The Occupy Movement is building a protest campaign against Wells Fargo Bank's profiting from predatory lending, immigrant detention centers, and private prisons
Wells Fargo Denies Access to Shareholders at Annual Meeting
by Maurice Weeks‚ Beyond Chron, Apr. 25‚ 2012
Unprecedented move denies legal right of hundreds of shareholders to attend meeting, suggests Wells Fargo executives unwilling to deal with face-to-face criticism; Protests part of new wave of 99% activism holding big corporations accountable over CEO pay, tax dodging
SAN FRANCISCO — In an unprecedented move today, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf denied entry to hundreds of community shareholders. Having been waiting for hours to attend the corporation’s annual shareholder meeting, the community shareholders were denied entry by Wells Fargo in an attempt to avoid answering questions from community members that had planned to attend the meeting to hold the corporation accountable for its destructive business practices that profit from communities’ losses.
Wells Fargo restricted entry to the community shareholders with barricades, claiming they were filled to capacity while they continued to let in shareholders that were not part of the protest through a side door. Wells Fargo also packed the room with its own employees so as to allow no room for additional shareholders to access the meeting, making inaccurate claims about the meeting room’s capacity.
Outside the meeting, thousands of people gathered in downtown San Francisco, to confront Wells Fargo executives at the financial institution’s annual shareholder meeting, demanding that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf and other executives address the concerns of the 99%. “Wells Fargo’s actions today demonstrate what communities across this country have been experiencing for years: Wells Fargo is indifferent to the havoc they are wreaking in our communities and they do not want to be held accountable,” said Wallace Hill, whose home was foreclosed on by Wells Fargo in Oakland. Read more »
ROOTS (formerly Occupy the Hood), People’s Community Medics, and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement invite you to
Join the Million Hoodie & Hijab contingent on May Day!
as part of the Dignity and Resistance march in Fruitvale & the International May Day mobilizations for workers & im/migrants
Tuesday, May 1
Meet at 3:00pm at Fruitvale BART plaza.
After the rally, we’ll join the march to San Antonio Park and on to Downtown Oakland.
Uniting our struggles against racist profiling and oppression
In honor of: Trayvon Martin (Sanford, FL), Sergio Huereca (El Paso), Shaima Alawadi (San Diego), Oscar Grant (Oakland), Ramarley Graham (Bronx), Rekia Boyd (Chicago), Danny Chen (U.S. Army), Kenneth Chamberlain (NY), Agnes Torres (Puebla) and all people attacked, detained, brutalized, and killed by racist violence.
We will wear our hoodies, our hijabs, our rebosos, in solidarity with each other for:
* An end to police brutality and vigilante murders *
* An end to splitting up and deporting our families *
* An end to the oppression of all immigrant communities *
* An end to all forms of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia *
* An end to evictions, foreclosures, and gentrification *
* An end to school closures and funneling our children into private prisons *
We call for Black, Brown, & Arab Unity against institutional racism
We want: Schools not jails. Homes not banks. People not profits. Immigrant rights. Civil Rights. HUMAN rights for all! Read more »
Tuesday, April 24th – Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 58th Birthday End Mass Incarceration!
4PM – RALLY at 14th and Broadway, Oakland
Occupy4Prisoners and supporters will rally at Oscar Grant Plaza, where awareness and understanding regarding the brutality and corruption within the United States INjustice system will begin to rise up. We will be doing educational outreach about the prison system with music, speakers, a “Truth Mob” and amplifying the voices of people inside of prisons.
5PM – MARCH to Federal Building and Obama Headquarters
We will take to the streets to march as an expression of our solidarity with the 2.5 million people incarcerated in the country. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country, with 743 people in prison per 100,000 of national population. Occupy4Prisoners brings to the attention of the greater Occupy Movement how we cannot forget the bottom 1% of the 99% in our greater struggle for justice and equality.
