Category Archives: Occupy Wall Street

BBC Marks Occupy Anniversary With A Message of Hope

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Monday was the one year anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy Wall St. movement. It was on this day last year that the first activists camped out in Zuccotti Park in New York City, and the media love-fest began. No broadcast organization supported and lauded the Occupiers more than the BBC. So, while I actually expected a little more noise about it from them, the special video reports make their bias evident enough. I guess Mitt Romney’s series of “gaffes” (no word from the BBC yet on whether or not Romney has actually eaten any babies) have taken up all the space and air time.

What did Occupy movement achieve?

I love how this is in the Business section, as if it’s a legitimate economics issue as opposed to a purely political extremist one. But where’s the “What did the Tea Party movement achieve” video?

Not only do we hear excuses from various Occupiers about why they haven’t actually achieved anything (“It takes years for a movement to do anything”), but the BBC found a Columbia University professor to tell you that they actually altered the national consciousness, changed the way we all think. What he really means is that the supportive media latched onto a bit of their lingo and promoted it to the ends of the earth.

In essence, the BBC is still presenting a hopeful picture of the Occupy movement.

This headline of another BBC report accidentally tells you the Occupiers’ real achievements:

Occupy Wall Street anniversary: More than 100 arrested

Getting arrested: that’s pretty much all they have achieved, outside of inspiring hundreds of Left-wing journalists around the country and in Britain and Europe.

The BBC will never dwell like this on what the Tea Party movement has achieved. They have to admit the real achievements in the House of Representatives occasionally in reports, but they do it begrudgingly, and it’s presented as a negative affect.  There was no special feature one year after the movement started, never mind one a year after the BBC actually started reporting on its existence. But their darling Occupiers deserve special treatment, because the BBC staff supports their ideology.

For those new to this blog, here’s a trip down memory lane, a reminder of how the BBC gushed over the Occupiers (comments on older posts have yet to be retrieved from our former Blogspot home).

The BBC Loves Left-Wing Protests

Katty Kay and Mark Mardell Love Far-Left Protests

Laura Trevelyan’s Occupy Poster Boy Is A Raging Anti-Semite

The Sickness of Mark Mardell (officially about the Wisconsin situation but includes positive reference to Occupy)

Matt Danzico uses his Twitter account to solicit donations for the Occupier library

(okay, that one’s not reporting, just blatant evidence of their support.)

Just do a search for Occupy stories on the BBC website. The enthusiasm is evident. And I won’t even get into all the negative Occupier stories and facts that the BBC censored.

For those who have an hour or so to spare, please compare and contrast what Katty Kay and Mark Mardell said about the Occupiers, along with any other impressions you may have gotten from the BBC, with my own report after spending a few hours at Zuccotti Park. Who got it right? Who was more accurate about who the Occupiers were, what they really wanted, and what they were going to accomplish? Who had a better idea of where this was all headed?

BBC Censorship: Occupiers Arrested In Plot To Blow Up Bridge Edition

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UPDATE: The BBC just posted a news brief about it after all. But the association of the criminals with the Occupy Movement is censored. Instead, they quote a DoJ mouthpiece saying the plot had nothing to do with the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. LOL! We all know what this was going to celebrate, and the BBC won’t admit it.

Today is May Day, a prominent day in Communist history. Some non-Left blogs last year started calling this “Victims of Communism Day”, in remembrance of the tens of millions of victims of Communists in pursuit of their goals.

Today the BBC has done a quick hype of their darling Occupiers, who are using May Day to cause violence and disrupt civilized society. Of course, that’s not how the BBC tells it. The news brief is full of hype and positive vibes about these people.

Censored by the BBC:

Terror Plot Suspects Appear In Court

Federal authorities on Tuesday morning announced that five people were arrested in Cleveland for allegedly conspiring to use explosives to blow up a local bridge.

Steven M. Dettelbach, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, and Stephen D. Anthony, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cleveland office, discussed the arrests and subsequent charges related to what they referred to as a “national security case.”

