Questo, who announced he had just driven by thousands of police in riot gear by South Street.
Various tweets among #OWS folks debated the significance of this and then the NYPD was spotted moving, the emergency #OWS tweet went out and I also got an email on it. At that point, no press were anywhere near Zuccotti Park nor were any covering it on Twitter. After the #OWS emergency notice, all sorts of people rushed to the scene, including the press.
Seems strange, then, that the NY Times photographer knew to be at this secret location.
Also strange, this article by the NY Times on the chain of events leading up to the raid includes a number of factual details that don’t appear to come from any quotes or press conferences, such as the secret planning that only the top brass knew about. This article has details about where the NYPD gathered pre-raid and details about the status of the park as the raid was beginning. How did the report get this information? Was he or she there? Were they tipped off before any of the other press?
If so, what does this say about the relationship between the NY Times and the Bloomberg administration, as well as the independence of the NY Times reporting?
In the photo series, the high resolution image from South Street Seaport is indeed a bit sus, unless the NYPD has started memorializing its operations for the benefit of posterity and favored media outlets. And in the background story on the raid, I was troubled by how fawning it was, a classic example of stenography masquerading as reporting. The brilliant tactical execution by New York’s finest! And the only people who were manhandled clearly deserved it! This characterization of a raid deliberately staged well out of public view, where there have been reports of the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and unnecessary roughing up, was indirectly confirmed by the punching of a woman on camera today whose offense seemed to be demanding access to the park loudly and having court papers to back her stance.
There are other signs of an overly cozy relationship between the Times and the mayor. The editorial today criticizes Bloomberg mildly, but most papers maintain a church and state separation between their editorial pages and the news sections (the split in the Wall Street Journal is occasionally schizophrenic). A November 3 piece, “Demonstrators Test Mayor, a Backer of Wall St. and Free Speech,” at a minimum shows that access journalisms works. It depicts Bloomberg as well intentioned and struggling to balance the needs of various constituencies. Key extracts:
Mr. Bloomberg’s evolving response to the protest has come to embody a central tension in his third term, between his celebration of free, and at times cacophonous, speech as a hallmark of New York, and his emphasis on bolstering the city’s economy by improving its appeal to residents, employers and tourists. Mr. Bloomberg, who is generally known for his decisiveness, at first emphasized his disagreements with the protesters, then began describing them as peaceful dissenters exercising a fundamental liberty. In the last several days, he has sounded increasingly exasperated, a reflection of complaints from neighbors and accusations of criminal activity in Zuccotti Park…
Mr. Bloomberg has managed simultaneously to be less sympathetic to the protesters’ point of view, and more sympathetic to their right to protest, than some other elected officials around the nation. “There’s nobody that’s more of a defender of the First Amendment than I am,” he has often said
Note that the “accusations of criminal activity” as of that date were drug use and I believe a petty theft. Given how often I smell marijuana in my near geriatric neighborhood and that in front of Bloomingdales is the biggest site for purse snatchings in the city, the mayor seems to be pursuing a double standard for enforcement. Similarly, the headlines on the front page of the New York Times are more downbeat about the future of the movement than, say, those in Wall Street Journal or the Guardian.
I’m curious to get reader reactions. Do you see the New York Times’ coverage as its typical not-as-liberal-as-it-pretends-to-be positioning, or do you also see the corrupting signs of special access leading to more favorable coverage of the officialdom?
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Here is a quote from a protester speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now: “ALEX HALL: My name is Alex Hall. And I basically heard a tip from reporters. They were outside the park about an hour before it happened…”
I read the NYT daily.
I remember way back when the girls were corraled and pepper sprayed.
There was no mention of this anywhere in the NYT until the comments section started flooding with people saying essentially “how can you not cover the fact that girls were pepper sprayed for no reason”.
Comments were then quickly disabled for OWS posts.
HOURS later (after the story ran on world renowned newspapers like the Minneapolis Star Tribune), the NYT put up a post that literally said “this is a video of an alleged police officer allegedly pepper spraying two women”.
the commenters then asked how on Earth can the Times say “allegedly”. They had his badge number and his name. there was no alleged. It was clearly pepper spray.
comments immediately disabled again.
the NYT is completley captured.
They have been for a long time. Most of the press is. Remember the build up to the Iraq war? Anyone still viewing the NYT or Washington Post as an unbiased news source is fooling themselves.
“the NYT is completley captured. ”
That they are.
I have had email conversations with a NYT reporter referring to articles he had published 10 or more years ago in which the reporter not only did not feel permitted to acknowledge content in that article, he also did not want to acknowledge it.
As far as I can see, the NYT has never NOT been captured. I guess there was a time during Nixon’s administration when it was fashionable among certain elites to be all progressive and whatnot. Perhaps after the Post scooped them on Watergate. The important point is that, historically, the NYT was the paper of the bosses. Always. The only reason anyone considers the Times not reactionary elitist crap is Fox News and the NY Post, in short, all the Murdoch “properties”, being rabidly so. We don’t really have “left” papers anymore, including rags like “Mother Jones” and “The Nation”. We need The Catholic Worker, and other workers’ papers from the heyday of the labor movement if you want to see what real left, progressive journalism looks like.
Shocking how raggy the “left” papers and mags are getting or have been and I finally caught on a few years ago. The NY Review of Books had a piece by Ezra Klein on Ron Suskind’s book. Ick. “The Progressive”‘s Matt Rothschild was waxing rhapsodic on the victory for progressives in having the Keystone tar sands pipeline building “delayed” until 2013. He pronounced it a victory. Ugh. And don’t get me started on the Nation. “Counterpunch” still good. Blackagendareport.com is awesome. Shout out to Bruce Dixon, Glen Ford, and Margaret Kimberley for fighting the good fight over there. And smartly too.
Note that Canada was tossed a short-term bone (ability to export up to 400,000 b/d MORE oil to US at HIGHER prices for US consumers) while the Keystone line is held up until after Obama’s re-installation as Criminal In Chief. There is NO DOUBT it will be approved:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/17/idUS218222+17-Nov-2011+BW20111117
agreed, especially on the media shill mckibben and his 350 drones and the “delay” “victory” for the tarsands pipeline… now I hear he wants to get attention, I mean involved, in fracking, watch out, with him and nrdc and riverkeeper in cahoots we may wind up with some really protective “regulations” on it, instead of a ban!
agreed too, counterpunch is still good!
Pick up your local printed copy of the New York Times
(after someone else has bought it), write down all the advertisers that are in your local area, look up their
phone numbers,call them and tell them that you are boycotting them as long as they advertise in the Times. Boycott them.
Just Do It.
Council those reading the Times that they are reading a
propaganda rag and they should be ashamed of it. The
New York Times has an alleged veneer of respectability
and quality to it that can disappear if enough people
sneer at those reading it in public.
“Counsel”
There is allegedly a way to get around their pay wall by
eliminating everything to the right of and including the question mark in the URL.
You get around the 20 articles/month by deleting their cookies.
