Star Trek

Another video from Seattle showing the violence that OWS says didn't happen....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wYT82Fec3cQ

are they still protesting??

down with greed and up with peace.

BamBam: ... the violence that OWS says didn't happen...

Quit lying. The Occupy Movement has been condemning the violence, not denying it.

I think I have discovered who BamBam's favortie baseball team is:

AMY GOODMAN: In Union Square, we bumped into an entire baseball team: the Dodgers. Well, the Tax Dodgers, that is.

TAX DODGER: We’re a baseball team, and we go to bat for the 1 percent, not the 99 percent. We’re the Tax Dodgers, the best team that corporate money can buy.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you describe what you’ve got here?

TAX DODGER: Well, we’ve got our full baseball team out here, and we’ve got all the best heavy hitters in corporate America who are part of our team: Verizon, GE, Citibank, ExxonMobil, Pfizer, Bank of America, Time Warner. You know them all. We’re practically household names at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: Then the Tax Dodgers broke into song.

TAX DODGERS: [singing] Take me out to the tax game
Bail me out with the banks
Buy me a bonus and tax rebate
Never pay nothing, not federal or state
So just shoot, shoot, shoot for the loopholes
It’s law, so you can’t complain
Where the one, two, three trillion you’re out
Since we rigged the game.

Take me out to the tax game
Flip the bird to the crowd
Losers pay taxes, we take rebates
Cause we make the rules for the corporate state
And it’s wham, bam, slam through the loopholes
We always win, what a game!
We’re the one, yes, the 1 percent
And we have no shame!

Notice how the OWS supporters here are oh so quiet about about the Ohio terrorist suspect and his connection to OWS Cleveland???

While I'm sure that some in OWS didn't like what this guy is accused of, others are more concerned about it getting in the news that he was one of the people that was on the lease for the OWS Cleveland warehouse....

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/oops-occupiers-admit-on-video-that-ohio-terror-suspect-signed-lease-for-occupy-cleveland-warehouse/

Notice how some people just can't get over their obsessive fears about a small minority of demonstrators and ignore the voice of those who turn out for protests:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/2/may_day_legacy_of_labor_immigrant

DOMINIC RENDA: Yeah, my name is Dominic Renda. I’m with the Communication Workers of America, also known as CWA. And I’m out here because workers need to take a stand against corporate greed and against the wars that only benefit the wealthy. May Day means dignity for working people. And May Day started here in the United States, and it’s important for us to recognize that. There’s a lot of people who are unemployed, and they deserve jobs, and a lot of people that deserve...healthcare, and they’re not getting health insurance from their employer. Pensions are becoming a thing of the past. Unions are becoming a thing of the past. And the thing is...that working people, we really need to organize, because without the unions, there would just be the very rich and the very poor.

PROTESTERS: May Day! Whose day? Our day! What day? May Day! Whose day? Our day!

BARBARA INGRAM-EDMONDS: I’m Barbara Edmonds, and I’m with District Council 37 AFSCME. And I’m here today to support the efforts of May Day in fighting as a coalition to protect working families, struggling families and individuals—quite frankly, known as the 99 percent—to make sure that our issues, our causes are not forgotten and that we are not demonized, because we need to make sure that we protect the rights and the important value of the common good, which has been lost, quite frankly, over this last year or so, whether it’s fights in the labor community, fights in our communities around the city and around the country, fights to protect those most vulnerable in our populations. So this is a day that I’m very happy to be here with my union family, AFSCME District Council 37, and many of the labor unions, faith- and community-based organizations across the city represented here.

MARVIN HOLLAND: I’m Marvin Holland, Transport Workers Union. I’m the political director. TWU has always participated in May Day since we’ve restarted it back in 2006. And we’re happy to say that this is probably the biggest one we’ve had so far. We just want to get a decent contract, with perhaps some cost-of-living wages. We think it’s time to turn the tide on the constant concessionary contracts that have been happening to state workers throughout the country.

BERESFORD SIMMONS: Hi. My name is Beresmond Simmons. I’m with the Taxi Workers Alliance. I’ve been driving a cab in New York City for over 40 years. And I’m here today to support the workers, because taxi drivers are some of the most exploited workers in New York City, and we need some attention from the authorities who are abusing us.

LINDA HARRISON: My name is Linda Harrison. I’m with TWU Local 100. I’m here today for workers’ rights. I was one of the laid-off workers. And I just came back to work the end of March, the last week in March. It was almost two years that we were off. And, I mean, we found money that the MTA had, that they could have kept us on, that services that they cut was unnecessary....—so this day is a day for us to come out and unite as one. All the unions are here. Everyone’s being represented.

And we just want rights. We just want equality. We don’t want them to give us anything...We work hard. We have...sometimes dangers on the trains. We have different situations where our lives are in danger. And we still have to deal with it. We have to come back to work...And we just want them to just pay us for what we give back, what we give to them: our experiences, our—...skills that we have. .. we’re not dumb... They have classes for us, so we know that they know that we have these skills. And we’re just asking them to just give us what we deserve.

FITZ REID: Hi. My name is Fitz Reid. We are part of DC 37 Local 768, healthcare workers. We are here to support all the oppressed and the workers, students. We just want to get a movement going so we can redeem the dream, to get back the wealth that we produce and provide for the capitalists, so we can get our fair share, at minimum. The struggle should not just to maintain what we have, but we should have...full healthcare, universal healthcare. And that would take the burden off the union, so we will not have to negotiate that, because all of us would get the standard care. We are all human beings. And if we cannot provide healthcare for the workers and for the masses, what else becomes primary? That’s a priority.

