#OCCUPYWALLSTREET campaign - September 17

[Hammer of Los]

..

Someone was asking what sort of leaders the movement needs.

It would be better off without any leaders.

If you must be lead, choose the one who doesn't want to lead, choose the one who preaches love, not hate, unity, not division.

..

[beeline]

Slavoj Žižek rocks.

Zizek on the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999:

So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma "Bomb or not?" is: not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE.

Zizek's thoroughly mendacious justification of a racist pogrom against Slovenian Roma:

There was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which they occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. As expected, all liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism into this isolated small village, while none of the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had any everyday contact with the Roma (except for meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras when they supported them). When the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen to be a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of small harassments from the Roma. It is all too easy to say (as the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. – nobody clearly answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.

Zizek in Tel Aviv (breaking a boycott he pretended to support) on Palestinians and Africans:

someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank.

Some of his best (imaginary) friends are black:

I met a big, black guy, and when we became friends, I went into it like, [assuming a naïve, awe-filled whisper] "Is it true that you have, you know [makes gesture signifying a gigantic penis]?" and (this is a racist myth I heard in Europe) "Is it true that you blacks can control your muscles so that when you walk with a half erection and there is a fly here you can BAM! [slaps thigh] snap it with your penis?" We became terribly close friends! Now, I'm well aware of how risky these waters are, because if you do it in the wrong context, in the wrong way, I'm well aware that this is racism.

Much more if you want it.

Zizek is a scumbag, a blackblock intellectual to be avoided at all costs.

Wow, thanks kenoma, I had no idea!

[Bruce Dazzling]

This kid rules, and could easily be Hot Dissident material as well.

[operator kos]

[Laodicean]

Powerful. Really like this one. Sharing with friends who've said the same thing.
Nice work, Kos. Keep it up!

[Wombaticus Rex]

So by my count, your image just went out to about 300,000 people today...good work.

http://twitter.com/#!/AnonyOps/status/1 ... 0833648643

[2012 Countdown]

Congratulations Occupy Wall Street. You're Officially Making Companies Scared
Julia La Roche | Nov. 10, 2011, 4:02 PM


The CME Group, which runs the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, is out with its 10-Q filing and the Occupy Wall Street movement is included in the report. [Footnoted via Dealbook]
It appears the Occupy Wall Street movement has garnered enough attention to be considered a new "risk factor" for the company, according to the regulatory filing.
Hacktivist group Anonymous was also mentioned in the company's filing.
From the CME Group's 10-Q filing:
Our role in the global marketplace may place us at greater risk for a cyber attack and other cyber security risks.
In connection with the continued economic uncertainty, groups such as Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous, have targeted the financial services industry as part of their protest against the perceived lax regulation of the financial sector and economic inequality.
For example, the Anonymous group called on its supporters to launch a “distributed denial of service” attack to overwhelm website traffic on NYSE Euronext’s external Web site which resulted in a brief outage.
While we have no evidence at this time that we are a specific target of a cyber attack, our role in the global marketplace places us at greater risk.
Additionally, our role as a leading derivatives marketplace and the operation of our CME Globex electronic trading platform may place us at greater risk for misappropriation of our intellectual property.
In September 2011, a former employee of CME Group was charged with two counts of theft of trade secrets in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury.
We do not believe that any customer information, trade data or required regulatory information was compromised in this incident and we have no evidence that the trade secrets were distributed in connection with this matter.
While we continue to employ resources to monitor the environment and protect our infrastructure against security breaches and misappropriation of our intellectual property assets,
these measures may prove insufficient depending upon the attack or threat posed, which could result in system failures and delays that could cause us to lose customers, experience lower trading volume, incur significant liabilities or have a negative impact on our competitive advantage.
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/congratu ... z1dLjK9vhg

[Jeff]

Yesterday's bullfight:

[smiths]

brilliant, brilliant, its the creative responses that offer the most

[2012 Countdown]

Yesterday's bullfight:

Ha! Here's the write-up too-

Uploaded by felizysolomon on Nov 10, 2011
A small group of Occupy Wall Street activists engaged in a near-successful corrida against the Wall Street Bull.

The incident began when two clowns, Hannah Morgan and Louis Jargow, scaled the steel barricades protecting the landmark. The clowns began spanking and climbing the beast, traditional ways of coaxing a bull into anger in preparation for a Castilian corrida, or bullfight.
Within seconds, police officers grabbed both clowns by their colorful shirts and wrestled one of them (Jargow) to the ground. The other (Morgan) continued to play the harmonica until an officer removed it from her mouth.
With the officers thus occupied, a matador in full traje de luces leapt onto the hood of the patrol vehicle parked in front of the bull and boldly presented his blood-red cape to the beast.
"I wondered whether I, neophyte matador, could bring down this behemoth, world-famous for charging towards profit while trampling underfoot the average worker," said the OWS activist/torero whose first fight this was. "Come what may, I knew I must try."
Police officers took no notice of the matador, occupied as they were with the clowns.
"This bull has ruined millions of lives!" wailed clown Jargow as he lay on the ground face-down. "Yet he and his accomplices have been rewarded with billions of our tax dollars—and we, here to put a stop to it all, are thrown to the ground. ¡Un escándalo!"
Both clowns were charged with disorderly conduct and released an hour later; they returned to Zuccotti Park to great fanfare. The Wall Street bull continues to rage.