The march will continue past the Federal Building (13th and Clay) where representatives from the Labor Action Committee to FreeMumia and the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal will speak. Folks from the Bradley Manning Support Network will share information about Bradley’s plight when we reach the Obama Headquarters (17th and Telegraph.) Then we will march to…
6PM – THE INJUSTICE SYSTEM ON TRIAL – 19th and Telegraph
Once we arrive at the 19th and Telegraph Plaza, we will be putting the Injustice System on trial. Powerful local activists will preside over a trial that is actually about the truth.
The prosecutor will be Anita Wills, (Oscar Grant Committee and Occupy4Prisoners), the defense attorney will be Deborah Small, (Break the Chains), and the judge will be Jerry Elster (All of Us or None). The system will be played by Dan Siegel (National Lawyers Guild).
Occupy protesters and police clash outside Zuccotti park in New York, 11/17/11. (photo: Allison Joyce/Getty Images)
By Justice Online, The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
25 March 2012
trove of documents released today by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a FOIA request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee reveal that federal law enforcement agencies began their coordinated intelligence gathering and operations on the Occupy movement even before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011.On September 17, 2011, a Secret Service intelligence entry in its Prism Demonstrations Abstract file records the opening of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The demonstration location that the Secret Service was protecting? The “Wall Street Bull.” The name of the Protectee? The “U.S. Government.”
American taxpayers might find it odd to learn that the Secret Service was on duty to protect the Wall Street Bull in the name of protecting the U.S. Government. But there it is.
The DHS’s Game of Three Card Monte to Deflect Disclosure of Law Enforement Operations
These documents, many of which are redacted, show that the highest officials in the Department of Homeland Security were preoccupied with the Occupy movement and have gone out of their way to project the appearance of an absence of federal involvement in the monitoring of and crackdown on Occupy.
On the street it would be called “Three Card Monte,” a swindler’s game to hide the ball – a game of misdirection. The House always wins.
The DHS, as revealed in the newly released documents, has engaged in what appears to be a effort to avoid looking for Occupy related materials where it is likely to be found, including in Fusion Centers and DHS sub-divisions such as the Operations Coordination & Planning sub-division which is responsible for DHS coordination with local and federal law enforcement partners. Read more »
[New artwork from Rachel Marie Crane-Williams, on the USprisonculture.com blog. We look forward to more of her cartoon art of exposure and reality. -- Frontlines ed.]
A Q&A with Ben Ehrenreich about his March profile of Chicano activist Carlos Montes
Los Angeles magazine, March 1, 2012
Carlos Montes by Willie Heron's 1972 mural "The Wall That Cracked Open" in City Terrace. Photograph by Bryce Duffy.
In the March issue of Los Angeles magazine, Ben Ehrenreich writes about how after a lifetime of activism, former Chicano power leader Carlos Montes is facing possible prison time on questionable charges. Ehrenreich, whose Los Angeles magazine story “The End,” about death in L.A., won the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2011, talks with executive editor Matthew Segal about Montes’s singular career—and why the case against him should concern us all.
Carlos Montes was central to the Chicano rights movement in Los Angeles. A founding member of the Brown Berets, he helped organize the student walkouts in L.A. that began in 1968. Yet as you note in your story, many people have forgotten—or never knew—key details of that movement. What got you thinking about Montes?