A news conference was held Tuesday morning at the Cleveland FBI headquarters at 1501 Lakeside Avenue.

Fox 8′s Stacey Frey reports that the suspects have been identified as Brandon Baxter, 20; Anthony Hayne, 35; Joshua Stafford, 23; Connor Stevens, 20; and Douglas Wright, 26. Baxter, Hayne and Wright were arrested Monday night by members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on charges of conspiracy and attempted use of explosive materials to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce.

A criminal complaint filed Tuesday morning states that Baxter, Hayne and Wright are self-proclaimed anarchists who formed a small group that considered a series of plots over several months.

Self-proclaimed anarchists? Try self-proclaimed Occupiers.

Brandon Baxter: Occupy Cleveland organizer

Occupy Cleveland May Day festivities cancelled because five of them were arrested

FBI met the at OWS event

Screenshots of all their Facebook pages

This must be more of that love for humanity and sense of civic duty Katty Kay was telling us about, and which Paul Mason is celebrating on Newsnight. I pretty much saw this coming after spending a few hours among these darlings of the BBC.

What I mean is that these people can keep doing this for a very long time. And eventually, they’re going to realize that it isn’t working.  Will they fess up and become a ready-made cadre of Obamessiah activists?  I don’t know. If not, the emotions will have driven many of them into a frenzied state over time. Fighting the man, speaking truth to power, getting arrested over and over again, and watching a seemingly endless stream of video clips of their comrades fighting with police, getting pepper-sprayed and bundled into police vans will not yield a happy result.  Like we heard from a couple people, they all seriously think that obstructing traffic and infringing on other people’s space and property is their right. Freedom of speech and right to peaceable assembly and all that. What they tragically fail to understand is that, unlike many blacks in the South before the Civil Rights movement, they can exercise their right to vote without fear, and all this glorious civil disobedience is unnecessary extremist nonsense.  The Tea Party movement has proven that they don’t need to do any of this. I found only a couple of people who even remotely grasped this point.  So I think the violent confrontation – always started by the nasty fascist police infringing on their rights, bien sur – will become a kind of ouroburossian (if that’s not a word, it is now) reality. They’ll continuously create situations which they’ll interpret as justifying their cause, projecting onto it false equivalences with everything from Wat Tyler to the German Peasant Rebellion to Gandhi to MLK and the Civil Rights movement. That’s when you’ll really start to see the stuff the BBC told you would never happen over here.

 

Is The Occupy Movement Racist Now?

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A while back, the BBC followed the lead of their brethren in the Left-wing US media and tried to get you to think the Occupiers were similar to the Tea Party movement. This was done because – to the media’s dismay – much of the country failed to hate the Tea Party movement and buy into the demonization promoted by the press. So, having resigned themselves to that fact, the media luvvies tried to gain acceptance for the Occupiers by trying to promote the idea that they had similar ideals to the Tea Partiers. The BBC even played a little game of “Who Said It” to help drive home this notion.

Now it appears the two movements do have something in common after all: their opposition to The Obamessiah.

Tea Party and OWS Protest Side-By-Side Against Obama in San Francisco

The unthinkable finally happened last night in San Francisco: the Tea Party shared a protest with the Occupiers, both groups angry with the same person.

And who was this unifier, the only man who can bridge the divide and bring together all sides of the political spectrum? Why, President Obama, of course.

I don’t need to remind anybody here that the Narrative from the BBC has been that opposition to the President is not so much policy-based as it is steeped in racism. They simply refuse to acknowledge that people can be genuinely opposed to His policies for legitimate reasons. See the video of Mark Mardell’s appearance at the BBC College of Journalism for a reminder of his mocking of a Southern woman whom he describes as a racist, as well as his opinion that the Tea Partiers are really, deep down, under the skin, concerned about the Government spending money “on people not like them”.

So, one has to ask now: Is the Occupy Wall St. movement racist?

Over to you, BBC.

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OCCUPY UPDATE

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As I pointed out in the comments yesterday, the BBC’s Matt Danzico has been touting for book donations for a new Occupy Wall Street library organised by his sister Liz (aka “bobulate”):


(Liz sounds like she could be one of Occupy’s Uptown crowd.)

