Greetings,
Regardless the shortcomings of the Occupy movement, it has focused the nation's attention on wealth inequality - and how this inequality has become increasingly divergent due to corporate malfeasance.
Even Newsmax - the nation's most conservatine "news agency" - now spotlights Occupy positions... probably with no awareness of their cheek-by-jowl alignment. http://w3.newsmax.com/a/meltdown/video.cfm?s=al&promo_code=DA31-1 ///
Those who rail against the "illegality-and-filth" of the Occupy Movement are curiously silent about the nation's paramilitary organizations -- growing by leaps and bounds, and increasingly determined to destroy the federal government.
Substantively, these militias comprise The Military Wing of American Conservatism.
Lest we forget... Timothy McVeigh was, in many ways, the progenitor of contemporary American militias, the fellow who modeled their mutation into hate groups. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/20/my-life-as-white-supremacist.html
The intermittent "squalor" of the "Occupy Movement" is a googolplex-of-magnitudes removed from the treachery (if not treason) of the nations' "Militias."
Because the following article begins with an account of LAPD's removal of "Occupy LA" protesters --- a "law-and-order" issue that will hearten Americans who support paramilitary groups (whether their affiliation is explicit or implicit) --- I have prefaced "Occupy LA Arrest" with an excerpt that summarizes the author's thoughts-and-relections subsequent to the encampment's destruction - a hobnailed operation undertaken by LAPD with needless and vindictive brutality.
(Following "My Occupy LA Arrest" is my correspondence with Harry Phillips, a retired college professor and "Occupy Chapel Hill" founder.)
Excerpt: Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”. This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is. Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why. If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why. If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why. But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined. The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards? In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it either). I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me."
December 8, 2011
My Occupy LA Arrest
My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”
As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars.
As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.
When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement.
He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.
I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.
At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.
With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.
I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.
Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.
As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”
So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.
Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.
This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.
Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.
If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.
If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.
But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.
The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?
In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it either).
I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.
Thank you for letting me share that anger with you today.
Patrick Meighan is a father, a husband, a Green, a sitcom writer, a Unitarian Universalist, and a Culver Citizen.
***
Dear Harry,
Thanks for your email.
Surprisingly, conservative New York Times' columnist Ross Douthat had interesting, if somewhat backhanded praise for Occupy. For example, his analysis of resistance to Keystone pipeline and Wisconsin "unionizing" beg questions. But overall, Douthat agrees with Occupiers that the nation's plutocrats are corrupt, anti-American, and out-of-control. http://www.nytimes.
Elsewhere... Newsmax (America's most conservative "news agency") circulated an email spotlighting a fellow who (whether he knows it or not) heartily endorses Occupy's central critique of "income inequality" - as aided-and-abetted by Wall Street felons. (The economic solutions recommended in the Newsmax article below distill to hucksterism, but the analysis of America's underlying screw up is spot on - an analysis in perfect harmony with the fundaments of Occupy thought.)
Recently, I had a "premonition" that a significant percentage of American conservatives are about to awaken - albeit unwittingly - to the self-destructiveness of our plutocratic status quo.
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Best wishes!
Alan
PS Recently, I expanded my essential "Political and Economic Reading List."
1.) Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman on America's inconceivable wealth inequality -http://www.cbsnews.com/video/
2.) Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, "Of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%" -http://www.vanityfair.com/
3.) "Our Banana Republic" by Nicholas Kristof - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
4.) "A Hedge Fund Republic" by Nicholas Kristof - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
5.) "How to End The Great Recession" by Robert Reich -http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
6.) “A Dogma to Wreck the Country” by Thatcherite conservative, Niall Ferguson - http://www.thedailybeast.com/
7.) War, Peace and Political Manipulation - http://paxonbothhouses.
8.) “The American Dream” by (foul-mouthed) George Carlin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?
***
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Harry Phillips wrote:
Great interview, Alan, and thanks for sending. I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get to it. Life is full these days with Occupy and climate work. Hope you're well.
Harry
Dear Arthur,
Here's an interview with Hessel about Occupy Wall Street. http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/10/ 10/stphane_hessel_on_occupy_ wall_street_find_the_time_for_ outrage_when_your_values_are_ not_respected
Pax
Alan
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