I heard about his arrest from a friend who lives across the street from him and who last May woke up at five o’clock one morning to find a sheriff’s SWAT team and two armored cars in front of Montes’s house. The story at first seemed completely bizarre—a massive display of police force to conduct a search for weapons that the sheriff’s department believed had been registered illegally. I knew that Montes was an antiwar activist and soon learned that he had worked with a number of peace activists in the Midwest whose homes and offices had been searched by the FBI in the fall of 2010. I also learned that an FBI agent had been present when Montes’s house was raided and that the agent had tried to question Montes about his political activities. So I understood the story to be about an FBI crackdown on political dissenters, one that was all the more disturbing given the absence of any viable antiwar movement at the time. Only after doing more research and talking to Montes at length did I realize that he had played such an important role in the local Chicano movement and that he had fled the country in 1970 and lived in hiding for seven years because he feared he would be either killed or set up by police. The story, I realized, was not just about what was happening now. It was about a much longer history: of movements that have challenged war, racism, and police brutality and of fairly consistent repression of those movements by local and federal authorities. It also opened a window into a chapter of local history that has been largely bleached out of L.A.’s collective memory. More people were killed by police protesting the Vietnam War on Whittier Boulevard than at Kent State, but the Chicano movement has been largely expunged from our narratives about the sixties. L.A.—and the Eastside in particular—has a long history of political militancy that shouldn’t be forgotten.Read more »
By Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Magazine, March 1, 2012
The FBI has known about him since his days as a cage-rattling Chicano activist in 1960s L.A. A onetime fugitive and sometime company man, Carlos Montes has kept on confronting the system the only way he knows how. Now the system is closing in.
The first raid came at five o’clock in the morning last May 17. Carlos Montes awoke to a thud. It was the sound, he soon discovered, of his front door splintering open. The sun had not yet risen, and Montes’s bedroom was dark, but in retrospect, he says, he’s glad he didn’t reach for a flashlight—or for a gun. Montes, a retired Xerox salesman, had kept a loaded shotgun behind the headboard and a 9mm pistol beneath a pile of towels on a chair beside the bed since the day he had walked in on an armed burglar a year and a half before. That time a cool head had kept him alive: He persuaded the thief to drive him to a 7-Eleven, where he withdrew as much cash as he could from the ATM and refused to take another step. This time, fortunately, he was half-asleep: He stumbled toward the hallway empty-handed.
Montes, 64, is a tall man, but his shoulders are rounded and slightly stooped, which along with his long, thin legs and the short fuzz of his gray hair, gives him something of the appearance of a bird. Maybe it’s that he always seems to be in motion, as if there’s a motor in him that keeps humming even when he’s sitting still. He often seems to be on the verge of cracking a joke, or as if he’s already laughing at the joke he could be telling. Once I showed up early for an interview and found him on the phone, reserving a space in a yoga class. “Gotta take my yoga, man,” he said, laughing at himself, “or else I’ll blow it!”
Standing in the bedroom of his Alhambra home, Montes saw lights dancing toward him. He hadn’t thought to grab his glasses, but when the lights got close enough, he understood that they were flashlights. Green helmets bobbed behind them. Inches beneath each beam he could make out the black barrel of an automatic rifle.
“Who is it?” Montes shouted.
Voices shouted back: “Police!”
Then they were behind him. They shoved him past the ruins of his front door and out onto the patio. Handcuffs clicked around his wrists. It was a cool, misty morning, but Montes could see that his narrow hillside street had been transformed, rendered unfamiliar and almost unreal by the two green armored vehicles parked in front of his house and by sheriff’s black-and-whites blocking the road to the left and right. Read more »
[Under the umbrella of "Homeland Security", over the last decade layer upon layer of repressive measures, technologies, and "inter-agency" coordinations have constructed an ever-present police state. Repressing dissent, actively suppressing and jailing activist protests, intensifying racial profiling, and infiltrating traditional liberal groups before they take to the streets in response to the economic crisis--these have become the marching orders, organized in many ways. Extraordinary nationwide police spying is often assigned to local agencies, who operate as organs of the FBI and DHS. Such arrangements seem to underlie NYPD operations in New Orleans. -- Frontlines ed.]
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NYPD surveillance: ‘It’s ridiculous that they would come down to New Orleans’
As documents reveal the NYPD spied on liberal political groups, Jordan Flaherty tells how he was monitored in Louisiana
[NYPD monitoring of liberal groups was revealed in documents obtained by the Associated Press. Photograph: Dima Gavrysh/AP]
Jordan Flaherty wasn’t exactly shocked to hear the NYPD had monitored a gathering of political groups in 2008. He was a little surprised, however, to learn of the significance the department ascribed to his role at the event.
