Assume there are four major industries that dominate domestic policy: defense; finance; health insurance/big pharma and oil. For everyone of those industries, there is a lobby on K Street that represents them. If I was more creative with power point, I could chart it out.  Maybe it looks like this:

Health Insurer ——>lobby group—–>U.S. Senate Committee on Healthcare—–>Health Insurer—->(picture big boot kicking a guy holding a “We are the 99%” sign.)

Health Insurer & like minded think thanks—->some U.S. Congressman—->Health Insurer

The same goes for the other big four industries that dominate U.S. domestic policies that, in turn, impact the lives of the 99%.  Not all one-percenters are created equal.

Which brings me back to Paul Krugman’s other post this morning, Superfraud.

Here, he writes about the Super Committee — the group of Senators from the left and right who are supposed to agree where to trim another trillion bucks out of the federal budget. Krugman says that there is a deal to undermine social insurance programs in return for a promise that Congress will come up with a plan for raising revenue in the future.  He says that opens the door to the possibility of cuts to Social Security and tax breaks for the wealthy.

The rate we’re going, the meek will never inherit the Earth. Psalms 2.0 Chapter 1 Verse 1: Low yield on oceans of money still begets even more money. More money begets more influence, which begets more money.

We need a better map of our nation’s millionaires. I would wager that most are in the 1% because they inherited a 1970s summer house in South Beach before Hollywood discovered it and jacked up the rent, or can hit a baseball farther than anyone else, or build a better smart phone.

Sure some of the 1% will invest in individual politicians like Sarah Palin or Herman Cain, but neither of them are going to pay off. They would have been better investing in those AAA rated Chilean bonds if they wanted money out of this.

What really matters is when the one-percent’s interests are organized and investing in policy because those policies make them or their particular industries more profitable. Usually that has meant that it makes them more profitable at the expense of some other group.  That’s the one percent that Occupy Wall Street should focus. The real 1% is in Washington DC, with offices down on K Street. The movement should pitch their tents there next because Wall Street doesn’t care about whether the nation has Obamacare or No Care. An Wall Street was going to make money on health insurance stocks whether the President signed the health care reform act, or threw the bill in the trash.  Most Wall Street securities traders have as much information on the legal process involving a company as a studious health care policy student from NYU camping out in Liberty Square.  K Street is where it’s at.  But wait at least until Cherry Blossom season.  I hear it’s nice down there that time of year.

Every good story needs a bad guy. But the best narratives can be ambiguous. The antagonist is really a broken hearted man who, come to find out, owed his life to a purer evil puppet master. When that antagonist realizes his mistake, he turns on his master, destroys him, and thus saves the protagonist from certain doom. The antagonist’s true self is revealed, recognized for the deeply flawed person he is and accepted for it: Star Wars.

The biggest national story over the last few days has been the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their slogan is a mild us versus them, “We are the 99%.”

We are the good guys, it implies. The 1% are the villains. I know that most of the brains behind Occupy Wall Street don’t think that black and white, so I wondered who could be the real antagonists in this story, because clearly Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots, a multi-millionaire and a one-percenter, is not our problem.

What can be so horrible about uber-one percenterDarwin Deason, a Forbes billionaire? No one even knows who he is.  He sold Affiliated Computer Systems to Xerox in 2009 and made a fortune that way. Did he step on a few toes here and there? Probably.  Do his three ex-wives think he’s an asshole? Perhaps. But did he screw Americans out of their homes? No. Deason, as a one percenter, didn’t get us into this mess. What is this mess exactly? It’s a myriad of things, but most of it boils down to fairness. Most people — the 99% — feel they have worked hard, or studied hard, and the 1% have flipped them the bird and run off with their spouse.

I was thinking about this in the morning over my Forbes Twitter account while eating an overripe cantaloupe and nursing my daughter’s sick kitten to health, wiping its nose covered in a thick yellow mucous.

First stop was Paul Krugman’s The 1% Across Space And Time. Krugman references the World Top Incomes Database. The database is run by the Paris School of Economics, and while it doesn’t name names, it shows how much the 1% in any given country has of the nation’s income. In the U.S. in 2008, the last year for data, the 1% owned 17.7% of the nation’s income, up from 16.4% in 2000, but less than the Roarin’ 20s pre-crash, when the one-percenters owned 19.6% of the nation’s income.

That data base reminded me of similar databases that list high net worth individuals in the U.S.  Asset management firms use those databases to solicit new clients.  This is the boring side of Wall Street, and most of it isn’t even money managers in Cleveland managing a few hundred million dollars worth of Ohio teacher pensions. Their mandate is capital preservation of middle class incomes upon retirement. Many of those managers, if not all, are in the 1%. But they’re usually not buying and selling mortgage backed securities and writing put options on them. It’s mostly boring buy and hold.