Absolutely. I tend to use the ‘private tab’ function in my browser, Opera; no cookies to mess with then.
But why read their product at all if it is so misleading? What intelligent person deliberately misinforms him or herself?
opposition research, Holmes.
Deleting cookies is the simplest way to get around the paywall, but if you use Firefox or Chrome/Chromium as your browser you can also download the Stylish extension and use its workaround that does it all for you.
Deleting, or using some extension or feature (i believe firefox can be set to ask about cookies in various ways) that deny cookies.
Allegedly? You couldn’t test this complicated technique before posting?
Just picking up a sarcastic cue from the NYT.
Sorry you didn’t get it.
If you browse the Times site using an iPad and engage a page’s scroll bar by placing your finger there before the page completely redraws, the code that enforces the paywall never has a chance to engage and you can read to the end of the page without molestation.
Engaging the scroll bar also suspends page redraw, so you may have to lift your finger off the the scrolling area for a fraction of a second so that more text will appear so that you can read further in the article. As long as you re-enage the scroll before the page draw completes, the paywall test will not execute.
If you mistime when to press the scroll bar and the message appears that cuts off further access to the article, refresh the page and try again.
A little finger dexterity defeats the Times paywall.
But no amount of finger dexterity defeats the Times’ willingness to discard truth and justice if it works to the advantage of Times advertisers. When it suits them to lie, they just lie. No qualms.
After I submitted this last, I realized I had inaccurately described the scrolling behavior that thwarts the Times’ paywall check .
On iPads, pressing and holding your finger in the middle of a web page article turns scrolling on so that you can finger push the text up or down within its window in order to reveal new text to read.
This finger pushing action takes the place of the scroll bar manipulation that folks used to do with a mouse pointer on Macs or Windows machines. On iPads, the stream of text itself acts as a directly manipulable scrolling indicator.
It was my error to invoke a nonexistent scroll bar to describe iPad scrolling actions.
As long as you continue to touch text in the middle of a Times story on your iPad, you are declaring your intention to scroll in the story, thereby preventing the paywall check from firing and interfering with your reading pleasure.
Yves, my take is that the NYT is not and has not been liberal at all, let alone socialist or democratic socialist in its entire existence. It makes a good whipping boy for the Moronic Right who never have enough targets for whipping as they proclaim their own drama of “voices crying out in the wilderness.”
As Nellie McKay sings, “It’s A Pose.”
Of course they have reporters/photographers embedded and of course they are sympathizers of Mayor 1%. It’s not like the Sulzbergers are paupers, now is it?
All the news that’s fit to print doesn’t include the cozy relationships the ruling elite have with one another. Their fights and disagreements are more on the order of a WWE entertainment and, consequently, are almost always part and parcel of publicity stunts.
As I mention (below), those “cozy” relationships among the elites are quite treacherous, involving things like debt covenants. The Sulzbergers enjoy their lovely lifestyle on borrowed money. They are regularly reminded of that fact and are careful not to get too uppity with the “elites.” Let’s just say, the 1% of this country don’t get by on their ability to throw nice dinner parties. They work for a living.
@elizabeth,
i gather you are familiar with the lifestyle on which you report here. i often wonder about the indebtedness factor among the elites and how it works socially and politically, as i understand from reading history that it’s often been an aspect of aristocracies that they include people whose membership is based entirely on external appearance and behavior, supported entirely by borrowed money.
hope you will illuminate further here on nc this phenomenon among a social group that i (and many others) will never be able to observe close up. it has important ramifications including the one you note here. thank you.
True. Very true. Many of the aristrocrats are indeed just well-dressed paupers and debt slaves; that’s how they control each other. Check the available reports on public corporations’ debt, from the major rating agencies. . . . It would be interesting to see who Murdoch works for.
I would caution against looking into the backgrounds of New York Times reporters, however, or their amazing breadth of expertise. It’s illegal to expose CIA operatives, you know.
At least maybe some of them occasionally write their own articles instead of getting them written for them by pharmaceutical companies and the like. . . . They really should be careful about that, because relaying these drafts on bulletin boards at scientific conferences, where anyone can see the process at work, lacks subtlety.
Then again, anyone who didn’t already suspect that the pharmas write the articles about their drugs hasn’t been counting number of NYT ads for these companies.
Geez, how much more obvious does it all need to be? Do you have to read it on the front page of this rag? Oh wait, it’s there too. . . .
“It’s illegal to expose CIA operatives, you know.”
Unless done from the top as political retribution.
“Many of the aristrocrats are indeed just well-dressed paupers and debt slaves; that’s how they control each other. ”
Sounds like the moral of a story, a story about .. Long Island.
And counterparts throughout the country, world ..
lol
I get the dead tree edition, and the contrast in placement and depth of coverage (two front page stories, four full interior pages) was striking, as was, as Yves says, the fawning pro-police tone.
Blunt–
Actually, I think the demographic they’re trying to appeal to, especially in the print edition, is what makes the NYT the paper of the one percent. The various ad generating sections, Travel, Dining etc are aimed at a readership at least in the 95th income percentile. The editorial voice generally reflects the views of that same audience. It’s less evident on the web, where there is additional content, and placement is more fluid.
I happen to live on the periphery of a very high income ZIP code in the city. Every Thursday the paper includes a 168 page (last time I counted), perfect bound, full color ad magazine, usually real estate, but sometimes stuff like wristwatch porn. That’s the demographic that informs their editorial narrative frames, IMO.
The Lifestyle and entertainment stuff is advertisers who want the 99% to aspire to lavish one percent lifestyles.
This isn’t just ad agencies creating desire through their ads, it’s opinion makers subtly informing the content of
major media with a goal of extracting the last possible value from the 99%.
Since the last scraps of meat have been extracted from
the Middle Class bone, all they have left are the MOMA
bag toting money-menschs who might buy yet another round
of stuff.
The NYT fuels the aspirational culture. It also fuels a wood stove nicely which is its ultimate utilitarian value.
jayackroyd you make a good point about the readership. as of now on the web edition, the 10 most emailed stories do not include anything on OWS. (though that is so odd in relation to the zuccotti park mow-down being in the paper’s own city it makes me suspect even that list has been tweaked.)
to respond to yves’s query, i happen to have been checking through the nyt just before landing on this post, so i was not prejudiced by reading yves’s post first. i can affirm that i was struck by the tone of the coverage and a notable absence of balance and presence of spin.
i can only guess that part of the DHS/FBI/federal police strategy sessions with the mayors included guidance on how to control what your city’s main paper publishes about your mow-down the next morning. it reads as though bloomberg’s pr office read through and edited every article… wait, no, only the skilled wordsmiths at the nyt could do it so well. i do think i’ve seen some fairer reporting in the nyt on OWS before this day.
to just address some of the captions in the photo series you link to:
#5: “police hand out notices from the city and the park’s owner, Brookfield Office Properties, saying that the area had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous.” reiterates bloomberg’s focus on “safety” and makes it sound as though all was orderly and justified.