Even *ahem* impartial BBC journalists such as Matt Danzico might think twice about giving stuff to OWS when they hear of the money swilling around the place.

Last month Danzico interviewed this guy, Thorin Caristo, from the OWS media centre at Zuccotti Park:

Caristo was also interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme following the clearance of Zuccotti last week; he told Evan Davis that the occupiers’ next move would be a takeover of Central Park.

It turns out Mr Caristo is a bit of a divisive character within the OWS set-up. According to audio-plus-transcript posted today by OWSNYC at Livestream (recorded secretly by other occupiers, it seems) he has been taking substantial amounts of money from a rich benefactor called Jean Louis Bourgeois (no, seriously). Here are some screengrabs to give you an idea of the sums being discussed, not to mention a somewhat two-faced attitude towards the guy with the money:

The Livestream clip linked to above is worth watching in its entirety to get a full sense of the bitterness, backstabbing and bitching that’s going down within OWS. There’s talk of chauffeur-driven cars, alienated celebrities, and even a threat to kick someone in the teeth. And if you’re really into the soap opera of it all, you can see one of Thorin’s former friends responding here.

You don’t get any of this stuff on the BBC, do you?

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#OccupyFail: Three Occupiers Exercise Their Freedom of Speech by Bringing Mortars in Glass Jars

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The BBC will never report this, because their thought-leaders in the US media and Left-wing blogosphere won’t.

3 men claiming to be Occupy Portland protesters arrested in Marion County for possession of explosives

Inside the car, the deputy also found a number of firecrackers and two commercially made mortars inside glass canning jars, designed to be fired into the area during professional pyrotechnic displays. One was found in the floorboard of the vehicle, and the other was allegedly in Luff’s jacket.


The deputy also found two gas masks, protective eye goggles and a safety helmet. All three men told the deputy that they had spent the night at the Occupy Portland demonstration, and they brought the mortars and safety equipment to the demonstration in preparation of the expected confrontation between police and protesters Sunday morning.

The three had been at the demonstration during the confrontation Sunday morning and had left about an hour before the vehicle was stopped. During that confrontation, a police officer was injured by a firework, but the three men denied being involved in the incident.

When asked about the explosives, the three men told authorities that they knew the canning jar would explode, causing glass shrapnel to fly and possibly cause injury.

(emphasis mine)

A reminder of Mark Mardell’s partisan bias and hypocrisy:

Healthcare row gets physical?

We are used to terms like “Nazi” being bandied around in the health debate at overheated town hall meetings.

But a new way of persuading opponents has just emerged – biting off their finger.

It reportedly happened in California and the man took his detached little finger to a local hospital to be sewed back on.

I don’t yet know how he fares. But as we in the media are always on the look-out for real-life case studies to illustrate political debates, this seems ideal.

Did he have insurance and did it cover Severed Pinkie Syndrome?

As he was 65, was he covered by a government-run, taxpayer-funded scheme?

And can any Americans out there explain why this debate has got quite so heated?

Mardell can tut-tut about this non-story, and openly sneer at what he assumes to be the senior citizen’s own hypocrisy, simply because he disagrees with the victim’s political views.

Yet there has been utter silence from him and the BBC about all the violence and foul behavior by their darling Occupiers.  And all this while the BBC has increased spending and hiring for their US coverage.

#OccupyFail.  #BBCFail.

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#OccupyFail: You Know Your Movement’s Over When….

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For Twitter fans, it’s a hashtag: #OccupyFail

Here’s just a sample of what the BBC doesn’t want you to know about their favorite US political movement.

A Petri Dish of Activism, and Germs

The chorus began quietly at a recent strategy session inside Zuccotti Park, with a single cough from a security team member, a muffled hack between puffs on his cigarette. Then a colleague followed. Then another.

Soon the discussion had devolved into a fit of wheezing, with one protester blowing his nose into the mulch between clusters of tents.  