Some one-percenters may just be the local pizzeria owner who, thanks to good years selling Mystic Pizza to Foxwoods gamblers, is now a millionaire. Every year, those millions are worth more not because of exotic trading strategies or cocktail parties with members of the Senate Finance Committee in Georgetown. It’s because he invested a million in AAA rated debt in Chile, for example, and turned it into $1.05 million. Then it became $1.5 million in 10 years.  The one percenter pizza man got richer not because he convinced Congress to shit-can wheat subsidies so he could go long Chicago wheat futures and make a bundle. It was just because he made sound investments, and — stating the obvious — had more money to start with than most people earn in their lifetimes. So if this pizza man millionaire donating a couple grand a year to the fledgling campaign of some flavor-of-the-month politician isn’t the villain, then who is?

I turned to Henry Blodget, who had an interesting post on Twitter about a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday that examined Congress’s legal right to trade securities based on insider information.  Blodget knows a thing or two about insider trading.  A former top ranked Wall Street analyst, he was banned from the Securities industry on fraud charges — most of them dismissed — and is now the CEO of the popular and irreverent Business Insider. I don’t know if Blodget is in the 1%, but I do know that Blodget is one of the few exlities and apolitical financial pundits who has done a service to the 99% by explaining the main grievances behind Occupy Wall Street better than they can.  Blodget was a bad guy. Now he’s a good guy.

The 60 Minutes segment may not have uncovered any illegal activity, but it does chip away yet again at America’s eroding confidence in Washington. More than that, it stinks of unfairness.  Americans know that some lucky ones start the race a few feet from the finish line. But Congress isn’t supposed to. They are supposed to work not for the 99% or the 1%, but for 100% of the people they represent.  Now, slowly and painfully, we are becoming aware of the truth.

Then again, not all big money is treated equally. That’s why guys like the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, is against large political donations.  Schultz is part of the 1%, but he’s not the problem.  And that is because there is no major coffee lobby, or retail lobby that makes domestic policy on his behalf.

From the people who brought us Occupy Wall Street comes a new target, the entire G8 nation states and members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, aka NATO. Both the G8 Summit and NATO Summit will take place in Chicago in May, and the Occupy movement leaders are testing the waters for a big showing in President Barack Obama’s home turf. Instead of going after Wall Street bankers, they are going after the politicians and even the military. It’s round two in the 99% vs Laissez-faire capitalism.

The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be in Chicago then. And so will Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men, and Women.

Adbusters Magazine, the Vancouver-based unofficial headquarters of the Occupy Wall Street movement sent out an email to over 90,000 followers calling for people “from all over the world” to head to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, barricades and, of course, the #OCCUPYCHICAGO hashtag to advertise it all. And, oh, they plan on staying for a month.

“With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen,” they wrote in the email.

G8 and NATO officials will meet behind closed doors on May 19 in Chicago. Adbusters is hoping to get 50,000 people to the Windy City to call for a global Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions, something at least one G8 member, Russia, said it will not do; am outright ban on high frequency trading (impossible, considering that is more than half the market); a binding climate change accord and a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals; plus an all-out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East, which probably includes the “non-nuclear” Israel.

From the organizers: “Whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out. And if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before…we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe.”

Oh dear…

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, during his October 9, 2011 message in Philadelphia, “Atonement, Reconciliation and Responsibility,’ and in subsequent interviews has spoken of or to the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements in a very unique manner.

On November 16, 2011 at the annual CATO Institute Monetary Conference, I finally had a chance to meet and thank Professor Allan H. Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University. Mr. Meltzer is a respected historian and author who also has advised international governments and American administrations on economic matters. I expressed my gratitude to Mr. Meltzer for the portion of his book, “A History Of The Federal Reserve Volume 1: 1913-1951,” wherein he mentions that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

After conveying my sentiment to Professor Meltzer, he looked at me pointedly and said, ‘None of the regional Fed banks are covered by the Freedom of Information Act.’ To this I responded, “Right, only the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are covered under the Act,” to which Professor Meltzer nodded and replied “That’s correct.” He was referring to the 12 regional banks of the Federal Reserve which exist in the following cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco.

One day in a group discussion he was leading, I heard the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan raise the possibility of where these 12 banks may be written of in scripture. He used the word, ‘… could’ and then indicated this was only something he was mulling over. He then set the thought aside and moved on in discussion. My mind immediately went to two of Minister Farrakhan’s speeches—one in 1992 and the other in 1995­—wherein he spoke at length about the Federal Reserve.

Why should Minister Farrakhan’s thoughts on the Federal Reserve System matter at all or in relation to anything written of in the Bible or Holy Qur’an? Why should this be mentioned in relation to the words of an eminent economist like Mr. Meltzer?

