Occupy Wallstreet

[Cyvaris]

Originally Posted by Fkeu'itan

I'm going to ask...

If indeed we are just inherently greedy/knowledge craving, is that any real justification for what we are doing in the world? To me, saying that 'we can't help it, let's carry on' is equally as bad as blaming everything on an "evil 1%".

Thing is OWS incorporates MANY things like this. Since I am an Environmental Science major one of my main focuses in my protesting is the environmental part. Its both about equality and waking humanity up to the fact that we have screwed up both our world and each other.

Looks at thread....what have I done!

[Pa'li Makto]

This is really bad. This happened over the weekend and late last week in Melbourne and then Sydney.

Occupy protest turns violent
Benjamin Preiss, Reid Sexton
October 22, 2011
Police force protestors out (Video Thumbnail) Click to play video
Violence on Melbourne streets

As 400 officers forcibly remove protestors from City Square, police deny using excessive force.


ALMOST 100 protesters have been arrested after clashing with police in ugly scenes in Melbourne after they were evicted from their CBD camp.

The scuffles spilled into city streets after officers forcibly removed Occupy Melbourne demonstrators from the City Square, dragging many writhing and kicking, and carrying others.

Police denied using excessive force to break up the protests, which blocked major city intersections and public transport for most of the day.
City Square resembles a rubbish tip after protesters are driven out. Police removed buckets of urine from tents.


(Pic taken from: Premier praises police over protest action)

About 95 people were arrested, police said, but most have been released without charge.

More than 20 protesters had minor injuries and one was taken to hospital. Two officers were also injured with one taken to hospital to have his eye flushed after police used pepper spray. Eight police cars were damaged, police said.

Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana said police tried to use minimum force. He said protesters were given plenty of time to make their point and leave. ''We don't really want to engage in this sort of activity but we're not going to back down either,'' he said.

But yesterday's police action was criticised by protesters and the Greens MP Adam Bandt.

''It's the worst response to peaceful people sitting down talking that I think we've ever seen,'' Occupy Melbourne's Nick Carson said. ''Why couldn't [lord mayor] Robert Doyle have come down and talked to his constituents?''

Mr Bandt, the federal member for Melbourne, said calling on police to intervene rather than encouraging authorities to negotiate was a serious error.

''[Premier] Ted Baillieu and Robert Doyle have made a huge blunder by sending in the police, turning a week-long non-violent protest into a site of confrontation,'' Mr Bandt said.

Cr Doyle told a radio station yesterday morning the protesters had been allowed to make their point and ''the time has come for us to return City Square to the people of Melbourne''.

About 100 campers defied an order from Melbourne City Council to leave the square by 9am and ignored repeated requests to move on. Police dragged the campers out about midday. The protest spilled onto the intersection of Swanston and Collins streets while police on horseback pushed through the crowd.

At the peak of the protest about 400 police, including officers from the mounted branch, dog squad and public order response team, worked to disperse the crowd.

Occupy Melbourne organisers, who had camped out in protest at global greed for a week, vowed to continue protesting.

Read more: Occupy protest turns violent

Sydney:

Police deny excessive force used in Occupy Sydney raid


In a dawn raid police clear the Occupy Sydney site in Martin Place arresting 40 people.

NSW Police have denied using excessive force to break up the Occupy Sydney protest, saying they acted with the "utmost professionalism".

Claims protesters were bashed and manhandled during a dawn raid on the Martin Place protest site have been "grossly exaggerated", Assistance Commissioner Mark Murdoch told reporters in Sydney.
Riot police keep an eye on the Occupy Sydney rally at Martin Place.

Riot police quietly kept an eye on the Occupy Sydney rally at Martin Place yesterday, but moved in overnight to clear away protesters.

"It was resolved very quickly, very peacefully," Mr Murdoch said.

"My officers conducted themselves with the utmost professionalism."

Forty people were arrested after police, including riot squad officers, raided the site shortly before 5am today and cleared the area of more than 100 protesters.

The group had been at Martin Place for over eight days as part of a global campaign against capitalist greed.