AMY GOODMAN: Some of the voices of organized labor at the May Day rally in New York.

...or maybe I Wish I were a Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof.

Frances Fox Piven; Public Sociology - UC Berkely - 25 April 2012 - she discussed laying out a stretegy to ILLEGALLY occupy foreclosd homes and refusing to replay their student debt.

Here's a few excerpts:

“How can we defend if the reoccupation of foreclosed homes grows in scale? How can we defend those houses that are occupied? How can we exert enough pressure so that the occupations become legal ownership? I think– there are real, big strategy questions.”

“In the occupation of homes, we have to figure out how to provide services, how to reconnect utilities often. Or if what we’re doing is we are defending people who are occupying multi-family apartments in big cities, we have to figure out how to get the services running in those buildings. And they, if the landlords, the new predatory equity landlords, had not succeeded in forcing them out — but once that stage is reached, the tenants have to figure out alternate ways of providing services to the building — heat and hot water, things like that.”

Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. His latest is an e-book, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix Them.

ROBERT REICH: ...it is very important for people to visibly demonstrate. Now, it’s hard to break through in the media, but visible demonstrations with a lot of people do help. They shift the media’s attention. The Occupy movements put inequality on the front page. The Occupy movement succeeded in changing the tenor and the shape of debate in this country about what was happening and allowed the President of the United States to say that the defining issue of the campaign is fairness, who gets what...without the Occupy campaign, none of that would happen. ..

AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised by it?

ROBERT REICH: ...I’ve been around for a while—civil rights, Vietnam, anti-Vietnam, so on. I was surprised that in a matter of months the Occupy movement could claim so much attention and so effectively shape the debate around the concentration of wealth and power in this country. And that, to me, is an indication of how much can be accomplished.

...We’ve got to also get involved in electoral politics. In relatively safe Democratic districts, it’s important to put up progressives, so that the center of gravity doesn’t keep on moving to the right in this country. It’s important to get behind a plank of specific ideas, like resurrecting Glass-Steagall, like breaking up the big banks, like making sure that taxes are increased on the very wealthy and the earned income tax credit, which is basically a wage subsidy for the working poor, be expanded, and so on. Get behind six or seven major ideas that we all think are critically important to the future and push them, and push them dramatically. Get big money out of politics. ...I’m the chairman, the national chairman, of Common Cause, an old organization. It’s been doing this work for years. But if we don’t get big money out of politics, everything else we want to do is hopeless. And that is a fundamental, fundamental, basic goal, reversing Citizens United. All of these things can be done.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about President Obama too much appeasing the Republicans, but isn’t it also the people who will fund his campaign, expected to raise more than a billion dollars?

ROBERT REICH: Yes, and we’ve got to have campaign finance reform and lift the lid on the amount of campaign finance, so no president or...would-be president is at a disadvantage in accepting public financing.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about the police crackdown on the Occupy movement, a level of militarization of the police in this country that we have rarely seen before?

ROBERT REICH: Yeah, and it’s ironic that, under the First Amendment, we now have a Supreme Court that says corporations are people and money is speech, and yet when the people really do mobilize under their First Amendment rights to free assembly, the police, in city after city, crack down and don’t allow the people to be heard. I mean, if corporations are people and if money is speech, then it becomes even more critical that we expand and enrich the definition of First Amendment—of the First Amendment to allow people to express themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: It would be interesting to see this militarized police force deal with corporations as people.

ROBERT REICH: Yes...I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes a corporation. I mean, once we go down the track of treating corporations as people and money as speech, there is really no end to the distorting effects of big money and corporate money in politics. That’s why it’s not just Citizens United. It’s also several Supreme Court precedents that have got to be changed—if necessary, by a constitutional amendment.

AMY GOODMAN: A constitutional amendment that would...?

ROBERT REICH: That would say, effectively, corporations are not people and money is not speech. And it is perfectly appropriate for Congress ...especially ...in a presidential campaign, to regulate and restrict big money.

....

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, you think Occupy is the answer?

ROBERT REICH: I think Occupy is certainly part of the answer. You know, I would say we need to make a ruckus in this country. We also need to get very, very much more clever about politics. We need to get involved in electoral politics. We need ...to fight cynicism. We need to understand that this is a long haul. You know, take civil rights, women’s suffrage, anything that we’ve got accomplished that expands the franchise and expands opportunity in this country, it did not happen in six months. It didn’t happen in four years. It happened over 20 years. I’m not saying we should be patient, but we’ve got to understand that mobilizing and changing the allocation of power in society is a serious and long-term and very difficult process. It’s necessary for our children and our grandchildren, but it is not going to happen overnight.

Here's how Oakland Protestors "celebrated" Independence Day.... (more proof of just how OWS is as anti-American as you can get.)

They even made their own video with anti-police music.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/fu-the-police-occupiers-celebrate-4th-of-july-march-by-burning-american-flags-and-vandalizing-police-property/

*wipes tear from eye.*

Aw BamBam, you remembered to bump my thread. Thanks buddy.

I'm not against protesting, but I wonder who pays these people, because I know some of the ones in my area were getting paid (minimum wage, I think) by someone.  So, is some organization really behind this movement?