A police report composed by an undercover officer at the time described Flaherty as “a main organizer” of the People’s Summit, a gathering of liberal groups opposed to US economic policies. The summit was held in New Orleans over the course of two days in April, 2008. According to the NYPD, Flaherty “held a discussion calling for the increase of the divestment campaign of Israel and mentioned two events related to Palestine.”
Flaherty – now a journalist with al-Jazeera – contests the NYPD’s “main organizer” claim. Upon learning his name was listed in a secret NYPD file, he says he went through his own records.
“I knew I wasn’t one of the main organizers,” Flaherty told the Guardian. “I had to go back and look at the record – then I find out there was a film festival at the same time as the conference.”
Flaherty says he introduced a film at the festival. He noted that protests related to the Louisiana gathering did not involve arrests, indicating they were little threat to national or New York security. Read more »
“We use the word – in the US we call it “it chills your rights” — because it’s basically sending a message to the next demonstration, you come out there, you’re not going home tonight. You better bring your toothbrush. And that’s a bad message for peaceful demonstrators, a really bad message. And it’s a way of undercutting mass protests because, as I said when I began, what they’re afraid of most, I think, in this economic downturn, the austerity measures, is mass protests, which we started to see in Madison, Wisconsin, in the United States, and which we’re starting to see in Canada, which we have certainly seen across Europe. I remember when they were happening in Europe over the years, I kept saying, when are we going to start having this? And now, of course, austerity is kicking in, in the States. We’re seeing it happen here as well.” — Michael Ratner from an interview with Paul Jay of the Real News Network
Watch the full 10:50-minute interview with Michael Ratner here, followed by my transcript of selected portions of the interview, including added subheadings and text highlighting to facilitate browsing.
New York City police are investigating death threats made against staff through the phone and on twitter. This after officers forcibly arrested more than 70 people during an Occupy Wall Street protest. Since the start of the movement, nationwide protests have faced numerous cases of police brutality with batons and tear gas often used to disperse crowds. As the movement continues, so, too, does Washington’s desire to silence the American public, as RT’s Marina Portnaya explains. My Transcript follows this 3:51-minute video.
March 15, 2012 | Omaha — Several dozen demonstrators spread a 30 foot banner across the entrance to the Nebraska State Capitol on Tuesday in behalf of the Omaha Two. Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) are serving life sentences at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln for the 1970 murder of an Omaha policeman.
FBI Director J Edgar Hoover organized the special COINTELPRO program to eliminate the movements against racism and imperialism. The targets were Black activists and other radical and revolutionary people's movements. The methods were frame-ups and imprisonment, cold-blooded murder, and campaigns of media malignment. Hoover was FBI director from 1924 to 1972.
The Omaha Two were convicted after a COINTELPRO-tainted trial where Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered evidence withheld from the jury. Poindexter and Mondo were leaders of Omaha’s Black Panther affiliate chapter and targets of Hoover’s clandestine war of counterintelligence against domestic political activists.
Serving 41 years in prison, the Omaha Two are among America’s longest-held political prisoners.
The capitol steps demonstration was organized by Ben Jones of the Anti-Oppression Art project. Jones used Facebook to help recruit people to help hold the giant banner.
Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa continue to maintain their innocence for the murder of Larry MInard, Sr. on August 17, 1970. Minard and seven other Omaha police officers were lured to a vacant house by an anonymous 911 call about a woman screaming. Instead of a woman, police found a booby-trapped suitcase filled with dynamite which exploded in Minard’s face as examined it.-
J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI crime laboratory to withhold a report on its analysis of a recording of the 911 call. Omaha police had sent the tape to Washington to determine the identity of the anonymous caller. The unknown caller presented a problem in making a case against the two Black Panther leaders. Read more »
This is Part II of a three part series “Infiltration of Political Movements is the Norm, Not the Exception in the United States” on infiltration of Occupy and what the movement can do about limiting the damage of those who seek to destroy us from within.