Protesters said they were given little warning before police descended on the group and manhandled them off the site.

But Mr Murdoch said protesters were given plenty of warning and refused to leave by linking their arms together.

"We encountered varying levels of resistance from the protesters," Mr Murdoch said.

"That resistance was met with a commensurate use of force.

"Some people had their arms bent behind their backs, I make no apologies for that, absolutely none.

"It was to ensure compliance and their own personal safety and the safety of my police."

Mr Murdoch said police had gone out of their way to negotiate with the group and said a meeting took place on Wednesday afternoon to try and reach an agreement that would allow the protest to continue.

The protesters were told they could continue the protest during daylight hours and leave the site every evening, he said.

"We tried to work with them every step of the way for the last eight days," Mr Murdoch said.

But when the activists refused to confine their protest to day time, police made the "deliberate decision" to end it this morning, he added.

"It was time that we took steps to return Martin Place to the community of Sydney," Mr Murdoch said.

"They certainly can't say they weren't warned."

The dawn raid was timed so that there would be a smaller group of protesters and so surrounding roads could be closed without causing traffic chaos, he said.

Forty people were arrested and 29 of those were issued with infringement notices for breaching a local government act, police said in a statement.

Four people are expected to be charged with assaulting police and seven were issued filed court attendance notices for breaching a local government act.

The Occupy Sydney group will meet at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) at 5pm today to discuss their next step.

There are no initial plans to return to Martin Place and Mr Murdoch said that would not be allowed.

Police remain on standby at the site and will monitor the UTS meeting, he said.

Read more: Police deny excessive force used in Occupy Sydney raid

[Human No More]

City Square resembles a rubbish tip after protesters are driven out. Police removed buckets of urine from tents.

About 100 campers defied an order from Melbourne City Council to leave the square by 9am and ignored repeated requests to move on. Police dragged the campers out about midday.

The protesters were told they could continue the protest during daylight hours and leave the site every evening, he said.

"We tried to work with them every step of the way for the last eight days," Mr Murdoch said.

But when the activists refused to confine their protest to day time, police made the "deliberate decision" to end it this morning, he added.

...who's in the wrong here, exactly?

Don't assume police automatically did everything, they are almost certainly likely to get attacked when attempting to resolve a situation like this without confrontation from their side.

[Tsyal Makto]

News time. Wish it could have been on a brighter note today.

Oakland Police Critically Injure Iraq War Vet During Occupy March

New York Becoming a Police State? Occupy Wall Street Meets the "Ring of Steel" at Liberty Square | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet

Inside the Shocking Police Crackdown on Occupy Oakland: Tear Gas Used, 85 Arrested | | AlterNet

I guess there are a few bits of good news out there.

New York Cops Defy Order to Arrest Hundreds of

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by Tsyal Makto

News time. Wish it could have been on a brighter note today.

I can't wait to see how certain people try to spin that as not the rioters' fault

[Tsyal Makto]

Two points:

1) Police can incite riots just as equally as protestors can incite riots. Just sayin'... To toss the protestors under the bus without including the human factor in the (in modern times, extremely militant) riot police is wrong, IMO. You saw the other video of them tossing the M84 into the crowd trying to help up the fallen person. Are you honestly saying the cops are guilt free in this situation?

2) And the protestors weren't "rioters" before the cops stepped in. These protests were peaceful, and everyone knew that if they wanted their First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievance to be addressed, they would have to remain peaceful (like Thom Hartmann said, the only permit we need to protest is our very own Constitution and First Amendment). Trust me, I've been following these movements a lot more closely than you probably are. That is, unless your only beef with them is the music or tent cities, in which case I would tell you that free speech isn't always visually or audibly pleasing to everyone.

That is, unless you somehow consider "nonviolent civil disobedience" to be wrong or violent in some way? Or justification for police violence? Do you believe nonviolent civil disobedience is a legitimate form of protest? Were Thoreau and Gandhi wrong about the justification of nonviolent civil disobedience? I remember you went to a protest a few weeks ago about the teaching to religion in public schools, would you have still been in the protests if the group took a nonviolent civil disobedience approach similar to the Occupy Movements? How would you feel if your demonstration was raided?