#6: “tarps and tents came down” apparently on their own–no, we can’t even say that the police took them down and threw them into sanitation trucks.
#7 “there was resistance from protesters as police moved through to clear the park.” shows policeman with hands clenched around baton pushing it against woman who is placing one of her hands on his chest and another on one of his hands. okay, she may be attempting to push him in a lame, helpless sort of way. but it looks like a reflexive, natural reaction a baton with several large cops behind it pushing into you in the manner shown. her ‘resistance’ hardly justifies this caption. and how about “moved through” great euphemism there for what the cop is actually doing.
#8 “An Occupy Wall Street protester and New York police officer tussled after the order to leave.” this is my favorite. protester is bent over with his arms up trying to protect his head while multi-striped officer in white shirt and black jacket holds his jacket with one fist while pounding on him with the other. “tussled” i love that.
i also noticed while reading some of the nyt comments that nyt had “highlighted” some anti-OWS ones that read as straightforward bigotry and foolishness. (the preponderance of the comments recommended by readers were supportive of OWS.)
all that said, i have to admit i’m not objective. i am seriously distressed and enraged over the multicity mow-down orchestrated by DHS and our DOJ, which should be defending the people from city police departments’ flouting of the constitution and civil rights but instead are doing all they can to bring what remains of our democracy to a bitter end.
sorry for the excessive length.
Great comment.
I noticed the same thing with the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the Berkeley violence earlier this week. The Chronicle avoided stating that the police hit/struck/beat protesters with their wooden clubs. Their word choice was awful. I can’t remember what the exact online versions were, and they updated them a couple of times that night, each slightly less awful than before, but in essence it was something like, “police clear protesters and placed their batons on protesters to get them to obey lawful orders.”
The word they used was “nudged.”
That’s it. Thanks!
The face of a tussler:
http://www.bloomberg.com/image/iE3XAfWuPRW4.jpg
I believe I agree, jayackroyd. See allaway down at 1:30ish pm. *smile*
stop supporting the NYT, they never apologized for helping to get us into that stupid war with Iraq.
DON’T READ NYT, DON’T SUBSCRIBE! DON’T FOLLOW LINKS TO THEIR SITE
it’s time to create something new, stop participating in the old as much as you can.
On this subject. NYT Reporter Al Baker, who was assigned to cover OWS during the Brooklyn Bridge kettling, turns out to be the son of an high-ranking NYPD official. The vast majority of his coverage of the OWS story has been from the perspective of law enforcement, including yesterday’s gushing account of an “operation perfectly executed” (editorial quotes, not original). Reading his coverage of OWS you will note that without exception his “sources” for what the facts on the ground are/were consist of NYPD insiders. Would it be such a stretch to imagine that he may have been “embedded” in the planning and execution phases of yesterday’s grotesque operation?
Echoes of the Cassano fugitive.
Good piece of info.
Yeah I was about to say… the NYT that published Judith Miller’s lies about the justifications about the Iraq War? That liberal NYT? Priceless, really.
I’m not paying the Times money for it, but Krugman’s blog and columns are more than worth the trouble to read. (The rest of their opinion section, not so much. I usually gag on Tom Friedman’s… output. But Krugman is clear, on point — and often highly critical of his colleagues at the Times.)
Yea, with Bob Herbert gone (and Frank Rich too?), there’s very little worth reading there anymore. Usually, the only hard news content tends to be in the market pages, and I think that’s probably only because there’re numbers there, and because propagandized market reports are useless in management.
I think any pretense they might have had at liberal sympathies was basically shattered in the run-up to the Iraq war. They threw Judith Miller under the bus for crony journalism, as they should have done, but the ultimate fault, then and now, is with an editorial approach that seems to be more interested in supporting the oligarchy than reporting news expressive of the views of the people.
I gave up the NY Times after the Judith Miller Iraq War propaganda campaign was exposed. I don’t miss being lied to at all.
Definite embed.
Otherwise, how do you reconcile the fact that reporters were being stopped blocks away from the park, with the fact that these shots are from within or directly next to the park, including shots of the raid itself?
And can someone remind me who just stepped down as editor of the NYTimes? Right, that would be Bill “Soggy Sleep-Ins” Keller. Keller recently claimed that you won’t find the Times “cheer leading” for OWS. Which isn’t to say they haven’t donned skirts and pom-poms for government-approved movements like the NATO uprising in Libya.
Thanks a lot Yves for making me read the NYT :) I do force myself to look at/listen to the MSM so I can see how they portray various topics. Consistent as of last night I hear the following themes concerning OWS, (themes which are glaringly evident in today’s NYT coverage):
1. The Occupy movement has made its point and now its over.
2. Inserted into every article/newscast is an Obama campaign commercial. There is “information” on how Republicans (tools of Wall Street) are against OWS, trying desperately to work against Obama’s life saving outreach to the 99%. Vote Obama for president, he’s anti Wall Street!!! Yeah!
Just looking at these two pieces of propaganda alone, I would say the NYT is deeply embedded with the govt.
What was your first clue that The New York Times was rigged? Not exactly a surprise here, more like business as usual. “Positioning” itself as some kind of reasonable rearranger of facts in the abstract (though not actually on the street) AND special access to “the officialdom” AND a willingness to do its bidding.
It’s not as if the Sulzbergers live in some special bubble above the Wall Street fray; they currently depend on a lot of confidence from lenders and investors in a declining corner of the media business. A case in point: I get my news here every day and only occasionally buy the Times. I’m guessing Yves hasn’t built any glass towers on 8th Avenue lately, and her relationship with the imaginary union that prints and distributes her publication is pretty good. Her shareholders are . . . well, what shareholders?
Let’s not act surprised here. The Times has been making up news for the past 25 years at least. At least! If not, it wouldn’t have to act so holier-than-the-rest, so “first-draft-of-history.” Only a whore needs to wear such strong perfume.
There are degrees of co-option. Per the embedding issue, in war (sadly), the cliche is that truth is the first casualty. But embedding became popular because it is recognized as having an impact on the perspective of the reporters. They bond with the troops and adopt their perspective in reporting. So it’s more than an editorial spin, it’s a subversion of the independence of the reporters. In Iraq, at least some of the embedding was reported. Here, not.
We’ve often reported on how business/bank friendly the NYT’s coverage is, as well as its related economics coverage (for instance, on the deficit hysteria).
What I want to know is whether there was a conference call for the editors, just as there was for the governors, with a “shadowy force” [*cough* DHS *cough*] doing the facilitating. I’m guessing yes.
Cronyism trumps ideology.
The progressive liberalism of the NYT is a faded myth.
Who are we kidding? The NYTimes has been “embedded” for a long time. Bill Keller was actually “proud” for having asked the government what they could and could not report from certain Wikileaks cables. What an embarrassment.
As per “proud”, the reporter I referred to way up near the top was ‘proud’. Of what? I asked myself at the time. Of the nonentity he’d become over the years?