“It’s called Zuccotti lung,” said Willie Carey, 28, a demonstrator from Chapel Hill, N.C. “It’s a real thing.”

Seems to be spreading. No headlice in NYC yet.

Future of Occupy Burlington encampment uncertain after police clear City Hall Park to investigate man’s death 

The city closed half of City Hall Park and put a halt to all camping at the Occupy Burlington site Thursday night while police investigate a shooting in a tent that cost a 35-year-old man his life. Meanwhile, the movement’s participants mourned a member of their community and planned the future of the encampment.

Just a day after the joyful spontaneity of a Gogol Bordello performance Wednesday night at City Hall Park, Thursday’s shooting that police believe may have been self-inflicted spiraled into a tense confrontation between Burlington police and some protesters over access to the park.

UPDATE: BBC News Online found a moment to acknowledge this story, plus that of the murder in Oakland.  Naturally it’s written in defense of the Occupiers, total sympathy, no effort spared to portray them in the gentlest of lights.  Naturally, the BBC continues to describe it as a “protest against corporate greed and income inequality”.  This is only partially true, and true mainly of the Union organizers and middle-aged and part-time hangers on, who are just your average Leftoids.  As I’ve shown previously, the real organizers and hard-core Occupiers want an end to what they think is Capitalism, and an end to the entire US system of government and rule of law.  That the BBC continues to deny this is not surprising, but still pathetic.

 Mostly Peaceful Occupy Portland Rape Policy: “Nobody Should Contact the Police”

Video at the link.  We keep hearing that the Occupy leadership (when the BBC said this was a leaderless movement, they were misleading you) try to dissuade their fellow campers from going to the police.  Much better to do what they’ve done in Zuccotti Park and set up a women-only anti-rape tent, I guess. 

Man found dead in Pioneer Park, Occupy SLC ordered to leave both camps

The police were already on hand, as they had to turn up earlier to quell a pre-dawn riot that broke out amongst the little darlings of the BBC.

Elite Berkeley Students Upset They’re in the 1%, Throw Occupy Tantrum:

A clique of privileged U.C. Berkeley students, upset that they’re the top 1% of elite students in the state and thus disqualified from participating in the Occupy movement, could no longer contain their frustration on Wednesday and threw an Occutantrum, attempting to “occupy” a few square yards of the 1,200-acre campus. The police dutifully played their roles in the street theater performance, showing up in riot gear and looking scary so the privileged students could shout at them and feel properly revolutionary, as instructed by their professors. Following the script, the police repeatedly removed the handful of occupation tents so that the students could feel sufficiently wronged by authority figures and thereby earn their “Berkeley protest stripes,” which have been a requirement for graduation since 1964.

 Harvard Keeps Occupy Harvard Harvard-Only

The Harvard iteration of the Occupy protests is ironically, appropriately, and unwillingly now the most exclusive Occupy protest in the country. Guards closed and locked the gates to Harvard Yard in the minutes leading up to the inaugural Occupy Harvard general assembly, meaning that the tent city now built in front of the John Harvard statue will be as exclusive as the university itself. Only people flashing Harvard IDs were allowed in the Yard for the 7 p.m. protest, and Harvard police officers stood sentinel into the night to keep the riffraff out.

UPDATE: Apparently they’re so dedicated to the cause they…um…all went home to mater and pater for the weekend.

 Occupy Oakland 11_02_11 shut down Burger King

Video at the link.


Occupy DC becoming increasingly violent, police say

Mayor Vincent Gray and D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier on Monday said the Occupy DC protesters have grown violent, and the police department will adjust its tactics to ensure the public’s safety.

 SoCal Street Cart Vendors Hurting After ‘Occupy’ Group Splatters Blood, Urine

Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators, but when they stopped, the protesters became violent.

Occupy Thugs Taunt Black Security Guard

In which there’s not so much of what Katty Kay said was the Occupiers’ “love of humanity”, but more calling a black man a “slave” and telling him he’s “no one’s brother”.