Part of my answer is found in these words from an article published on November 27, 2011 in Bloomberg, ‘Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B’:

“The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

… A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.”

This news [along with the July 2011 partial audit of the Fed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a significant form of progress for those who have sought greater details on the workings of the Federal Reserve System, yet it hardly scratches the surface of what would be discovered if one were able to read a complete audit of all 12 regional banks of the Federal Reserve which are still not covered under FOIA.

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to foiendly relationships with those who describe themselves as ‘on the Left’ or ‘on the Right.’ It is striking to see how each side misses or avoids potential or even obvious points of agreement with one another that could result in the best interests of America. Monetary policy is one such area. The two foremost critics of the Fed on the Left and Right within the American political establishment are Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Mr. Sanders is ideologically a Socialist while Mr. Paul is ideologically a Libertarian.

Might we ever see the day when the Federal Reserve System is brought completely under FOIA? What would such a ‘day’ look like? What kind of leadership—political, spiritual and cultural—could bring it about? What events and circumstances would lead up to such a dramatic and defining moment?

I believe that if both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street understood the scriptural exegesis contained in the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s book “Fall of America” and accepted the same, with extended insights from Minister Louis Farrakhan’s “A Torchlight For America,” a coalition across creed, class, color and partisan affiliation could emerge.

This process would also require Members of the Nation Of Islam to get fully into Minister Farrakhan’s spirit, example and attitude toward the skillful use of the English language and the scriptures. Minister Farrakhan gave a recent brilliant example on Brother Robert Muhammad’s ‘Connect The Dots’ program. Years ago, he gave a now legendary example in answering a question regarding The Muslim Program posed to him by the late Tim Russert on the Meet The Press program.

As he has previously written, Brother Jabril Muhammad states the Honorable Elijah Muhammad told him that he (the Honorable Elijah Muhammad) knew the exact year when he would have ten million followers.

Are all of these 10 million going to be ‘Black-skinned?

The campus police had apparently been instructed by the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda Katehi, to remove tents from the campus, but she said she hadn’t given any directions on forcibly removing the protesters, who were sitting in as part of theOccupy Movement, a global protest aimed at social and economic inequality.

Whilst the campus police chief, Annette Spicuzza, has been placed on ‘administrative leave’, two policemen (including Lt. Pike) have already been placed on leave too following the pepper-spraying incident at UC.

The many wrongs of the incident speak for themselves, and everyone will have their own opinions on what happened at UC last week. But what has followed on from this is really quite remarkable. The whole Internet has been talking about the pepper-spraying cop – but why?

The footage that emerged from UC last Friday showed a string of protesters sitting, arms interlocked refusing to move, and then ‘wham!’, Pike unleashed his orange spray directly in their faces, as nonchalant as you like. Yes, it was absolutely shocking, but the manner in which he did it, it was only a matter of time before the parodies started.

A myriad of mock-ups then emerged online, portraying a maniacal pepper-spraying cop, hell-bent on attacking everyone and everything in sight. There was the Pepper Spraying Cop on Twitter, for starters, dishing out comedic nuggets such as: “After spending all my time in parents’ basement, being around that many women led to premature pepper spray release.” And then there’s the most recent one:

There’s this WordPress blog, calle/pikescorner.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Pikes Corner, which has its own ‘humourous’ pepper-spraying-cop offering to share with the world.

But probably the best example of how one gung-ho cop has been transformed into a bona-fide Internet meme, is the plethora of Photoshopped (actually, maybe best not using that word as you’ll see here) images placing Pike in a range of famous scenes, the best of which can be found on this Tumblr blog. So Neil Armstrong thinks he’s safe from Pike’s pepper-spraying ways, 400,000km away on the moon’s surface? Think again:

As everyone will agree, there’s nothing funny about what happened at UC. But the manner in which Pike so casually pepper-sprayed the protesters as though he was cleaning his car lends itself to being parodied. It was that ridiculous.

Some may question whether it’s correct to lampoon what would’ve been a horrific situation for those involved. But satire, since the beginning of time, has always been closely intertwined with tragedy and unpleasant events. And laughter is what people use to counteract the bad guys with – especially when the crime in question is so blatant and can’t be disputed.

The vision of Pike ambling along a line of protesters, perhaps even whistling thetheme-tune to MASHiconic. It’s something that has entered folklore and we’ll likely see popping up in countless comedy situations in the future.

The following proposal was passed by a massive general assembly today at UC Davis (emphasis added):

The UC Board of Regents, who not only represent but actually are this state’s richest one percent, has repeatedly shown itself to be utterly unfit to manage and represent the interests of the students, faculty, and workers who constitute the University of California.

Following two successive years of sharp tuition increases, accompanied by millions in department and resource cuts, layoffs, and furloughs, the board had the audacity to propose a new 81% fee increase and drastic budget reductions.