Joke beyond joke.
How long had that been a goal of the security state? And then to find their reporter happy as a pig in sh- …
Prostitutes to a comfy lifestyle, one of the subthemes of OWS.
I have started to see most of mainstream press as well as TV as propaganda. I’ve felt that way since we heard that the press was holding back information before the Iraq war.
Ya gotta love the caption on that photo: “Hundreds of police officers approach Zuccotti Park . . .” “Approach”? They’re obviously underneath the FDR overpass at South Street, nowhere near “approaching” the park. So clever that the Times would try to downplay the fact that it’s covering an event so far in advance of its even happening, by not even giving its location in the caption.
If they just stack lies on top of lies and obfuscations, they won’t have to answer for any of it. Too much work for too little benefit.
the first photo is credited to a New York Times photographer, so there’s no question about who took it.
These are really very good photos. There’s more than meets the eye to good photos — no pun intended — in the areas of lighting, gesture, composition, storytelling narrative, choice of lens and resultant field of view, depth of field and plane of focus, etc.
These photos are clearly the work of photojournalists, not amateurs with digital cameras. The credits suggest about 11 or 12 different photographers, however, not all are from the NY Times.
The first several shots are credited to a single NY Times photographer and suggest to me an Embed with a heads-up on the timing and process. No question about it.
However, I don’t see in the images themselves any intrinsic propagandistic (if that’s a word) bias in favor of the police. The imagery seems objective, balanced and factual, rather than promotional of one side’s narrative. So to the extent a NY Times photoeditor selected these images, I don’t think there is a bias inherent in the selection.
They could have chosen to distort the event in a way that made the police look like saviors and the occupiers like animals (a la NY Post reporting). But that would have taken some significant precision and forethought, and there’s no evidence of that, at least to me.
@craazyman
agreed and it’s interesting the way some of the captions work against what’s actually in the picture, as if they’re trying to minimize the impact of the pictures. some of these pictures seem to have somehow made it through the filtering, maybe they have to weigh the entertainment value of the pictures against the message they’re being compelled to articulate verbally?
god just writing that i feel like i’m getting a hit of what it was like to live in eastern europe and try to parse whatever grains of fact might be buried in the state’s propaganda. isvestia really is the right name.
No shit, Sherlock. Lots of info in good photos. Like location — under the FDR overpass at South Street. Add the caption to that, and it tells quite a story: “approaching Zuccotti Park.” To get any farther away, any more in advance based on a tip, it would have to be a Dunkin’ Donuts in Brooklyn Heights.
@ elizabeth
please continue to post here. good laugh
Yes indeedy. She is quite the gem! I was going to request the same thing of her.
LOL!!! Goddess, yes!
My name isn’t Sherlock and I didn’t read the captions.
I don’t read the NY Times. Period. I usually only read the New York Post and then, usually only the sports section. Or the Washington Post coverage of the Redskins. Everything else, I channel using red wine and xanax. I find it to be far more accurate.
What is your name, Elizabeth? Something like “Ivanna Annoya”. Just say it phonetically it will make sense.
A little unclear on English-language idioms?
Well, gosh, I guess “no shit, Sherlock” could be taken as an insult, I guess. Sorry ’bout that. We agree then, that it’s a beautiful work of photojournalism because of the level of detail and what it reveals. A location next to the East River, not “approaching” a park on the west side of Broadway. A good photo tells a story. This one tells quite a story indeed.
I’m told I’m only “reasonably attractive”; getting asked out on Naked Capitalism is a much higher compliment indeed. Thanks!
by the way, since you are so curious. I wonder if you could tell a Rembrandt from a photo of a windmill.
Probably you’d have to think about it.
bowahaha hahaha ahahahah ahahahah
Have you gotten “I-want-to-annoy-ya” yet? If you have something to contribute to an understanding of the world, don’t hold back. :)
my name is watson.
@ crazyman: Are you, like, twelve?
I got stuck in 5th grade and doubt I’ll ever advance.
How old are you?
:)
Sorry, Liz, all in good fun. It’s a rainy and somewhat dull day at the office & you made me laugh. And if you’re reasonably hot I’ll buy you a glass of wine and you can channel with me. It’s easy. I’m 6′ 1″ and weigh 180 pounds and look kind of like Brad Pitt on a good day. Sort of. :)
craazyman, I don’t think the “No Shit Sherlock” was meant as an insult. I say it all the time, to people I am in agrement with. I appreciate your Gnostic POV, which is unusual to find.
elizabeth,
in addition to posting here again, could you please channel with craazyman over a glass of wine. i want to read the results (separately or in collaboration. …no, just separately.)
Getting back to the pictures (link repeated: Here )
I hadn’t seen them before. Scroll through them, extracting your own story from the images. Then go back and read the captions for each pic. They could all be paraphrased as, “Here’s the story. Don’t believe your lying eyes.”
Revolting.
Interesting comment overheard on KPFA FM 94.1 in the Bay Area or online…they have the best coverage of OWS–
after you stop laughing at the other programs like transgender immigrants’ woman’s drum circle for wicca.
“Tents need to be loaded down with sand bags so that the cops can’t just pick them up.” Make the tents so heavy that cops will go out on disability after trying to move them.
Will some OWS sign maker please make and post some large signs that say
“Occupy Wall Street, helping defend Police
pensions from Wall Street”
I prefer, “your boss is afraid of us.”
nice
Is anyone surprised that the NYT is once again revealed to be our version of Soviet Pravda? Isn’t their complicity with the (rest of the) ruling class kind of old news?
I used to read it now and then to try to figure out what the r.c. was up to, but beginning around 1980 I just couldn’t stand it any more.
“Is anyone surprised that the NYT is once again revealed to be our version of Soviet Pravda?”
Nonsense. The NY Post is Pravda. The NY Times is Izvestia. Just as much a propaganda rag, but decidedly classier. This way you can absorb what Big Brother is telling you _and_ claim to have higher than an 8th grade reading level.
Seems like an opportune time to quote this from the other side of the Pond:
“The Times:
Read by the people who run the country.
Daily Mirror:
Read by the people who think they run the country.
Guardian:
Read by the people who think they ought to run the country.
Morning Star:
Read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country.
Daily Mail:
Read by the wives of the people who own the country.
Financial Times:
Read by the people who own the country.
Daily Express:
Read by the people who think that the country ought to be run as it used to be.
Daily Telegraph:
Read by the people who think it still is.
The Sun:
Their readers don’t care who runs the country as long as she has big tits.”
And what about readers of The Independent?
They’re on their own.
“The Independent” started a few years after this ditty appeared in some episode of “Yes, Minister”.
Surprise, Homeland Security Coordinates #OWS Crackdowns
http://wonkette.com/456282/surprise-homeland-security-coordinates-ows-crackdowns-nationwide
Of course. If you concentrate only on things like people who want to fly airliners into large buildings, you’ll miss the really insidious threats to America, like playing drums in a public park.
