“Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the life blood out of a trade I care deeply about. It was bad enough that Huffington used her site for flagrant self-promotion, although the cult of the self has reached such dizzying proportions in American society that such behavior is almost expected. But there is an even sadder irony that this was carried out in the name of journalism. "Something is happening here," Bob Dylan sang in "Ballad of a Thin Man," "but you don't know what it is. Do you Mr. Jones?”
—http://www.truth-out.org/chris-hedges-huffingtons-plunder67931
Testimonial on Stop & Frisk from #OccupyWallStreet
Last night hundreds of fliers went out at General Assembly and a call from the Stop, “Stop & Frisk” Working Group, a multinational group of occupiers, who came together to build for October 21st and 22nd at OWS, was read which said in part:
“We, occupiers of Wall Street, wholly challenge the New York Police Department’s unconstitutional, racist, and inhumane ‘Stop & Frisk’ policing practice, and we will voice our opposition and challenge this policing practice gathering at 11:30 in Liberty Square to join the Stop ‘Stop & Frisk’ rally on October 21, 2011 In Harlem. On Saturday for the 16th National Day of Protest against Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation we will WEAR BLACK. We will march in solidarity on October 22nd at 12pm from Liberty Square to join in this day of protest.”
Early this morning I awoke after barely falling asleep to the sound of rain clamoring on the tarp over my sleeping bag… I start to talk… A young man chimes in that he’s personally experienced this many times and he agrees, it’s time to stand up… One young person, 25 years old, Black, has been in the military but is no longer with that and has been coming every day to the park, sometimes staying over, he decides to open up and tell these stories…
We were coming from the gym in East New York, me, my cousin, my father, he drives a hummer, they stopped all of us, maybe five of us, pulled us over randomly for no reason, he didn’t pass a stop sign didn’t do any illegal traffic moves, two cops came up to the car, I was in the passenger side, one of them was looking in the car, looking in the back, my father said, what are we being stopped for? “We’ll tell you in a minute,” they say. My father works for the Department of Sanitation they got his work card. They came back and said, “You can go.”
Another time with my friend Chris in my neighborhood, my neighborhood’s quiet, a nice neighborhood. They pulled us over got out of the car, put us in hand cuffs told us to sit in the sidewalk while they searched the car and one of the cops came up to us, they said, “The only way we’ll let you go is if you dance for us.” They said, “You heard of the dance ‘chicken noodles soup?’” “No we haven’t,” we said. “The only way we’ll let you go is if you do chicken noodle soup for us.” They let us go when when we said we didn’t know. They were jokin’ around but to me, it’s no joke, they’re trying to degrade us.
I’ve been stopped many times, they just pull up on the side walk. They went through my phone one time, that was a violation of my rights. One time I was waiting for my friend by myself they pull up on the sidewalk they search me take my wallet and phone out the cop goes through the phone sees pictures of my girlfriend “Oh, you’ve got some pictures in there.” I don’t know why you’re asking me where I’m going, who I’m waiting for going through my phone.
Those are just a few, it’s happened so many times, those are just stand out ones, happens all the time. The neighborhood I live in, it’s upper middle class, barely any crime, why do they chose to search us. It’s predominantly black neighborhood and it’s a quiet neighborhood it’s peaceful, but it’s a black neighborhood. I got other neighborhood’s they don’t stop people like that. A lot of them too have no respect for the neighborhood they think they can come in and get away with it, a lot of people don’t know their rights and even if you do they’re still going to do it because it’s you’re word against theirs.
Multiply that by almost 2,000 times. Every day. That’s the reality. Now that you know, it’s up to you to act with conscience on October 21st to stand with our brothers and sisters in this struggle.
Think about how just a few weeks ago all the anger and frustration at what this society does to people was boiling beneath the surface on the economic crisis and the criminal actions of corporations as well as this government, the lack of healthcare, no jobs, no education, mounting debt and the feeling that we don’t have a future, and now all of this has burst forth and we are impacting the political stage. It’s time for the anger around illegal unconstitutional police stop and frisk and profiling to be heard and it’s time to put a stop to this.
We at Occupy Wall Street have right on our side. We have created something beautiful and important and just- and we aren’t going anywhere!!! If we aren’t standing with people in Harlem on Friday at 1pm, can people really continue to call out that “We are the 99%”?
The World As It Is
Read this book awhile ago. Highly recommend. Chris Hedges is an author whose words jump off the page and provoke an emotional response. He speaks on several issues and “shakes his finger” at all sides, proving that no one is in the clear. For those who are not familiar with Chris Hedges, he is one of America’s most insightful cultural critics. He has graduated from all the well-known schools, reported for the big guys, won nice awards, and is now a writer for truthdig (http://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges). In this book, he speaks on politics, the middle east, healthcare, and the decay of the American Empire.
“Now the death of God with the perfection of image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence. It kills at will. Kills effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly. The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not to a mysterious holy trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of electronic image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.”
—John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards
Profiting From Human Misery
prisonplanet.comChris Hedges
Prison Planet.com
Feb 18, 2013
Marela, an undocumented immigrant in her 40s, stood outside the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., on a chilly afternoon last week. She was there with a group of protesters who appear at the facility’s gates every year on Ash Wednesday to decry the nation’s immigration policy and conditions inside the center. She was there, she said, because of her friend Evelyn Obey.
Obey, 40, a Guatemalan and the single mother of a 12-year-old and a 6-year-old, was picked up in an immigration raid as she and nine other undocumented workers walked out of an office building they cleaned in Newark, N.J. Her two children instantly lost their only parent. She languished in detention. Another family took in the children, who never saw their mother again. Obey died in jail in 2010 from, according to the sign Villar had hung on her neck, “pulmonary thromboembolism, chronic bronchiolitis and emphysema and remote cardiac Ischemic Damage.’ ”