Head and Body Lice Outbreak Announced at #Occupy Portland Squatters Camp (Video)

After all this, hands up anyone who thinks the majority of Beeboids still support these people, and would join them if they could.  My vote is yes, they still do, which is why Simon Wilson and Matthew Davis don’t think you need to know about this stuff.

During the first week or two of the Occupy activity, the BBC swooped in and did a number of gushing, positive reports.  After establishing the Narrative, and satisfying themselves that they’d gotten the word out and made sure the license fee-payers understood the correct version of events, the Beeboids got bored and moved on to more viable pastures.  They’ve ramped up their coverage of the US, spent more money and hired more staff, and all you get is an endless series of lightweight video magazine segments (some of which helpfully promote the BBC’s Lonely Planet commercial interest – at your expense), the latest Republican candidate faux pas and declaration that Romney is the “real winner here”, Mark Mardell’s slipshod analysis, Jonny Dymond’s one-dimensional drivel, and assorted celebrity gossip.

Does anyone feel that any of this makes you better informed about what’s going on in the US?  Or is that not even the BBC’s goal?

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Jonny Dymond’s Biased Sob Story

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One of the battalion of Beeboids covering the US these days, Jonny Dymond, has just done an extremely one-sided collection of sob stories for Today about the struggles of the middle class.  He went to a couple of slowly dying cities in Connecticut to create his tapestry of woe, and his agenda is clear.

I say it’s one-sided not because there are tons of stories of rising successes for the middle class he could have provided in the interests of balance, but because of the way Dymond presents the situation in the first place.  Highly selective, and framed in a very narrow-minded fashion.  The whole story is presented as a case study in how the 2008 financial disaster and the subsequent recession has ravaged the middle class, the backbone of the US. But the agenda here is really to support the Occupiers’ cause.

Dymond starts out in a metal parts factory in Prospect, CT, where he wrings his hands over the plight of the workers.  They no longer get the guaranteed annual raises, or the constant overtime which pads the  regular paychecks of anyone on an hourly wage in any industry (especially including the public sector), so their American Dream, he opines, is on hold at best, and possibly even disappearing for good.
The factory boss also laments the plight of his employees.  But in the middle of all this, he casually mentions that Connecticut hasn’t actually has any net job increase in 20 years.  What does that have to do with 2008 or the recession?  He and one of his suffering employees also point out that the food prices and gas prices and taxes are going up and up, which makes things tough for those on an essentially fixed income.  Well, we can all guess what the standard BBC answer to that is:  they need pay rises.  Never mind that Connecticut ranks 47th in crushing taxes which hurt businesses and job growth.

The Tea Party movement – so disparaged by the BBC – wants to lower taxes, something that’s an anathema to Left-wingers like Dymond, so he doesn’t mention the idea. Nor does he mention that the Democrats who run the state recently enacted the largest tax increase in state history. (Over the last two decades, when the state wasn’t run by Democrats, it was run by Bush-style Big Government Republicans, the kind the Tea Party movement has been working to get rid of.) Dymond also better hope that none of these factory workers earn more than $50K pa, or have spouses earning a similar middle-class income, as the Democrats who run Connecticut recently raised state income taxes for both.  These aren’t even the “millionaires and billionaires” against whom the President often rails, either.

Food prices going up?  Even the Guardian admits that this is in large part due to the Warmists forcing biofuel down our throats, causing edible corn prices to skyrocket, which drives up everything else.  Who’s robbing the American dream here, Jonny?

One of those responsible is the Democrat former Senator, Chris Dodd, who was partially responsible for driving the mortgage crisis, and got a sweetheart deal from one of the failed sub-prime companies. Never mind all the campaign largesse he got from the industry.

One of the staples of the American Dream Dymond mentions is home ownership.  Well, he better hope none of his struggling middle class workers in Connecticut own homes these days, as the Democrats who run the state have made property taxes there 50% higher than the national average.  Sure, these geniuses think they’re doing to it soak the evil rich bankers and David Letterman who live within commuting distance of New York City, but the unintended consequence – as always in these cases – is that hurts the middle class most.  Dymond couldn’t be bothered to find this out, as it would detract from his Narrative.