Actually if you focus on people who focus on people who want to fly airliners into buildings ..
.. you’ll see those who focus on people who want to fly those airliners into buildings are dependent on those hijackers for their jobs.
Just to be clear.
Where’s the like button?
Not so sure about that; the only place that’s claiming DHS is behind the coordination if FoxNews. The newspaper she linked to is a Fox affiliated paper, and the AP just picks up whatever anyone’s talking about. If there was some other news agency making this claim, I’ve yet to see it.
Not saying FoxNews is lying, but it’s not like they haven’t done so in the past if it made the current administration look bad.
here is the link i believe you are referring to:
http://www.examiner.com/top-news-in-minneapolis/were-occupy-crackdowns-aided-by-federal-law-enforcement-agencies
i picked up this article from a twitter feed from #ows and other sources last night around midnight. michael moore picked up on it around the same time and immediately tweeted as follows:
MMFlint Michael Moore
Dear @BarackObama We luv ya but pls detail any #ows discussions btwn cities& HomelandSecurity&FBI // RT til he answers j.mp/ssseb9
20 hours ago
MMFlint Michael Moore
Dear @JeanQuan Pls. detail any & all #ows discussions between Oakland & Homeland Security & FBI // RT til she answers j.mp/ssseb9
20 hours ago
MMFlint Michael Moore
Dear @MikeBloomberg Pls. detail any & all #ows discussions between NYC & Homeland Security & FBI // RT til he answers j.mp/ssseb9
22 hours ago
moore’s tweets are the probable reason i didn’t consider it necessary to verify the source. doing some checking now, i find it is a “pro-am” “citizen journalist” blog-type “content aggregation” site, where posters are not required to have professional journalist affiliation; where there appears to be plenty of highly opinionated material of dubious accuracy; whose pay rates for contributors have been much contested; and whose standing on google news google has tweaked at least once. it also appears that some reliable reporters are writing for this entity. (some of these, perhaps, out-of-work print journalists with families to feed?)
the piece i linked to, by a poster named rick ellis, who appears to be a bona fide professional journalist, appears to me to be a piece of responsible reporting. in an update of the piece posted today he writes: “My original source for the story (who still works at the Justice Dept.) stands behind the original story and we’re working to flesh it out in more detail today. I also have some other aspects of the story I’m working on as well.”
i am looking forward to the fleshing out he promises, and i will continue to follow his work now that i have discovered it.
FYI on examiner.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examiner.com
here is a resume including some recent story headlines from another examiner.com poster:
http://www.examiner.com/progressive-in-philadelphia/tim-mccown
in light of these citations, you need to provide a source for your apparently deeply buried information that examiner.com is a fox affiliate and that the story i linked to, as you suggest, is not true and not from a reliable source.
follow-up:
daily kos diarist bob johnson has posted a piece in which he says that some folks at daily kos have picked up ellis’s story and run to conspiracy-land and back with it, questions ellis’s credibility, and points out that “no other news outlet has confirmed ellis’s story”:
http://www.dailykos.com/user/Bob%20Johnson
in the light of johnson’s admirable admonishment regarding sourcing of information on the internet, i feel i should apologize here for posting forward information i did not verify following journalistic standards.
at the same time, i will be watching rick ellis to see how this scenario plays out.
i would still like to see some verification of the affiliation of examiner.com with fox that John L has asserted.
Johnson is correct as far as he goes. But the DHS signature is all over the place. Among the data points: (1) The conference call mentioned by Quan. Who facilitated it, if not DHS? (2) The funding for the raids, from cash strapped cities? Or the DHS? (3) Toronto and Ottawa shut down on the same dates. International involvement means the Feds, and probably DHS.
And then there’s the biggest tell of all: The coordination is obvious. And yet no coordinator steps forward.
In answer to Lambert’s last comment, yet no one steps forward,
it’s probably because I called them out on the epidemic of mortgage fraud, then nothing since. Do not for a moment think they aren’t involved in it all. These orgs will be taking the social media aspect as a challenge to defeat. Be a bright boy or girl and define ‘defeat’.
This is what happened in Oakland during the first raid, at least. The news media left the scene shortly before the police attack and at least 2 major media stations cut their live feed (I’ve yet to see mainstream news confirm all this as I’ve just seen it in alternative and social media).
Of course during the second raid the police fired a bullet at someone filming them as they were staging for their military-style attack.
So during the second raid protesters were looking for the official press to leave the encampment or for the news helicopters to leave as a sign of an imminent police attack. The protesters assume, probably correctly, that the media is complicit with the police and politicians in suppressing these protests.
It’s also unacceptable that our local police forces are taking orders from the feds. Oakland is in federal receivership because of the brutal tactics of its police force and Mayor Quan invited in a bunch of bloodthirsty cops to bash black people and hippies with impunity. Hell, Quan has given these criminal thugs a license to kill.
Where is the City’s investigation of the attempted murder or at least assault the police committed against the cameraman, or Scott Olsen, or the other injured protesters? Where is the mainstream media coverage of this?
And don’t tell me that Occupy NY has done a good job of shaming the police. The police committed criminal acts of assault against citizens and the most that happened is some of the white shirts got to go on a paid vacation.
Actually, it was the third Oakland raid, this last Monday morning, where I saw protesters watching the media for signs of what the police were going to do.
The protesters on the night of the second raid, when they took over the abandoned property near City Hall, were probably also aware of many of these signs. That’s why they built barricades and engaged in property destruction as the police were getting ready to attack. Plus, as we have seen, the police were shooting bullets at amateur journalists with video cameras which was a serious indication the police were about to get violent.
Sounds like the ‘bubble-headed bleach blond, comes on at 5’ effect.
Some in America have learned you don’t assume they’re your friends.
the new york times withheld reporting till after the 2004 election that the bush administration wiretapped, read email and did sneak n peek of the american people, without warrants and in violation of the 4th amendment
any questions?
As Mr. Keller explained, that was responsible journalism because they didn’t want to affect the outcome of a Presidential election. Doubleplusgoodthink.
And the times engaged in a disinformation campaign with the Bush administration in the runup to the Iraq War.
that article was pure croney journalism. they seemed proud of the fact that the city was doing such a good job of attacking a bunch of people in the middle of the night and stealing and vandalizing their property. PROTECT AND SERVE!
Here is an account of several accredited print and other media reporters rounded up by NYPD during the Zuccotti raid…none was with the NYT, by the way.
There are reporters, and then there are NYTimes reporters, I guess. Clearly NYPD recognises the difference.
I linked to this article in the links post but thought it was so good I wanted to share it here.
It’s very likely the government is treating the Occupy protests as low-level terrorism. The linked article does a good job of showing us the broad picture and it is quite amazing how far we have come in ten years. Here’s a frightening quote from the article:
“Occupy protesters should make themselves familiar with the USA Patriot Act. Section 802 expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include persons who engage in acts of civil disobedience to coerce or affect the conduct of government by intimidation of the civilian population. Furthermore, the US Department of Defence training manuals, until an amendment in 2009, equated protest with “low-level terrorism”. Although the DoD changed the wording two years ago, human rights lawyers and activists have lingering concerns about whether the sentiment and intent has caught up with the change.”
