Category Archives: #OccupyFail

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?

The sickness of Mark Mardell

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Words fail me. Mardell has done a blog post about the Walker result, opining that, regardless of whether or not it actually means anything for the rest of the country, it’s still a psychological boost the the Republicans. Which it is, although Mardell wants you to think they’re wrong for feeling that way. He then plays the writer’s game of asking a question so he can give his opinion without appearing to do so, wondering if this means that the unions are simply “too big for their boots”, or really are the champions of the downtrodden worker. Then he says this:

The protests that led to the recall election were portrayed by some as the renaissance of union power, and taken alongside Occupy Wall Street as sign of a new dynamism on the left. That did not work so well.

?????? “New dynamism”?

Behold what Mardell views as “new dynamism”:

New Dynamism in Madison: Rage and violence against Tea Party and Walker supporters. The guy at the start of the video urging people to get bloody is a Democratic Party Rep.

New Dynamism in Fon Du Lac, WI: Death threats against Republican pols force them to miss St. Patrick’s Day celebration

New Dynamism around Wisconsin: A comprehensive list of death threats and vandalism by unions, Democrats, and their supporters

New Dynamism from Wisconsin Teachers’ Union: Comparing Scott Walker to Hitler

New Dynamism in Cleveland: Occupiers plot to blow up bridge

New Dynamism in Berkeley: Occupiers seize university farm site and trash it.

New Dynamism in Seattle: Occupiers vandalize several downtown businesses to celebrate May Day

New Dynamism in Washington, DC: Occupy protest turns violent

New Dynamism in Portland: Occupiers bring mortars in glass jars

New Dynamism in Portland again: Occupiers tell women not to report rapes to the police

Even more New Dynamism in Portland: Band sings “F@#& The USA”

New Dynamism in Oakland: Occupiers shut down a Burger King

New Dynamism in Oakland again: A business puts up a sign showing solidarity with the Occupiers. Occupiers smash the window.

New Dynamism in San Diego: Occupiers turn violent when street vendors stop giving them free food

New Dynamism in Boston: Occupiers try to occupy Israeli consulate

New Dynamism in Los Angeles: Occupiers say “Violence will be necessary to achieve our goals”

Total arrests for New Dynamism so far: 7,263

Others are welcome to post more examples. There are many, many more.

Mark Mardell is a very sick man. He must be removed from his position.

 

Life In These United States – No. 3

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The latest edition of my report is up on EyeTube now (no embed possible at the moment). It clocks in at 15:23. Some stuff the BBC covered badly, and some they haven’t covered at all. Sources are below, and my thanks to all those who took the time to listen to the previous editions.

Life In These United States – No. 3

SOURCES:

BBC report about slowing US jobs growth, “fewer than expected”

Civilian labor force at 30-year low

NY Times report about slow jobs growth and people dropping out of the workforce

Washington Post trying to defend the President on unemployment

Long-term unemployed make up 42.4% of the total people out of work

Commodities and oil down

BBC report on new Keystone pipeline plan

President caves on part of Keystone after trying to put it off until after the election

Sierra Club criticizing new plan

Democrats voting for pipeline approval, too

Canada will just sell the oil to the Chinese

85% of tungsten supply is mined in China

China has 60% of tungsten market

China floods tungsten market to keep prices down and maintain their hold

US could be world leader in mineral supply

Obama Administration’s regulatory agenda hurting mining, energy production

Obama Adminstration still trying for more restrictive mining regulations

Niobium in Nebraska

Government prosecution of student loan default rose 25.7%

Columbia University course on the Occupy Movement

Government screwing up student loan interest rates

Student loan defaults rising

$67 billion in student loan default

The President reads policy speech on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Yes, it’s a violation of campaign law

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

OccupyArrests.com

Occupy violence in Seattle, LA, SF, NYC

Occupiers attack photo-journalists

Katty Kay on the Occupy Movement

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.

 

OCCUPY THE BBC

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Well just as the Occupy jamboree outside St Paul’s is disappearing off radar, up pops the BBC to tell us about the Occupy Leeds “camp.” Evan Davies takes a remarkably relaxed view of the “aims” of the rabble in Leeds doing his best to portray their support for Big Government, their hatred of the free market, their envy of those who actually work for a living and are successful, as “reasoned”.  He then gets a response from market town of Skipton to evaluate what support the protesters have from those who are not protesting,as the BBC carefully puts it. But since the anarcho-communist rabble have only the most convoluted of “ideas”, surely Davies is acting as more of a cheerleader for their alleged objectives.

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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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