Undergraduate student fees have tripled over the past ten years, as we have seen an unprecedented explosion of student debt; and departmental budgets have shrunk, as academic and non-academic workers experience diminishing benefits, swelling workloads, and non-existent job security.

In the midst of the economic crisis, the Regents have intensified their pursuit of the project of privatization and de-funding that diminish the quality of education and quality of life for those across the UC, while consigning students’ futures to greater and greater sums of debt.

The Regents’ theft of an ostensibly public resource to fund “capital projects” such as construction projects and private research initiatives, demonstrate a clear conflict of interests that benefits a narrow administrative elite—both the Regents and their local appointees (chancellors and vice chancellors)—at the expense of the greater faculty, staff, and student body.

The familiar rhetoric of austerity demands our resigned compliance, as our learning and working conditions progressively deteriorate. We have seen recently and in years past that political dissent is met with increasingly violent displays of force and repression by University police.

The continued destruction of higher education in California, and tforms of police violence that sustain it, cannot be viewed apart from larger economic and political systems that concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of the few.

Since the university has long served as one of the few means of social mobility and for the proliferation of knowledge critical to and outside of existing structures of power, the vital role it plays as one of the few truly public resources is beyond question.

The necessity of reclaiming the UC has never demanded such urgency, as it continues to shift towards the corporate model, pursues dubious fiscal partnerships (such as those with the defense department and international agribusiness), and engages in disturbing collusion with financial institutions like US Bank (which is one of the largest profiteers from student loans).

As such, I propose that in light of the upcoming Regents’ vote on Monday the 28th, (which will be occurring on four campuses simultaneously, one of which being UC Davis), that we call for a general strike this same day, with the aim of shutting down campuses across the state and preventing the Regents from holding their vote.

In response to the intolerable effects privatization and austerity and the horrific repression of student dissent that has occurred throughout the last month, the GA, as a governing body of all concerned UC Davis students, will prevent the Board of Regents from continuing its unbridled assault upon higher education in the state of California.

This will entail total campus participation in shutting down the operations of the university on the 28th, including teaching, working, learning, and transportation, as we will collectively divert our efforts to blocking their vote[s]. In doing so students, faculty and workers assert the power—and the will—to effectively represent and manage ourselves.

This weekend, while listening to an NPR story about police using tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a demonstration, I was actually surprised when it turned out the newscaster was talking about Tahrir Square -- I had assumed it was about another brutal response to a peaceful protest here at home.

All across the country -- most recently on the campus of UC Davis -- a war is being waged. This isn't a battle over parks and tents and sleeping bags. Though many of our leaders don't seem to realize it, this is a battle about their credibility -- even their legitimacy -- about how they represent us, about whom their real allegiance is to. Their misguided response to the Occupy protests has actually proved the point of the protesters more than any sign or chant could. Sure, you can clear the protesters out from this or that park in the middle of the night, or send in riot-geared police to clear a campus sidewalk, but that doesn't mean you've won. Quite the opposite. As James Fallows writes, "what is going on is a war of ideas, based in turn on moral standing."

The Occupy movement has been a test -- a national MRI -- that has allowed us to check-in on the health of our democracy by allowing us to see what's going on underneath the surface of America's power structures. And the results are dire. What the movement, and the response to it, has shown is a government almost completely disconnected from those it purports to represent.

Each week brings an image more iconic than the last. There was the NYPD officer calmly walking up to several women who were penned, pepper-spraying them in the face and then slinking off. There was the 84-year-old woman pepper-sprayed in Seattle, along with a pregnant 19-year-old and a priest. There was Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen splayed on the ground with a serious head injury after being assaulted by police in Oakland. There was the picture of Elizabeth Nichols being pepper-sprayed directly in the face at close range by police in Portland.

And there were the indelible images from the surprise 1 a.m. raid on Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment by the NYPD -- which, Mayor Bloomberg claimed, was because it had become "a health and fire safety hazard." Really? Does the city traditionally take care of "health and fire safety hazards" under cover of darkness?

The mayor may have won the battle of sleeping bags in a park but, as protester Nate Barchus put it, "this reminds everyone who was occupying exactly why they were occupying."

If the mayor is so concerned about the hazards posed by people sleeping on the street and is prepared to use immense city resources to take care of it, as of last year there were over 3,000 homeless people sleeping on the streets of New York City.

City officials usually like to publicize their efforts fighting "health and fire safety hazards" for their citizens. But not this time. Not only were the media not allowed to report on the raid on Zuccotti, many reporters were barricaded, blocked, manhandled and even arrested. "The first thing the police did was clear out the journalists so that they could not see what was going on," writes Eric Alterman, "just as they routinely do in totalitarian nations."