[crikkett]

Powerful. Really like this one. Sharing with friends who've said the same thing.
Nice work, Kos. Keep it up!

Perfect timing for veterans' day, too. Congratulations on a brilliant piece, and Thanks very much!

[Laodicean]

Streaming Live right now:

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/11/10-0

The New School in New York City will be hosting Occupy Everywhere: On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power, a discussion featuring award-winning filmmaker and author Michael Moore (Here Comes Trouble), best-selling author and Nation columnist Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine), Nation National Affairs correspondent William Greider (Come Home, America), Colorlines Publisher Rinku Sen (The Accidental American), Occupy Wall Street Organizer Patrick Bruner and Richard Kim, executive editor, The Nation.com (moderator). Sponsored by The Nation and The New School.

[operator kos]

Powerful. Really like this one. Sharing with friends who've said the same thing.
Nice work, Kos. Keep it up!

Perfect timing for veterans' day, too. Congratulations on a brilliant piece, and Thanks very much!

Cheers. Thanks to both of you. It was quite popular on Reddit today, getting up to the #1 spot in the comics section before being mysteriously deleted by the mods without explanation.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Great stuff, kos!

Here's my contribution for the day.























Much more at the links in my sig.

[barracuda]

Shooting death near Occupy Oakland prompts calls for camp to disband

The scene was relatively quiet early Friday morning around Occupy Oakland and a shrine has been erected near the spot where a man was shot and killed the previous night.

Officials have not yet released the man's name, pending notification of next of kin, and are only saying that he may have been in his 20s.

The shrine, however, names him as "Alex". Lit by about 100 candles, it carries messages pinned to poster board that say "We love you Alex," "You will not be forgotten," and "Go in light and love."

There's been no significant change in the number of tents on Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, despite Mayor Jean Quan's plea for the campers to leave on their own in the wake of Thursday night's violence.

The man was shot and killed at about 5 p.m., Thursday just yards from the entrance to the Occupy Oakland encampment, apparently after a fight with other men.

The killing, which came as hundreds of occupiers prepared to celebrate the camp's one-month anniversary, prompted Quan to call for the campers "to leave voluntarily tonight."

The violence occurred on the same day as UC Berkeley police defended their crackdown on Occupy Cal.

Oakland City Council president Larry Reid condemned the shooting and said it was yet more proof that the tent city needed to be dismantled. "We can no longer continue to sit back," he said. "This has raised the red flag even more."
According to witness accounts, a small fight broke out in the camp between two young men.

"I heard gunshots, and everybody started running," said Kevin Jenkins, 24, an Oakland native who witnessed the shooting.

After the initial fight, one of the young men called several friends or family members from outside the camp and asked them to come and help him. The victim had visited the camp often, said his cousin, Medea Williams of Oakland, who said she lived in a camp tent.

When the friends arrived, the dispute escalated into pushing and shoving near the portable toilets adjacent to the plaza.
According to one witness and Occupy Oakland supporter, Rachel Tolmachoff, 55, of Pleasant Hill, a group of occupiers then intervened and tried to get the people involved in the fight to move on. A short time later, they heard between four and six gun shots and saw several men run by.

One of the men involved may have run down to the BART station on 14th and Broadway.

Mike Tarmo, 31, a native of Sierra Leone, said he also saw the shooting. Tarmo claimed that the group of outsiders simply walked up to a man standing on the steps of the plaza and started beating and punching him. The occupiers tried to step in, Tarmo said. "There were 20 Occupy guys going to help him, saying, Stop! Stop!" Tarmo said the victim of that physical assault was the same person who got shot.

Jenkins, the other eyewitness, said the victim was an innocent bystander. Interim Police Chief Howard Jordan said at a news conference that the victim may not have been involved in the dispute that broke out in the camp earlier.

A mood of shock and sadness settled on the assembled crowd as hundreds of people began to question what went wrong.

"Everyone is focusing on Occupy, but this guy has a family," said Todd Walker, a resident who works with troubled Oakland youth, "Everyone is worried about a patch of grass, but the problem is too many murders in Oakland."

Other longtime camp residents say the shooting was unrelated to the tent campers. "The only Occupy Oakland relationship here is that our medics were the first to arrive on the scene," said Verucha Peller, an activist who has been around the camp since the beginning.

Shortly after the shooting, several people began to place votive candles nearby.