FBI and police infiltrators don't dress like this
On March 6 members of an off-shoot of Anonymous, Lulzsec, were arrested as a result of an FBI informant, Sabu, who the media describes as a Lulzsec leader. The six arrests were for people allegedly involved with Lulzsec which became known for targeting Sony, the CIA, the U.S. Senate, and FBI, as well as Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal .
Exactly one year ago to the day of the arrests, The Guardian published an article headlined, “ One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer.’ ” The article described how the FBI had used the threat of long sentences to turn some members of Anonymous and similar groups into informants. It also described how the group was open to infiltration. On Democracy Now , Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who is an expert on digital media, hackers and the law, said: “ There had been rumors of infiltration or informants. At some level, Anonymous is quite easy to infiltrate, because anyone can sort of join and participate. And so, there had been rumors of this sort of activity happening for quite a long time.”
In Part I of this series, Infiltration to Disrupt, Divide and Mis-direct are Widespread in Occupy , we described reports of widespread infiltration of the Occupy. In this article we will describe the history of infiltration of political movements in the United States and the goals of infiltration. Part III of this series will describe behavior of infiltrators, how other movements have countered infiltrators and what Occupy can do to minimize the damage from infiltrators. Read more »
This is Part I of a three part series “Infiltration of Political Movements is the Norm, Not the Exception in the United States” on infiltration of Occupy and what the movement can do about limiting the damage of those who seek to destroy us from within. This first article describes public reports of infiltration as well as results of a survey and discussions with occupiers about this important issue. The second article will examine the history of political infiltration and steps we can take to address it. Part III will describe common behaviors of infiltrators and how other social movements have tried to minimize the impact of infiltration. The authors hope this series will lead to a broader discussion within the movement so that efforts can be made to balance the strengths of Occupy with actions necessary to protect the movement from disruption and division.
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In the first five months, the Occupy Movement has had major victories and has altered the debate about the economy. People in the power structure and who hold different political views are pushing back with a traditional tool – infiltration. Across the country, Occupies are struggling with disruption and division, attacks on key persons, escalation of tactics to property damage and police conflict as well as misuse of websites and social media.
As Part II of this discussion will show, infiltration is the norm in political movements in the United States. Occupy has many opponents likely to infiltrate to divide and destroy it beyond the usual law enforcement apparatus. Others include the corporations whose rule Occupy seeks to end, conservative right wing groups allied with corporate interests and other members of the power structure including non-profit organizations allied with either corporate-funded political party, especially the Democratic Party which would like Occupy to be their Tea Party rather than an independent movement critical of both parties.
On the very first day of the Occupation of Wall Street, we saw infiltration by the police. We were leaving Zucotti Park and were stopped in traffic by the rear of the park. We saw an unmarked van open, in the front seat were two uniformed police and out of the back came two men dressed as occupiers wearing backpacks, sweatshirts, and jeans. They walked into Zucotti Park and became part of the crowd.
Two undercover police who just stepped out of a police van (left) and the officer in blue entering Zuccotti Park (right). Photos by Margaret Flowers.
In the first week of the Occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC we saw the impact of two right wing infiltrators. A peaceful protest was planned at the drone exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. The plan was for a banner drop and a die-in under the drones. But, as protesters arrived at the museum two people ran out in front, threatening the security guards and causing them to pepper spray protesters and tourists. Patrick Howley, an assistant editor for the American Spectator, wrote a column bragging about his role as an agent provocateur. A few days later we uncovered the second infiltrator when he was urging people on Freedom Plaza to resist police with force.