Rivaling his "health and fire safety hazard" line, Bloomberg claimed the reason reporters were kept away was "to protect members of the press." Another hit to the mayor's credibility. As Harry Siegel put it in theDaily News:

The city doesn't take actions it's proud of at 1 a.m., and with the police literally shoving reporters away from the scene, 'to protect members of the press,' as Bloomberg insisted. That 'protection' applied to at least six journalists who were arrested, and many others who were handled roughly, including myself.

If you're a government official and you choose to do something in the middle of the night and you don't want the press to see, that's a pretty good sign you shouldn't be doing it. Since September, 26 reporters covering the Occupy movement have been arrested (you can see the run-down here, courtesy of Choire Sicha). A spokesman for the Mayor later bragged that "only five" of those arrested were officially credentialed by the NYPD. What a victory for civic government! Putting aside the fact that the NYPD doesn't get to decide who "the press" is, they actually want credit for "only" arresting five credentialed reporters of the many they shoved and beat and blocked and barricaded who were doing nothing more than trying to tell the citizens of New York what the officials they voted into office and whose salary they pay were doing in their name.

And then there is UC Davis, where police calmly and at close range pepper-sprayed students who were sitting down, arms locked and huddled. As the New York Times notes, one voice on the video of the assault is heard screaming, "These are children. These are children."

If this video were from China or Syria, James Fallows writes, "we'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population."

The response by UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi illustrates that lack of connection. In her first statement on Friday, she passive-aggressively said, "We deeply regret that many of the protestors today chose not to work with our campus staff and police to remove the encampment as requested." Hard to look at the way those campus police were outfitted and think they're people who really came ready to "work with" others. No, they weren't there to work with -- they were there to inflict upon.

By Saturday, in a statement that used "safe" or "safety" four times, Chancellor Katehi said that the officers' actions were "chilling" and that the video "raises many questions." That's certainly true. It also raises one answer: governments that purport to be democratic shouldn't assault their own citizens in the name of keeping them safe.

Obviously, protests and use of public space present complicated challenges, but it is actually possible to navigate them, as government officials of the city of Davis itself seem to have done. This was a statementput out by Occupy Davis:

At Occupy Davis relations with the democratically elected city council and local police forces have been genial and productive. The authorities have worked continuously to harmonize the occupation's presence with the park and surrounding businesses and ensure that all aspects of the encampment remain non-violent. Those in charge of using force are aware that they are democratically elected officials that are directly accountable to the people.

That awareness seems to be in short supply, however. Three blocks away, UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza defended her officers by saying -- stunningly -- that their actions were justified because camping on the quad is "not safe for multiple reasons." The main one of which is apparently that you'll be violently assaulted by her officers.

Kristin Koster, who aided protestors who had been pepper-sprayed while trying to shield others said: "When you protect the things you believe in with your body, it changes you for good. It radicalizes you for good." By "for good," it's unclear whether she meant permanently or in a positive way. Maybe it's both, and, if so, she's right. And it happens not just by doing it, but by being witness to others doing it.

And that radicalizing for good effect can now be scaled up dramatically because of the abundance of smartphone cameras. The weapons brought by the police are more powerful in the immediate sense, but the power of the weapons of the protesters and the press (both citizen journalists and those officially credentialed by the NYPD) is much greater and more long lasting. As Andrew Sprung writes at xpostfactoid:

You have a truncheon or gun, I have a camera. You inflict pain, I inflict infamy. Martyrdom is instantaneous and viral. Bearing witness is the keystone of political action. It can also affect the action directly. You shoot, I tweet (or IM or phone) for more demonstrators.

Or, as Carlos Miller put it on the blog Photography Is Not a Crime: "for every pepper spray canister they have, we have at least ten cameras. And that's why we'll win in the long run."

Another example of just how powerful images can be came the next day. These images weren't of a loud protest, but just the opposite. "I thought I wouldn't see a more dramatic video than the ones yesterday of the pepper-spraying of students by police at UC Davis," writes Boing Boing's Xeni Jarden. "I was wrong."

As Chancellor Katehi left a meeting and walked to her car, student protesters parted and watched her in stony silence. "The disciplined, contemptuous dead silence of the protesters through whom UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi walks en route to her car is another astonishingly powerful demonstration of moral imagery," writes Fallows. "Again, as a moral confrontation, this is a rout."

It's worth noting that some of the most troubling instances of violence have happened in cities -- Portland, Seattle, Oakland -- led by leaders who are not predisposed to seeing protesters as violent hippies. In fact, Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, site of some of the most brutal clashes, issued a statement early on saying, "We support the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement."

And President Obama has likewise expressed sympathy for the Occupy movement. "I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests," he told ABC's Jake Tapper. "The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you're supposed to do, is rewarded."