Remember this post...by you:

Sorry, being from Britain I have to correct you there. The only 'riot' was what is commonly known as a police riot, attacking generally peaceful people who had nothing to do with a few small groups of primarily anarchists and communists who had turned up solely to cause a fight and had no connection to the actual protest.

Sorry, being from the United States I have to correct you there. The only 'riot' was what is commonly known as a police riot, attacking generally peaceful people who had nothing to do with a few small groups of primarily anarchists and communists who had turned up solely to cause a fight and had no connection to the actual protests.

And before you come back at me with "but the Occupiers are anarchists and communists!" Well, nice try, but not so fast...

Now no offense, but I'm going to answer you in the same way you responded to Isard in that same thread:

Go back to flamebaiting in threads you actually know something about. These protests have been a borderline police riot.

The only reason you have this double-standard against the Occupy Protestors compared to protests you take part in is because you somehow got the idea (probably from the corporate media) that they are working against your own best interests. If you took the moment to step back and think it over, you'd realize that they aren't, and the majority of demands are things you and your European neighbors already have!!

That's all I really could say about all of that. I need to clear my head for a while, this whole Oakland thing (and the reaction it has garnered by some on this forum) has gotten me a bit enraged at the moment.

[Moco Loco]

I'd find it hard to know unless I saw it myself

[Human No More]

Tsyal, you're right - it's something similar. A few communists/anarchists who are not the main group, who like to incite violence. That happened in both cases

[Tsyal Makto]

Originally Posted by Human No More

Tsyal, you're right - it's something similar. A few communists/anarchists who are not the main group, who like to incite violence. That happened in both cases

Now you're getting it.

Another point I'd like to bring up again is that the media flocks to crazies in a group, especially media with an agenda, and the Occupy Movement is a perfect example. The group is very diverse, people of all ages, colors, religions (or lack of), sexualities, etc., coming together over a common goal. But that doesn't stop those in the media from finding an extreme radical and using them to create a stereotype (or in the case of Evan Coyne Maloney, creating the image of radicals himself).

[Pa'li Makto]

Originally Posted by Human No More

Don't assume police automatically did everything, they are almost certainly likely to get attacked when attempting to resolve a situation like this without confrontation from their side.

Never did. I just posted the news.
My gripe is that The Occupy movement in both Melbourne and Sydney resulted in violence and forced eviction. A protest movement shouldn't have to end in that. As far as I'm concerned it could of been more civil..

[Theorist]

Originally Posted by Human No More

...who's in the wrong here, exactly?

Don't assume police automatically did everything, they are almost certainly likely to get attacked when attempting to resolve a situation like this without confrontation from their side.

I really can't say who's in the wrong, but I do know that blacks sitting with whites on the buses were considered "In the wrong" at the time by southerners. So it can be extremely biased at times. Was tearing up a street acceptable compared to what the 99ers claim the 1ers do?

I mean to me it's wrong to say you can only protest at certain times, in certain places. To me that destroys the purpose of protesting. Protesting is supposed to be obnocious because it's supposed make people change something.

Now I don't know what the protesters were doing, but I like what Malcom X says: that you protest peacefully until they lay a hand on you; as soon as they do that, all reasons for peace are off.

[Pa'li Makto]

Right HHM let's clear this up:

Police removed buckets of urine from tents.

You seemed to focus on that quote from the article:

Now, I realise that you wouldn't have the full knowledge of what has been going on with the occupy movements in Australia because you aren't down here and haven't talked with protesters or seen weeks of media footage. So you wouldn't know the full story or what had happened in context of the eviction.

For Melbourne

Occupy organisers were prepared to hire portable toilets for the protest but were told they would be confiscated by police. protesters were also refused access to public toilets.

https://indymedia.org.au/2011/10/23/...idiot%E2%80%9D

This is the same with Sydney:

The police wouldn't allow protestors to access the public toilets from 10pm to 5am. What do you expect people to do?