If that’s not bad enough, they also just raised the state sales tax from 6% to 6.35% (still significantly lower than New York, but then New Jersey has no sales tax on retail good at all), and eliminated tax exemptions for all kinds of things which affect these middle class factory workers, like heating oil and the sacred property tax credit.  They even killed the tax exemption for products which help people quite smoking. At the same time, they jacked up taxes on cigarettes.  I hope none of those struggling factory workers smoke, or if they do they’re not thinking of quitting any time soon.  So much for the American Dream, eh, Jonny?  As we all know, and which the BBC has mostly kept from you, some states not controlled by Democrats have cut taxes and added jobs. Even New York, with the highest tax burden in the country, the Democrat Governor is trying to fix the budget without raising taxes. But that doesn’t help the Agenda, now, does it?  So don’t bring it up.

To tie it all together, Dymond goes to the city of Hartford to meet up with his darling Occupiers.  He manages to find one of them who hasn’t pulled a knife on someone.  This Occupier laments that we’ve all been lied to, that there’s no such thing as the American Dream.  What Dymond fails to realize is that this, just like the factory bosses’ statement about no net job growth for the last 20 years, also has nothing to do with the recent financial crisis and recession. This Occupier means that there has never been an American Dream available to everyone willing to work for it.  He’s not talking about a temporary rough time we need to fix at all.

This keeps happening with BBC reports on this issue.  On the one hand they say that the Occupy movement is inspired by anger at the greedy bankers who caused the financial crisis that everyone else has to pay for.  Ask yourself how many times you’ve heard someone (usually a trade union mouthpiece or Labour politician or Robert Peston) say that people are being forced to pay for a crisis they didn’t cause. On the other hand, they moan about income inequality and corporate greed. But if this is all anger at a recent phenomenon, why do the Occupiers keep saying that this has always been a problem, and everything has always been bad?  It’s because the BBC keeps misleading you about the whole story, as Dymond is doing here.

This is a very biased report.  Everything is framed from one side of the issue, and facts which detract from the Narrative are swept under the rug.

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BBC Censorship: Occupier Ugliness Edition

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Has anyone else noticed that the BBC has gone totally silent about the Occupy Wall St. movement in the US? With the exception of a couple stories about the violence innocent exercising of rights in Oakland, where they shut down a shipping port and attacked police were victims of unprovoked brutality from The Man, there has been scarcely a peep from BBC News for days.

After a flurry of encomia impartial reports on how nice and earnest and well-meaning the Occupiers are, the more violent and unhinged they became, the quieter the Beeboids got. Just two days after the original Occupiers hit Zuccotti Park, Daniel Nasaw tried to tie them directly to the Democrat/Union protests in Wisconsin (which the BBC also reported dishonestly), claiming that this was the “birth of a movement”.  It all seemed so wonderfully clear then, didn’t it?

The Occupier activity around the country is one of the most important stories going lately, especially since the Oakland City Council is about to cave in to the violence and now support the Occupiers. But the BBC seems to be censoring nearly all news of it. They’ve gone silent because they don’t want you to know about things like this:

Zuccotti protesters put up women-only tent to prevent sexual assaults

Zuccotti Park has become so overrun by sexual predators attacking women in the night that organizers felt compelled to set up a female-only sleeping tent yesterday to keep the sickos away.*

 Or this:

Occupy protest turns violent outside Washington Convention Center

UPDATE 11/7: Occupy DC becoming increasingly violent, police say

Citing injuries to five people outside the Washington Convention Center on Friday night, the mayor urged the demonstators to show restraint so that their protests are not discredited by violence.

“We will not tolerate behavior that jeopardizes public safety,” Gray said.

Lanier said in a statement that the protesters have become “increasingly confrontational and violent toward uninvolved bystanders and motorists.”
Related Examiner Occupy DC coverage
Jesse Jackson downtown Monday, compares Occupy to civil rights movement
D.C. police chief says Occupy protesters getting more violent

Four of the injured people appear to be protesters themselves. A fifth injured person was a 78-year-old woman who was knocked down while attempting to get around the Occupy DC’s blockade of a dinner for a conservative group Friday.