That sounds good, but setting up that system will require more than "understanding." We need to start closing the gap between rhetoric and reality. In his open letter demanding the resignation of Chancellor Katehi, UC Davis assistant professor Nathan Brown writes:

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students.

It's another example of the events of the Occupy movement serving as metaphors for the country as a whole. We hear a lot from our leaders about their concern for the middle class and the need for jobs. But their actions express considerably less concern. And that discrepancy, between words and actions, is where this battle of credibility is being waged.

That the Occupy movement has pushed this battle into the national consciousness -- no small feat in a country that loves to be distracted -- is undeniable. "This peaceful grassroots movement has succeeded in raising awareness about growing income and wealth inequality and, more generally, a system that seems better at serving the privileged few than enabling jobs and income growth for the many," writes PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian. And Politico points out that the term "income inequality" went from being used in the media 91 times the week before the protests started to nearly 500 hundred last week.

The challenge now, writes El-Erian, is to pivot from offering a critique of the current system to building a system to replace it. True, but we should remember that by the time Dr. King made his famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the civil rights movement was almost ten years old. Change is not going to happen in an instant. But the more government officials continue to respond in a way that only serves to illustrate the critique the movement is making, the faster change will come.

Shepard Fairey, in explaining why he morphed his famous "Hope" poster into one championing the Occupy movement, wrote:

Obviously, just voting is not enough. We need to use all of our tools to help us achieve our goals and ideals. However, I think idealism and realism need to exist hand in hand. Change is not about one election, one rally, one leader, it is about a constant dedication to progress and a constant push in the right direction. Let's be the people doing the right thing as outsiders and simultaneously push the insiders to do the right thing for the people.

Having those insiders recognize that what they're doing is supposed to be for the people and not against the people would be a good start.

Occupy protesters erected a 'bat signal' in New York that projected '99%' instead of the familiar bat [GALLO/GETTY]

New York, NY - We live in an age of Superbowls and Super Committees with millions hoping that some new superheroes will turn up to save us from a downward spiral of intractable problems.

A week ago, while New York's Mayor was scolding Occupy Wall Street protesters for blocking sidewalks and streets, his Police Department was assisting a movie company that was making a new Batman film that screwed up traffic on a major highway for hours.

Hollywood movies bring big bucks into town, even if the people have to be inconvenienced, but now the Batman story has a new meaning.

We all know the narrative.

Bruce Wayne, a member in good standing of the one per cent, in the town of Gotham created a secret headquarters for a character called Batman, based in the family mansion, It was there that he launched a war on crime that soon had a young recruit at his side, Dick Grayson, originally known as, Robin the Wonder boy. His witty Butler helped the team pull off its death-defying missions.

This dynamic duo soon became the stuff of legends - thanks to an entertainment industry that promoted the story into a billion dollar empire driven, first, by the sale of comic books and then major Hollywood films.

The story resonated not only because of the thrilling stunts and specialised cars that helped them pull it off but because of a story line, an urban legend about men with special powers who could rescue their town from certain doom.

One recurring scene involved a special light with the sign of a bat that would be projected by the Police Commissioner onto buildings to summon Batman and Robin into action.

In the real world, New York created its own modern day Batman and Robin in the form of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an ambitious billionaire who sallied forth in the company of his own Robin, Police Chief Ray Kelly, to save the City from itself.

The Batman story had been turned inside out.

Old fashioned villains like the evil Scarecrow that the original Batman fought soon disappeared from view to be replaced in the real world by a caste of white collar criminals who used their perches on Wall Street to accumulate vast wealth from fraud and leverage in a financial system operating without regulation or restraint.

The Joker was on us.

When a small group of rebels, began to challenge this system, the Mayor brought out the bats, now called truncheons, to sometimes brutally defend the banksters and their allies from the non-violent demands of a growing army of anger called Occupy Wall Street, They had tried to shut down Wall Street but thousands of riot police with barricades and batons assured they could only slow it down.

The American Bankers Association has reportedly now been pitched by a top-lobbying firm to launch a $845,000-media campaign to counter Occupy Wall Street.

Some wise guys on The Street, as it's known, baited the protests with signs that read "Occupy a Job or a Desk", apparently unaware of how difficult it is for young people to find jobs, partly through their own speculative gambling.

Hahaha!

On November 15th, New York's Batman Bloomberg had shut down the Occupy Wall Street encampment in the middle of the night while banning the press. He rounded up as many troublemakers as he could, and now has his cops spying on the rest, even in churches.

To the surprise of many, this rag tag movement survived several mass arrests and denunciations from on high, has just celebrated its second month of daily protests with the press speculating about its future.

James Stewart, a Pulitzer prize winning columnist in the New York Times has been persuaded that this movement that Occupy Wall Street has potential and staying power, "it's tempting to dismiss the movement as little more than a short-lived media phenomenon. The issues that spawned the movement - income inequality, money in politics and Wall Street's influence - were being drowned out by debates over personal hygiene, noise and crime... But critics and supporters alike suggest that the influence of the movement could last decades, and that it might even evolve into a more potent force".