Also, did I just the Guardian article correctly? Was LRAD used against the Oakland protesters that took over the empty property? I haven’t read this anywhere else.
It would explain the police shooting bullets at videographers shortly before the attack.
I wonder if there are other protester claims LRAD was used.
LRAD was definitely used in NY. Luke Rudowski covered this. He indicated it was not used at weapon/injury level, but was used to make the announcements extremely aggravating. This grading is of course subjective, but the point is: LRAD was definitely used.
Interesting. Thanks.
So there are reports the thing was used in both NY and Oakland the last week. This had to have been coordinated because this was the first domestic use of LRAD in the U.S. since the G20 in Pittsburgh in 2009, right?
And I had to learn about this via the Guardian and alternative media. Yikes.
According to the Guardian’s source, he or she felt more than simple annoyance at the LRAD, as the NY witness described, so maybe they dialed up the juice in Oakland.
Good, let them try to cast OWS as terrorists. I’m sure that will work well in an election year.
Yeah, they bought one last year..
Yeah foppe.
I have seen many reports that they “deployed” the LRAD in Oakland. [I saw similar reports in New York–the police are probably deploying and bragging about it–and the press dutifully reporting it– to set a precedent and get people used to these things, and maybe to scare people a bit]
But I hadn’t seen any other reports that it was used last week.
“The CCLU provided numerous affidavits from medical professionals in obtaining an injunction against LRAD use, including an audiologist who confirmed that exposure to the intense noise generated by an LRAD can “cause damage to the cochlea of the inner ear which may not show up until years later. Disruption to the delicate mechanics of the inner ear can sometimes improve within a few hours or days, but most often there is not a complete recovery and there is permanent hearing loss.”
why don’t we just revert to the old remedy off cutting of one or two ears. it would be more humane.
This article describes a reporter’s observations of the night of Nov. 2 to Nov. 3 in Oakland. She describes the police driving the LRAD vehicle and issuing orders from it. If you search Youtube you can see this vehicle being used in Pittsburgh in 2009, the first use in the U.S.A.
She doesn’t say if it was used but it doesn’t sound like she was around it the entire time and instead went back to the plaza.
Mayor Quan’s tweets are also interesting.
Well, the government appears to be treating protesters as terrorists–regardless of the public backlash. Plus, they are hiding their actions. They are excluding unfriendly media and embedding corrupt media and shooting bullets at independent and social media. The mayors and the politicians all seem to be on board as well–a few lower level advisers and staffers excepted.
There isn’t enough push back to the fact our government is treating its citizens as terrorists.
I wish I could believe the people will vote the bums out or not stand for it. But I’m pessimistic on this. Just look to the reaction to the military attacks on protesters we have already seen, as well as the subsequent torture when they were imprisoned (as described in the Guardian article) and the many other abuses the police state has perpetrated the last month or so. For instance, aft the 3rd and most recent Oakland raid, I mostly saw a reaction of blaming a few dozen vandals of some banks and a Whole Foods instead of focusing on the police actions. I saw people blaming those that were committing one form of civil disobedience that was more shocking but not morally distinguishable from the other civil disobedience for the police actions.
And the precedent is set. The police state is here to stay. They will pick off the Black Bloc people and other radicals first. Then the environmentalists. hell, these are the groups long under surveillance, probably. Then the police will come for those that want to engage in direct actions like shutting down the port. Those 10,000 people that day that walked to the port, including Mayor Quan’s husband, were terrorists, according to our government, it appears (and we can’t rely on the government or media to tell us the truth so all we have are a few bits of facts and our powers of deduction–e.g., Obama changing the language in a manual does not mean he really changed anything). Those children, those disabled people, the elderly, all that sea of humanity that was walking to shut down the Oakland port that day to get the government to change, were terrorists.
That’s why the government previously used military tactics on protesters shutting the port down in 2003. That’s why the government reserves the right to do so in the future. They just arbitrarily chose not to use deadly force in 2011 because it would have backfired. They are just setting the precedent and picking off the protesters as they can.
I wouldn’t be so confident in the American people pushing back.
I share you bleak assesment of the police states’ scope and motives, but people will push back, even the American people.It just wont happen in a single month. Look at how long it took in Poland and E. Germany. But even before those regimes “suddenly” collapsed the disent was wearing them down. Americans like Reagan take credit for those movements, but if you study what actually happened, the US state department and millitary spending had about as much to do with it as the weather.
Here’s one major media reporter’s take on embedding, from the Alternet article I link to directly above:
“Journalists have no special protections in Occupy demonstrations, especially journalists representing national media organizations. Local police rules give privilege to local media with locally dispensed “official” press passes, resulting in a local media who are more or less embedded with the government. This system actively discourages prying outside eyes.
But my experience counterintuitively revealed the opposite. At a time of such intense public scrutiny, the Oakland Police Department made the mistake of arresting a journalist, and sending her into the heart of an ugly process with which not only demonstrators but many other Oakland residents have long been familiar. They gave me an unmatched, visceral opportunity to understand what makes Oakland residents so angry with the police. “
The comment above by alex about the NYT being Izhvestia and jayckroyd’s breakdown on NYT readership and advertising targets as both on the money. (pun intended.)
NYT is a “high brow” rag, to be confused as often as possible with “New Yorker” and the more “smart set” publications. The idea is that Dorothy Parker and HL Mencken are still incarnated somewhere within the Gray Lady. You can almost hear the “sniff, sniff” as you turn the pages.
But that has become de rigeur culture in USA.
Taibbi’s last #OWS blog at Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110 went a long way toward capturing exactly what is going on within and around #OWS and why the resonance has become so great. A resonance that exists even though people mostly cannot capture that resonance in words the way Taibbi does.
It’s just that strange feeling that for the last time I have been seduced by a watch or a dress boutique of mineral makeup or the best stock tip ever. I’m tired of the ueber-material life. I wanna touch real people, real animals. I want my social networking buddies to be real life buddies, people I see and hear live and in my living room or in their’s.
NYT as a corporate culture doesn’t get that they wish to continue the establish way. Not simply to make money, or to repay their own debts as Elizabeth said, but because they cannot imagine, from Sulzberger to the copy boys that anyone could aspire to anything different.
To aspire, to inspire, just to spire in this country would be something too incredible for words and it’s an epidemic at this point. All those extreme sports freaks, MMA, Jackass, designer drugs (especially X and others that lend themselves to the warmth of actually feeling your own and other bodies as part of the high.
These are regular American aspirations and the MSM and the 5% and 1% just don’t get it. Instead they imagine that more teebee and more experience by proxy is what we want.
No, we just want a bit of comfort: real friends, a reasonable living accomodation, a town that feels like a town instead of a prison bloc, work that provides something other than complete alienation, ennui and anomie.