“That is no longer a peaceful protest,” Lanier said.

And this is coming from the DC police who generally support the Occupiers’ cause so much that the 911 operators hung up on a couple people inside the AFP event who called to complain about Occupiers blocking all exits and preventing people from leaving.

Or this:

Occupy Chicago protesters interrupt Wisconsin governor’s speech here

The Republican governor, who appeared before about 300 people at a public policy breakfast at Chicago’s Union League Club, saw his speech interrupted by union-backed Occupy Chicago protesters for about six minutes before they left the event.

Or this:

Occupy Boston Occupies Israeli Consulate

According to the Twitter feed of @kade_ellis, chants included, “hey hey, Ho ho! Israeli apartheid’s got to go!,” “long live the intifada! Intifada intifada!,” “not another nickel! Not another dime! No more money for Israel’s crimes!,” and “Viva viva Palestina!”

Or this:


A Chill Descends On Occupy Wall Street; “The Leaders of the allegedly Leaderless Movement”

On Sunday, October 23, a meeting was held at 60 Wall Street. Six leaders discussed what to do with the half-million dollars that had been donated to their organization, since, in their estimation, the organization was incapable of making sound financial decisions. The proposed solution was not to spend the money educating their co-workers or stimulating more active participation by improving the organization’s structures and tactics. Instead, those present discussed how they could commandeer the $500,000 for their new, more exclusive organization. No, this was not the meeting of any traditional influence on Wall Street. These were six of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

What on earth? The BBC told me that this was a leaderless movement, which is why the poor lambs had so much difficulty getting a clear message out to the media.

Occupy Wall Street’s Structure Working Group (WG) has created a new organization called the Spokes Council. “Teach-ins” were held to workshop and promote the Spokes Council throughout the week of October 22-28. I attended the teach-in on Sunday the 23rd.

According to Marisa Holmes, one of the most outspoken and influential leaders of OWS, the NYC-GA started receiving donations from around the world when OWS began on September 17. Because the NYC-GA was not an official organization, and therefore could not legally receive thousands of dollars in donations, the nonprofit Alliance for Global Justice helped OWS create Friends of Liberty Plaza, which receives tax-free donations for OWS. Since then, Friends of Liberty Plaza has received over $500,000. Until October 28, anybody who wanted to receive more than $100 from Friends of Liberty Plaza had to go through the often arduous modified consensus process (90% majority) of the NYC-GA—which, despite its well-documented inefficiencies, granted $25,740 to the Media WG for live-stream equipment on October 12, and $1,400 to the Food and Medical WGs for herbal tonics on October 18.

At the teach-in, Ms. Holmes maintained that while the NYC-GA is the “de facto” mechanism for distributing funds, it has no right to do so, even though she acknowledged that most donors were likely under the impression that the NYC-GA was the only organization with access to these funds. Two other leaders of the teach-in, Daniel and Adash, concurred with Holmes.

Ms. Holmes also stated at the teach-in that five people in the Finance WG have access to the $500,000 raised by Friends of Liberty Plaza. When Suresh Fernando, the man taking notes, asked who these people are, the leaders of the Structure WG nervously laughed and said that it was hard to keep track of the “constantly fluctuating” heads of the Finance WG. Mr. Fernando made at least four increasingly explicit requests for the names. Each request was turned down by the giggling, equivocating leaders.

And this is from an Occupier comrade.  Oh, dear, how the anarchists hate it when they get what they didn’t understand they actually wanted.  And only a couple weeks ago they all seemed so warm and fuzzy about their cute little group democracy.  I got the impression from my visit to Zuccotti Park that this is how it was going to be, and it turns out that I was right.