When the movement marched on triumph on November 17, a day of global action, its numbers had swelled to 40,000 with union support. They crossed the hundred plus year old Brooklyn Bridge where 700 had been arrested a month earlier.

As they did, they looked up at a building owned by the Verizon phone company.

There they saw and cheered an unexpected surprise, a dramatic image, a new bat signal, no longer an demand for help from a philanthropic plutocrats but, now an appeal to the people, the 99 per cent, to get involved.

The website Portside reported: "One of the most impressive moments of yesterday's Occupy Wall Street marches, was when someone projected a giant 99 per cent "bat signal" on the side of one of lower Manhattan's skyscrapers as thousands of people swarmed across the nearby Brooklyn Bridge. New Yorkers know the Verizon Building, as the windowless, concrete eyesore that looms over the bridge and mars the downtown skyline, so seeing it used is such a way certainly got a lot of attention.

But who did it? And how were they able to project the stories-high words on the building just as the protesters made their way over the span? Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin spoke to Mark Read, one of the Occupy Wall Street organiser who pulled together a team of friends and artists that arranged for the projection to happen.

Read says he got help from two video projection artists, Max Nova and JR Skola, who used a 12,000 lumen projector and programmed the software needed to properly program the message. He also found an apartment in a nearby housing project from where they safely angle the projection on to the building. He says he offered to rent the apartment from a single mother of three, but when she found out what they wanted to use it for - and saw what happened during the eviction of Zuccotti Park - she refused to take their money."

Talk about modern urban legends. This bat signal is now featured on YouTube, with music by Hollywood's Hans Zimmer. The song: "To Know My Enemy."

In its own eyes, the movement, led by young people deeply immersed in popular culture, has become a Batman out to save America from crime and corruption. And it's doing so in the name of the majority, the 99 per cent.

MANHATTAN — They're looking to drum up support.

Occupy Wall Street protesters, fresh off a national "Day of Action" that saw thousands march through the city and hundreds arrested in clashes with police, plan to stage a drum circle in front of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Upper East Side Mansion Sunday, according to the group's web site.

A notice for the event tells those who are interested to bring sleeping bags, instruments, food, and art supplies for the planned 24-hour event beginning at 2 p.m.

"Let's occupy the park [near Bloomberg's home] and have a love-in and serenade Mayor Mike," the notice, on Facebook, says.

The protesters were evicted from their encampment at Zuccotti Park early Tuesday morning and have been trying to regroup. Bloomberg said the final decision to do so was his.

The drumming circle at Occupy Wall Street has drawn complaints from neighbors. (Flickr/kennyysun)

A fixture of the movement at the plaza, near the World Trade Center were drum circles that would often play into the night, drawing the ire of some residents.

On Thursday, protesters staged a massive series of demonstrations throughout Lower Manhattan, resulting in seven police officers being injured and nearly 250 arrests.

Thousands marched across the Brooklyn Bridge that evening in a largely peaceful demonstration.

The rally near Bloomberg's home also comes a day after a video hit the Internet showing police at UC Davis dousing Occupy protesters there with pepper spray.

Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, of the NYPD was disciplined for pepper-spraying a group of female protesters near Union Square on Sept. 24.

Events like the one in the above video have been far too common in the police response to Occupy protests across the country. I do believe that Occupy Wall Street is at a tipping point, and that it must grow beyond and evolve away from the tent city occupations, but this police response is absurd and excessive.

Arrests exceeding 250 people followed protests in New York City yesterday. All across the country, cops are cracking down on protesters with force. I may be a critic of Occupy Wall Street, but the police are public servants, and public servants have no business treating the public this way.

Police Militarization in the Decade Following 9/11 E.D. Kain, ContributorWe Are the 80%, Not the 99% E.D. Kain, ContributorCrime and Punishment in America E.D. Kain, Contributor

By and large, Occupy has been a peaceful affair. Certainly pepper-spraying protesters while they sit calmly in a row like this is a gross abuse of power. It should have our collective blood boiling, whether or not we even agree with the protesters themselves. What was meant to be a protest against economic equality quickly morphs into a protest against the police state.

And make no mistake, the powers of the police in this country have grown out of hand. I’ve written at length on the militarization of the police, of SWAT team abuses, and the way that the war on terror and the war on drugs have both contributed to what is really just a war on individual liberty. Occupy Wall Street may need to grow up and evolve, but a far greater and more pressing issue facing this country is what to do about the security state we’ve erected about us at the local, state, and federal level.

Between the Patriot Act and the War on Drugs, it’s hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

AmandaMarcotte
It's interesting to me how many conservative pundits assume all of #OWS is unemployed. They assume others share their lack of empathy.

