Posts Tagged ‘occupy wall street’
Occupy activists sue Los Angeles over harsh treatment from police
Monday, 24 December 2012 07:35
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Activists with Occupy Los Angeles have filed suit against the city for what they allege was harsh police treatment as they were swept off City Hall grounds over a year ago, court documents show.

An estimated 1,400 officers drove about 300 demonstrators off the grounds on November 30, 2011; the activists had been camping out for eight weeks to support the Occupy Wall Street movement against economic inequality and wealth disparities.

In the federal suit filed in US District Court in California’s central district on December 20, five people are suing in the class action lawsuit meant to represent 292 people detained in the raid. (Read more…)

The suit names the city and county of LA, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LA Police Department Chief Charlie Beck.

The activists claim they were denied food and water for hours while being detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center, at a jail in Van Nuys or on a bus to the detention center. Others allege they were refused access to bathroom facilities, and told to urinate or defecate on themselves.

Two of the five named plaintiffs were journalists, a videographer and a radio reporter, the documents add.

Occupy’s camp in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in late 2011 spawned similar protests in cities around the world as the movement tapped into widespread resentment over the economic slump, persistent unemployment and anger at financial practices.

 
Occupy hatches plot to destroy payday loan industry
Saturday, 17 November 2012 22:01
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By Mandi Woodruff

In today’s ever-perplexing world of personal finance, there’s no question consumers could benefit from a little clarity.

Just don’t expect to find any in the pages of Occupy Wall Street’s new manifesto on consumer debt. (Read more…)

“The Debt Resistor’s Operations Manual” is 122 pages of some of the dodgiest financial advice we’ve ever seen.  It’s no wonder the entire thing was published for free and written by “an anonymous collective” of contributors.

Their mission is admirable –– a good portion of the advice has been obviously written with care and understanding of our muddled financial system –– but some of these schemes are so foolhardy we couldn’t help but call them out.

Here’s one of their more elaborate plans to upend the predatory payday lending industry, which involves finding 1,000 people from three different continents willing to commit fraud.

“How To Destroy The Payday Loan Industry” (as told to the authors by a former payday loan employee):

1. Identify a group of people planning to move between any of the four countries: United States, Canada, England, and Australia. Have each person take out a number of payday loans.

2. Once you get about $10,000 in loans, move the money to different bank accounts so the companies don’t have access to it.

3. When you move to another country, your credit score will be a blank slate and you’ll have free money to fight the system.

4. With about a thousand people willing to travel between the four countries, you can take out a few major international pay loan providers, like Wonga and Enova Financial.

If there’s one piece of advice we hope you take from this book, it’s written in the intro:

“This manual is not designed to provide legal counsel; it is a political act of mutual aid. We are not lawyers; you may want to consult one before doing anything that you think might be illegal. Look seriously into any of the options we present before taking action. Be smart.”

——

Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.

 

 
How Theory Met Practice …and Drove It Absolutely Crazy
Thursday, 01 November 2012 16:30
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Thomas Frank compares and contrasts Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party in the latest Baffler:

There is a scene I always recall when I try to remember the exhilarating effect that Occupy Wall Street had on me when it was first getting going. I was on a subway train in Washington, D.C., reading an article about the protests in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. (Read more…) It was three years after the Wall Street bailouts. It was two years after everyone I knew had given up hope in the creativity of Barack Obama. It was two months after the bankers’ friends in the Republican Party had pushed the country right to the brink of default in order to underscore their hallucinatory economic theories. Like everyone else, I had had enough.

Anyhow, the subway car was boarded by some perfectly dressed, perfectly polished corporate executive, clearly on the way back from some trade show, carrying a tote bag that bore some jaunty slogan about maximizing shareholder value or what a fine thing luxury is or how glorious it is to be a winner—the kind of sentiment that had been commonplace a short while before but that the American public had now turned bitterly against. The man was clearly uncomfortable with it on his person. And I considered the situation: Once upon a time I would have been embarrassed to hold a copy of this magazine on a crowded subway, but now it was people like him who would have to conceal what they did. Your service to the 1 percent would no longer be something you could boast about without feeling the contempt of your fellow Metro passengers.

A while later I happened to watch an online video of an Occupy panel discussion held at a bookstore in New York; at some point in the recording, a panelist objected to the way protesters had of saying they were “speaking for themselves” rather than acknowledging that they were part of a group. Another one of the panelists was moved to utter this riposte:

What I would note, is that people can only speak for themselves, that the self would be under erasure there, in that the self is then held into question, as any poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism would push you towards. . . . I would agree, an individualism that our society has definitely had inscribed upon it and continues to inscribe upon itself, “I can only speak for myself,” the “only” is operative there, and of course these spaces are being opened up . . .

My heart dropped like a broken elevator. As soon as I heard this long, desperate stream of pseudointellectual gibberish, I knew instantly that this thing was doomed.

*  *  *
“There is a danger,” the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek warned the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park last year, and he wasn’t referring to the New York Police Department. “Don’t fall in love with yourselves.”

We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?

Read more here.