There have been a handful of other reports around the country of infiltration. In Oakland, CopWatch filmed an Oakland police officer infiltrating. And, in another video CopWatch includes audio tape of an Oakland police chief, Howard Jordan, talking about how police departments all over the country infiltrate, not just to monitor protesters but to manipulate and direct them. Read more »
The Lessons of 2011: Transcending the Old, Fostering the New, and Settling Outstanding Accounts
Kali Akuno, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Friday, February 24, 2012
The militant working class struggles of 2011 – from the strikes and occupation in Wisconsin, to the countless demonstrations against Wall Street Banks, the direct action and broad resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, to housing occupations throughout the country, to the defeat of regressive anti-Union legislation in Ohio, to the (inter)national explosion of the Occupy Movement – demonstrated the critical fact that the multi-national working class contained in the United States can stop the” shock doctrine” measures being imposed upon it by transnational capital and the neo-liberal state.
The initial returns on these struggles are not insubstantial. Just two months into 2012, we have witnessed ILWU Local 21 coming to an agreement with transnational conglomerate EGT/Bunge in large part due to the impact of the Port Shut Down actions in Seattle, Portland, Oakland, and Los Angeles on December 12, 2011 and the threat of mass industrial action in Longview by the Occupy Movement allied with the Million Worker March Movement and militant rank and file members of the ILWU. Inspired by the Occupy Movement, the mass action in Oakland on November 2, 2001 and coast wide actions of December 12, Truck drivers in California and Washington State took independent organizing and industrial action to win wage and safety concessions from employers and potential legislation in Washington State that that will enable the Truckers to unionize. The victory in Longview halts the concerted drive to destroy the ILWU and further weaken organized labor and the pending Washington State legislation could potentially reverse decades of circumvention of the Wagner Act and provide an opening for sectors (and with it oppressed peoples) historically excluded from its protections.
None of this would be possible without the militant mass action of the multi-national working class, both unionized and non-unionized, acting in open defiance of the rules of engagement established between organized labor, capital, and the state in the 1930’s with the New Deal. As the power struggle between capital and the working class intensifies over whom and how the economic crisis will be resolved, the working class would do well to recall the lessons of 2011 and build on them. In addition to reaffirming the lesson that the working class must rely on militant mass action – that is strikes, occupations, blockades, general strikes and other forms of industrial action – as a primary means of exerting its own will and power, several other critical lessons we believe must be affirmed. These lessons include:
That in order to halt and over turn the slide of the labor unions, the unions must wage struggle beyond the confines of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and/or the Wagner Act framework.
That mass action will only be successful if it pulls in and engages broad sectors of the working class, particularly critical sectors of the 89% of the multi-national working class that is not unionized, and directly addresses their issues and demands.
That new forms of working class organization must be constructed capable of organizing workers as a self-conscious class that encompasses and incorporates the broad diversity of its totality as differentiated by race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and legal status.
That the multi-national working class must build, maintain, and exert its political independence from the Democrats (and Republicans), and not rely on electoral politics and processes (such as the recall efforts in Wisconsin that worked to negate mass action) to exercise its power, realize its demands, and build the society it envisions.
That the struggle for equity and economic democracy necessitates struggling to reclaim and redefine as much public space as possible – particularly the Ports given their strategic importance to the distribution of the necessary goods that sustain life – in order to rebuild the “commons” and exert democratic control over various processes of social production and exchange.
That the decolonization of the entity presently known as the United States national state is fundamental to the social and material liberation of the multi-national working class, particularly its subjected and colonized sectors, i.e. Indigenous Nations, New Afrikans (Black people), Xicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Hawaiians.
However, it should be noted that the struggles of 2011 and the lessons gleamed from them did not come out of nowhere. Read more »
[The ongoing financial crisis continues to fuel xenophobic campaigns and political / economic repression against targeted migrant communities. Some, including some voices in this video, make their appeals to Obama and the political system. Yet the need has never been greater for politically-independent organizing of working class solidarity with migrant workers against the oppressive capitalist economic and political system. -- Frontlines ed.]
OWS Joins Fight for Migrant Workers Rights
TheRealNews on Dec 21, 2011
OWS connects struggle for rights of migrant workers with struggle of the 99%
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trove of documents released today by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a FOIA request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee reveal that federal law enforcement agencies began their coordinated intelligence gathering and operations on the Occupy movement even before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011.On September 17, 2011, a 