Whilst we were sleeping without shelter under police restrictions, being denied access to public toilets, and fined when we went to find a discrete tree, and charging our phones from a solar panel that we had brought to the protest. We are demanding one thing, and that is the right to live, and to do things for ourselves. The reason we hadn't already hired a port-a-loo, was that the police had told us they would confiscate it if we tried, they attempted to confiscate our solar panel also, but it was rescued.

http://www.indymedia.org.au/2011/10/...s-to-criticism

[Fosus]

Just how cool would it have been if everyone left the place in time? Those 400 police would have had just stood there, worthless.

[Tsyal Makto]

Marine Scott Olsen Will Undergo Brain Surgery, And OccupyMARINES Are Making Demands

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Please try to reply with a full paragraph and not with a one-sentence quote plus a one-sentence answer. These are hard to follow and put into context even by me who originally wrote that wuote reply

Well, that's mostly because I was trying to squeeze that entire post into 10k characters. Since your new post(s) are even longer, I'm not even to try that, so hopefully that'll break up the problem. (Of course that means that this response will take up at least 2, possibly 3 actual posts.) EDIT: it is also 1:30am, so sorry if this post is hard to read or anything like that.

Of course the margin of profit will not drop to zero and depending on politics that other competitor will not have a chance anyways, but basically the value of the egg at the AF base is the price at the producer plus the cost of transport and the wages of the people arranging transport.

Isn't value, almost by definition, the (maximum) price people will pay for things? Eggs don't have any intrinsic value, after all, only value in the context of goals. Aliens might "value" eggs negatively, because they are, e.g. poisonous.

And I think that latter is highly overvalued in the present system. We pay people 2 or 10 times the value of a good at the producer just so that they organize bringing it to us (not even including expenses of that service). That way some people get fantastically rich on these "profits" - richer than those who in the end sell the product or the ones who produce it or the ones who transport it.

Some resources, like peoples' time and instaneous power generation, are, AFAIK, heavily affected by demand; the value is not so much in posessing the resource, but in posessing the resouce right now.

And in the end you even use Milos behaviour as an example of what leads to financial crash - so what is your intention then - showing me that this kind of "creating profit" and "shuffling money around" is not working? I knew that.

Actually, Milo's behavious has very little to do with the crash, and if, for some reason, the value of eggs plummeted, he would be fine, because his wealth is not in eggs; his wealth is in US dollars. The crash happened because the big investment banks had their wealth in things like investment indicies and the shares of other corporations, which as mentioned earleir, have no intrinsic value.

Imagine if Apple were not an electronics manufacturer, but an investment bank. What could conceivably happen upon Jobs' death is that shareholders lose confidence in Apple, and so their share price drops. However, if other companies have shares in Apple, and use them as assets, the value of that company drops. This means that their share price also drops, and...

Capitalism in its current form or even worse uncontrolled free markets lead to that inequality in distribution of the limits which results in localized scarcity. Of course the value of something is determined by the limits of its availability, that certainly is at the basis of trading - a feature that is really really old.

I would disagree that capitalism causes scarcity and say that scarcity is the default; capital and resources are required to move resources around. (What a lovely catch-22.)

The problems arise however if it is easy to "screw over" people by shuffling money - creating fake assignments of value to some things. Like your egg again. Its value at the AF base is the value of its production plus the cost of transport. Yet there is a virtual, created value assigned to it by the trader. That profit has to paid by someone - by the farmer who could charge 2ct for the egg or more understandably by the AF, who overpay Milo for that egg - in the end that cost then is paid by the tax payers.

Opportunity cost can hardly be called a "cost," in the actual financial sense. It costs the AF 5 cents per egg, but they don't "lose" 2 cents because they could have theorectically bought directly from the farmer for 3.

Another example for created fictional value are brand name shoes. People pay three times as much money for a sports shoe that was produced in a Sweat shop somewhere because it has a special symbol on it. The quality is the same as others, the pain and suffering involved in production is the same, just the trader did a better job at screwing over the buyers by something called PR and marketing.