Dammit people want to live again, or for the first time and escape this materialist prison. We want to touch each other and have lives that mean something greater than the amount of gelt and loot we can manage to amass.
Those are the breathings that neither Mayor 1%, his classmates (Buffett declares they have not only won, but that they won overwhelmingly. We shall see.) their on-hangers, lackeys and servants cannot understand that. They mistake the entertainments of shepherdesses and knights in the gardens of Versailles for the breath of life itself. They cannot see or understand that their desires and wants, their dreams are but pale and sordid shadows of real life.
Great comment Blunt. Sums up my thoughts beautifully.
Blunt,
I had a friend who grew up in the old USSR and once said that
it was common amongst people who didn’t tow the official line to refer to living there as living in the “bigger prison”. The gulag of course being the smaller prison.
In recent years I have started to get a real feel for they meant.
Seriously? The NYTs is fully corrupt, untrusted and untrustable. Hello?! Remember illegal domestic spying? The NYTs was sitting on that story for a YEAR and only started reporting on it when forced by the fact that some OTHER papers were going to start reporting it. If the whole Nixon and Pentagon Papers thing were to happen today, the NYTs would NOT be reporting it, they would be deeply involved in covering it up.
The NYTs IS the 1%’s paper or record. It is by, of, and for the 1%.
While the NYPD staging shot raises questions, it’s worth noting a lot of the shots in the set are not NYT but AP, Reuters, European Pressphoto Agency.
Anyway, I’m not sure having an embed would be a problem, but any explicit arrangements like restrictions on what the embed can do and where they can go, should be disclosed.
If they had special access… well hopefully no one is shocked to discover the NYT sometimes treats the powers that be with kid gloves in exchange for access.
“The editorial today criticizes Bloomberg mildly, but most papers maintain a church and state separation between their editorial pages and the news sections (the split in the Wall Street Journal is occasionally schizophrenic).”
Heh.
‘Honey? Have you seen my micrometer? I want to measure a separation.’
I’d guess the Associated Press knew too. This would explain the real reason they’re upset about the tweeting of their reporters – who likely were not told in advance. The NYT report is remarkably detailed.
Do the NYT or AP require exclusivity arrangements with photographers?
Regarding Occupy Philadelphia- I’m just watching from the sidelines, but it appears Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter is taking a much more conciliatory approach to the Occupy situation. Apparently, the city had previously scheduled a major renovation project ($50 million)at Dilworth Plaza (an area immediately adjacent to City Hall) where the Philly Occupy movement has been encamped. However, according to an article posted to Philly.com, there are still no immediate plans to evict the protestors.
No immediate plans to remove Occupy Philly, city says
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20111116_No_immediate_plans_to_remove_Occupy_Philly__city_says.html?cmpid=124488459
I’ve met Michael Nutter a few years ago, when he was still a City Councilman. And from my experience I believe he is a decent person. At that time, a professional association that I worked with had concluded that the city was shooting itself in the foot with some of its Business Privilege Tax regulations. In effect through its the existing rules, the city was incentivizing small businesses to locate their facilities outside the city. Won’t bore you with all the details, this issue had nothing to do with the rate, but rather how much of a business taxpayer’s total potential net income was apportioned to Philly (taxable in Philly) vs. outside the city (nontaxable). The old apportionment depended upon 3 factors- property, sales and payroll. (i.e. If your sole facility was located inside the City that factor would be 100%, if located outside the city it would be 0%). The payroll factor could also be influenced by the property factor. Hence locating a business within the city usually exposed a greater portion of its net income to the BPT tax.
Our group saw the ill-logic of the of the situation. We lived it every day.- e.g. If a client, prior to that time, approached me about establishing a business within the city, I’d have to alert them to the BPT tax problem(or else risk being sued for negligence, somewhere down the road). I grew up in Philly, wanted to see it thrive, and detested having to pitch this point of view.
Our professional group discussed this dynamic at great length and concluded how foolish it was. It was determined that local politicians would be invited to meet with our committee so they could learn these dynamics for themselves. Michael Nutter was one of those people. Although I wasn’t present at the meeting he attended, my understanding was that he almost immediately agreed with the logic. Subsequently he became a strong proponent for reforming the BPT so as to make the Philadelphia business environment more competitive with the surrounding suburbs . FYI-We had no money, offered Mr. Nutter or the other elected officials that met with us and other favors, other than what we observed as common sense. To their credit, some of these officials, including MR Nutter took the ball and ran with it, even though most voters probably paid very little attention to this type of thing.
So, I’m currently impressed with Mayor Nutter’s resolve in trying to work something out with OP. (There were negotiations in which some of the OP members thought that it might be a good idea to move because of the jobs that might be created by the project, but ultimately they voted against this idea as a group). I’m sure the Mayor has been pressured in the same way mayors in other cities have been pressured. I hope he has the political stamina to continue to refrain from taking any action against the OP folks.
I’d be very interested to hear first person experiences from any Occupy Philly protestors that would either support or contradict this view of Mayor Nutter.
Occupy Philadelphia has just been ordered to leave Dilworth Plaza.
Sorry to hear that. Although I honestly think this is one where Occupy should have considered other alternatives.
How about the NYPD being Wall Street rent a cops? How about Wall Strret manning NYPD spy centers?
http://www.youtube.com/user/HammeringTruth#p/u/24/BBlb-ssm5_g
http://www.youtube.com/user/HammeringTruth#p/u/15/lmFci41DBaA
We’ve had two posts on that, FYI.
looks like there’s an opening here to find common ground with the tea party.
Is the New York Times in bed with Bloomberg? Absolutely. I’m surprised it even comes up for discussion. The New York Times is liberal in so far as the objective interests of, forgive me, Neo-liberalism and the interests of Capitalism as a whole are liberal. The whackier positions of the Republican Party do not serve Capitalism well. Liberalism of the Obama/Bill Clinton type, and especially social liberalism, as broadly defined, does. That’s what Bloomberg is about and that’s what the NYT is about as well.
People don’t “serve capitalism”.
Any more than they “serve Marxism”.
Nor even “serve religion”- no matter what they may think they’re doing.
But people commonly can and do serve other people.
And there’s nothing wrong with that!
“But people commonly can and do serve other people.”
Baked, boiled, or fried?
Fo more about Bloomberg, free speech and this coverage in the Times see–
Question of Truth For The Times: The Meme of Bloomberg as Champion of the First Amendment & Free Speech, Firmly Planted Before OWS Eviction
http://nationalnotice.blogspot.com/2011/11/question-of-truth-for-times-meme-of.html
FDL has a great essay up now:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/11/16/where-is-the-money-for-these-raids-on-occupations-coming-from/
Essentially, he asks where they money for late night (OT?) raids is coming from, in terms of already-tight muni budgets. That’s a great question I think I will pose on the editorial pages of our local rags…..