So how about it, BBC?  Where are you?  You were so sure this was an important movement only a couple weeks ago, yet now it’s as if you’re bored and have moved on. Reality not fitting the Narrative?  The double standard between the BBC’s coverage of the Occupiers and their reporting on the Tea Party movement couldn’t be more obvious.  Hey, maybe the BBC’s silence about all this now is a belated attempt to make up for the fact that they censored all news about the Tea Party movement for the first two months of its existence.

What disgraceful behavior for a news organization which claims to be superior to the rest of them.

* I blame Bloomberg and the NYPD for this and not the Occupy movement, to be honest, as they’ve let drugged out homeless men hang out in the park. Although their childish refusal to allow police to do their jobs inside their precious encampment is also a factor. There are rumors that the police actually direct the homeless there with promises of free food.  But that should be a scandalous story in and of itself: evil billionaire politician and oppressive authorities using a sick tactic to secretly undermine the sainted protest with no regard for safety or decency.  How about it, BBC?  Any of you dozen or so intrepid young digital media geniuses looking for a big scoop?  I won’t hold my breath.

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The Unbearable Whiteness of Occupying

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Here’s one for you:

Internal Survey Confirms #Occupywallstreet Is Overwhelmingly White, Janeane Garofalo Unavailable For Comment

Fast Company conducted an internal survey of the #OWS crowd and found it to be as white as the line-up at MSNBC.

Specifically 81.2% white and 1.6% black.

The funniest part? The survey results were made into an infographic which was being distributed by some #OWS members until other #OWS members looked at the results of the survey and freaked out causing arguments and fights.

This wasn’t an outside party saying it, either. The guy behind the study is a data analyst for an advertising company.  And he is one of the Occupiers.

Full graphic of the study is below the fold.
Harrison Schultz claims to have been with the Occupier movement from Day One at Zuccotti Park.  In the piece I’ve linked to, he constantly refers to his “comrades”.  He also claims that this isn’t political like the Tea Party, but is in fact a “post-political” movement.  Anyone even slightly paying attention will have noticed that what these people actually want is good old-fashioned anarchy.  Problem is, they’re so deluded, so caught up in the emotion, that they think they really can achieve a new kind of society where there are national organizations, no corporations, and no national democratic system, but there will still be MacBooks, a well-managed and maintained national infrastructure, high quality backpacks and free wifi.  My own discussions with his comrades have shown that.

Now about that graphic. This was published by Fast Company, a hard-Left magazine which promotes innovation and technology.

The Occupiers are hideously white. And this was published in a magazine which only recently was cherry-picking photos to create the impression that it wasn’t the case. So where is the BBC on this?  Nowhere.

Let’s recall just how much they tried to tell you that the Tea Party movement was overwhelmingly white, which in itself was supposed to be proof of perfidy, and tried to create a strong association with racism.  Mark Mardell, the BBC’s top man in the US, still believes that the Tea Party is driven by crypto-racism.

Some of us noticed when this all started a few weeks ago (and the BBC rushed to tell you about how important it was, and what they believed it to be) that the Occupiers were mostly white.  Even the BBC’s first vox pops segment featured only white people. Mardell had to go out of his way to find a person of color. Yet this has remained unremarked by the same people who were sure that a lacuna of black people at a handful of events in the Midwest gave them the right to slander millions of people.  If there was a significant percentage of non-whites, the Beeboids would be going out of their way to remind you how superior they are to the Tea Party movement.

So I’m calling out the BBC right now.  Mark Mardell, Katty Kay, Laura Trevalyan, Daniel Nasaw, Matt Danzico, Jonny Dymond, Simon Wilson (behind the scenes), Franz Strasser, Caroline Hepke, Michelle Fleury, Andy Gallacher, and all the anonymous Beeboids furiously churning out content for BBC News Online, and even the various Washington-based Beeboids:  Where the hell are you on this?  Furthermore, why aren’t you comparing the clashes with police, the illegal encampments, vandalism, and calls for violence from the Occupiers with the genteel, law-abiding, civic-minded behavior of the Tea Party movement.  Where are your suggestions of guiding hands, or admissions that people from mainstream US media are enabling and coaching them?

BBC reporting on the US is a disgrace.

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