Yes, the brand itself has value. That value is only as fictiotious as the value gold has over, say, platinum. For instance, in the 17th century, the Spanish were off counquering South America, and they found a group of islanders who decorated themselves with a unknown, silverly metal. It wasn't a particularly nice status symbol, nor was it rare on the island. The Spanish hadn't any idea what to do with it, so they mined for gold and then sailed off again. Neither gold nor platinum has any "real" value; they are both completely useless unless you happen to manufacture electronics.

How DARE they say that they can produce something for a few $$ if that number is completely ignorant of all the suffering of life outside their economy? The "best" they are doing is to try and put some value into it that is supposed to represent the monetary value of ecological destruction. A few $$ for the elimination of a wetland, some $$ for burning a forest?

Simple: see above. It is the belief of most people that ecology does not have value, or it has negligible value.

Numerous studies show that it is not the same, that it is fundamentally different to have an old growth forest compared to a bunch of seedlings. And that this will not change for centuries. What is the monetary value of an ecosystem destroyed or changed for centuries. What is the monetary value of a species gone extinct!

...Pretty much nothing, unless they produce something we trade. Sorry.

And to make one thing clear - I do not think that modern capitalism is in so many things fundamentally different from previous systems in the medieval ages or in ancient Rome. There are some added features like planned obsolescence, fiat currency and consumerism that add to the predicament, but the problem lies deeper. Modern capitalism came out of an economic system that already had all the flaws, it just increased their impact.

As mentioned, this is a disadvantage of captalism: nobody planned it out, and so businesses basically treat any stragy alloewd by law as a valid tactic, which includes artificial scarcity and planned obsolscence.

(Since I don't believe in an intrinsic value in the gold standard, I am unsure how fiat currency is actually less "backed" than gold. They both rest on the same consensual value.)

But by spreading things more equal, I think scarcity can be avoided. Of course with all the grain available in the world, not everyone will be able to have a swimming pool fileld with graint o take a grain bath in it, but if it is reasonably distributed, everyone would have enough to eat, so there would not be scarcity in food for anyone.

Who's paying for it? I'm serious actually: distrubuting grain does, itself, take resources.

Not per se. I merely pointed towards that there is commodification of emotions happening, something you said is not possible.

That's technically commodification of IP, which isn't the same. If A2 was bland, but broke another box office record through sheer inertia, it wouldn't make a difference to the value of the IP.

There are some concepts for that around, a common one is the "culture flatrate" where people pay a small amount to use cultural infrastructure and that money is put into maintaining the infrastructure and providing artists with investments.

This is a wonderful idea.

Add to this the concept of publicly shared income - basically every citizen gets a minute share of the profits of everything in the state.

This, however, is not, because it removes the main incentive to make a profit. It may also rely on people spending their money wisely, which is a silly assumption to make.

This sums up to enough money to fulfil all the basic needs for a house, food, water, some extras - an artist can then create art free of the pressure of making money with it. If he does well any many people want to see his art, he gets rewarded out of the "big pot" that all people paid into. This is a system that could solve some issues, that also might fail misearbly due to buerocracy - just wanted to point out that people actually have thoughts on these issues.

What incentive is there for the artist to create "good" art, as opposed to anything?

Oh I am all in for letting people who cash in on profits personally feel and suffer from the long term consequences of their actions. Fire away - let Tony Hayward eat oil contaminated fish and let him spend his next vacation on a stretch of oily beach or give indigenous people who have been driven away by Chevron in the Amazon free access to the houses of the executives of that company. Things would become very different very fast.

It's also vastly impractical to actually implement. It probably also won't make a difference. Humans are irrational like that.

For example, a computer may as well as a rational human conclude that it is highly efficient, profitable and does not pose any risk to profits beyond the gains to keep pigs in small metal cages and force feed them. Humans would object if they would have to do this themselves - but from an economic standpoint it makes perfect sense.

PR itself has value, in that good PR increases profits.

I have huge issues with that idea, sorry.

If you remind me, I'll write a thread about it tommorow.