The OWS need to read more MLK. I started re-reading over the weekend. Not only inspiring, but also full of great ideas. Remember that MLK specifically went to Birmingham BECAUSE he knew the response from Bull Connor would be overwhelming and would engender sympathy to their cause. I hope the OWS continue to occupy spaces where the oligarchs have made it clear they aren’t wanted.
While OWS has been a breath of fresh air amidst a largely somnambulent population the movement faces overwhelming odds against it. The stripping of Constitutional rights combined with regulatory capture, judicial capture, legislative capture, and media capture, the only effective way to topple the corporate assault on us is to withdrawal from their institutions. Take your money out the big banks, liquidate your retirement accounts, stop paying your mortgage,and stop buying anything but essentials–and gold & silver .
Nonsense.
That’s not an argument.
Barry’s recent acquiescence had been on my mind. Would this operation have originated with his approval or his instigation – contrary to earlier suggestions that it originated or was instigated by the conference of mayors ? And Barry remains quiet, still. “Cat got his tongue” or would any statement be a truthful reflection of his stance ?
Regarding the NYT, the reader question that inspired this post never came out and asked but seemed to imply a frustration that the NYT’s obligation would be to the OWS folks – with a head’s up perhaps day’s ago. This would have generated another Judith moment I now suspect.
Hopefully the NYT Ombudsman will feel pressed to take on this issue soon. Should that not come to pass would be an admission both of defeat in their role in fueling the aspirational culture and of their true 0.01% loyalties.
I hate how the media are labelling the retard #OWS “anarchist”
read Rothbard or Patri Friedman,they are real anarchists not the retards like Chomsky who are trying to co-opt the word(first social-democrats stole the word “liberal” from us,now socialists and communists are trying to steal the word anarchism and libertarianism)
those who are for socialism,egalitarism, big governemnt “tax the 1%!!!” aren’t anarchist by definition
“aren’t anarchist by definition”
Anarchists are bad people. OWS are bad people. Therefore OWS are anarchists.
QED
The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal too for that matter, are both excellent newspapers. I can’t think of anything that works so well under the cats’ litter boxes.
The press has been in the service of the elite since its inception more or less. The press corp is in fact part of that social class, just at the lower end.
Back in the days when it took major money to own a newspaper you can bet the investors were the 10% affluent class and as such the paper worked for them. Heck William Randolph Hearst was probably the cause of the Spanish American war , strictly for the profits and his own ideology.
Also in this market, with few people actually reading papers and add revenue down, the editors and reporters who might stand up and be actual journalists have no slack to do so. No replacement jobs, too few owners and getting fired is mostly a career ending move. They are more dependent than ever on access.
Of course the bad side is that if things go south, well just as reporters and bloggers in Mexico have learned they can go way south. People hold the press accountable in times like that ….
“Of course the bad side is that if things go south, well just as reporters and bloggers in Mexico have learned they can go way south. People hold the press accountable in times like that ….”
You should have explicitly mentioned LA JORNADA,
a successful Mexico City newspaper with a pro-people stance. It lives on 287,000 subscribers and has very little ad revenue.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ultimas/
Noam Chomsky described it as
“the one independent newspaper in the whole hemisphere.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/Similar
There is a solution to this action by police. It’s called suing there ass into oblivion. Not in an official capacity though and you do it in small claims court. so they have no lawyer. False arrest aggravated battery etc…
People don’t realize a simple truth about the law because of propaganda and pacifistic conditioning.
EVERY ARREST IS PRESUMED UNLAWFUL IT IS UP TO THE COP TO JUSTIFY IT.
All you have to do is prove you were restrained. It is then up to the other person to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt they had a right to restrain you.
I want to acknowledge this comment as extremely useful. Duly noted! Sue them as individuals, eh?
I walked through the protesters and the cops on my way to work today, and I was tempted to tell the cops that if they needed to make some arrests today, Goldman Sachs was over there, Morgan Stanley there, and Deutsche Bank was right next to them.
Just some back up in case people thinkin I’m talking jibberish
From
A treatise on the law of malicious prosecution, false imprisonment, and the Abuse of Legal Process
http://books.google.com/books?id=fHQ9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA481&dq=false+imprisonment+presumed+torts&hl=en&ei=BkfFTvylJMXh0QHx_envDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CEEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=false%20imprisonment%20presumed%20torts&f=false
I’m with the 120+ (not the ones about advice on finger dexterity & paywalls) I don’t have a memory of the NYT as a neutral (never mind left) news source. I like to catch up on arts and theater in the NYT, things I know nothing about. But science, energy, economics, international development, politics, etc? Go beyond the NYT. On some impt. issues I’ve actually studied their coverage over time and it’s shockingly party line. MSM is MSM, they’ve got an audience and advertisers.
Mainstream media…duh.
But I’m afraid there is a terrible truth we just do not want to acknowledge:
There ought to have been millions on the streets in October 2008 in Washington and New York. Or any time in 2009. Or 2010. Or now. Though in % terms those whose “thinking” is well to the “left” is small, they still number at bare minimum 10 million people. Where the F ARE THEY??!!!!
some guesses
if they have jobs, they are afraid that if they are photographed at a protest they will lose that job. it’s a reality-based fear for many.
they are afraid of being arrested.
they are afraid of being roughed up, abused, or denied medical care in jail.
they are afraid to become fully aware of how close they are to bankruptcy, job loss, home loss, etc. and all the associated loss and vulnerability.
they are afraid of their own anger and that if they join the movement their anger will lead them to do dangerous things they’ll regret.
they are afraid of big brother.
they are afraid of their neighbors’ judgments of them.
they are ashamed of their bad financial situation and afraid others will perceive it if they become active.
their children and/or parents depend on them completely.
they are afraid to recognize how bad the overall situation of their society has become and they are hoping things will improve some time soon, or even not so soon. they hope if they can just hang in a little longer things will turn around. recognizing how dire things really are is very painful and many people will just avoid that inner reckoning as long as they can.
they are hoping that praying alone will work.
they are physically and/or mentally too vulnerable/infirm/frail to come out in the street for very long even without the risk of arrest.
they can’t afford to lose a day or even an hour of work.
they are raising families and have no free time.
they are exhausted from excessive work and stress.
they are doped up. in the grip of one addiction or another.
they just don’t know what’s gone down. they’re uninformed. they don’t read. they don’t think much. they’re not educated to think and read.
they feel they should inform themselves, but they don’t want to because they do suspect how dire things are and they want to pretend they don’t know because they think their sanity and well-being depends on maintaining that lie.
they are not aware of what their neighbors are going through, or how many of them are. (see shame, above.)
they spend more time watching tv, playing video games, etc. than talking with actual people.
they want to go on living for as long as they can in whatever little bubble they’ve managed to stake out for themselves.
unemployment among people with college degrees remains at only around 4 and a half percent (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm).
i think that covers at least some of them. does it explain the lack of action? not sure.
why do so many people insist on staying in their houses until flood waters rise to the height of their noses? it’s a mystery, but not unusual.
flood waters are far more visible than the threat in this case.