November 17 Day of Action:

• Over 30,000 People Rally in New York City (NYPD estimated 32,500), including organized contingents of workers, students, and other members of “the 99%”
• Actions in at least 30 cities across the country and around the world
• Commemoration of 2-Months Since Birth of the 99% Movement, Festival of Lights on Brooklyn Bridge
• Blockade of all Entry-Points to NYSE; hundreds participate in nonviolence civil disobedience
• Sense that a powerful and diverse civic movement for social justice is on the ascent

Tens of thousands took action Thursday, November 17 to demand that our political system serve all of us — not just the wealthy and powerful. The NYPD estimated tonight’s crowd at 32,500 people, at the culmination of the day of action. Thousands more also mobilized in at least 30 cities across the United States. Demonstrations were also held in cities around the world.

"Our political system should serve all of us — not just the very rich and powerful. Right now Wall Street owns Washington," said participant Beka Economopoulos. "We are the 99% and we are here to reclaim our democracy."

New York led the charge in this energizing day for the emerging movement. In the wake of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s predawn raid of Occupy Wall Street at Liberty Square, 1:00am Tuesday morning, thousands of people throughout the five boroughs and the greater region converged to take peaceful action. Following Bloomberg’s action, the slogan “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come” became the new meme of the 99% movement overnight. The mobilization today proved that the movement is on the ascent and is capable of navigating obstacles.

*General Assembly*
POST GA/human mic: In Zuccotti Park, no electrified amplification was allowed. Occupiers responded by creating a human mic in which a speaker's words were repeated by the crowd so that everyone could hear her. The process takes a long time, but some occupiers felt it had good psychological effects and it kept speeches short.   
POST GA/consensus-based decision-making: This form of group deliberation has been a key differentiating component of the occupation. Led by skilled facilitators, the entire group can engage in debate about what courses of action to take. Consensus-based decision-making is not some newfangled idea, but has been developed for years. Take a look at this overview of how it works for more details.

*Ideas and Memes*
POST Idea/economic inequality: The core message that the world's playing field is tilted to the advantage of the wealthy has come through loud and clear. Since Occupy Wall Street began, mentions of economic inequality have skyrocketed in the national media. The protests have become a "news hook" to look at the United States' shockingly unequal distribution of income and wealth. Though OWS' package of complaints was the catalyst, the more reporters look, the more they find. 
POST Idea/inadequacy of politics: Approval of Congress and President Obama are near all-time lows. The idea that our politics are not up to the serious tasks we face in fixing our economy and society has become widespread. Instead of pointing that out, as many have, Occupy Wall Street simply ignored mainstream politics. As the press clamored for position papers and lists of demands, OWS responded by paying no attention. There were two messages in that relative silence: 1) your media is inadequate to convey the scale of changes necessary and 2) your politics are inadequate to make the scale of changes necessary. 
POST Meme/the99percent: One especially savvy viral idea to come out of the protest was the idea of The 99 Percent, or those Americans who make less than approximately $250,000 per year. Not only did a viral Tumblr spin out of the idea, but it became a kind of rallying cry of solidarity. American progressives have often been torn apart by their micro-differences, but the 99 percent was the biggest tent that could be imagined. It provided space for nearly everyone to ally with the occupy movement.  
POST Meme/occupyX: Occupy has become a cultural token with its own value outside the protests. People don't just occupy cities in the true spirit of Occupy Wall Street. They also OccupySizzler andOccupytheBathroom. It's a meme with a strange power. It's a testament to the flexibility of Occupy Wall Street that Occupy jokes don't seem to subtract power from the movement but add it. 

Even though I've framed this in terms of the technology of the API, many successful social movements have had this self-replicating quality. In one way or another, organizers hit on a protest strategy that speaks to a national issue but that can be executed at the local level. What's fascinating about Occupy Wall Street is that local now means your local Twitter neighborhood or your local physical neighborhood and that protest could mean anything from OccupyDesign to OccupyDayton.

*Infrastructure*
GET Infrastructure/Internet: Zuccotti park wifi has been run by a group called The Free Network Foundation. They created a $2090 ultra Internet hub called The Freedom Tower that can be easily copied.
GET Infrastructure/network amplification: Though the number of people in any individual occupation has tended to be small (relative to the biggest civil rights marches, say), the number of people acting as network amplifiers has been large. Bloggers like BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin have become key nodes for disseminating information as have internal activists.
GET Infrastructure/kitchen: A fascinating feature of the occupation was the kitchen that occupiers set up to offer free food to all comers. An Occupy field manual detailed the list of sanitary regulations that should be enforced. A system was also arranged whereby food could be purchased at Costco with donations from around the country.
GET Infrastructure/electricity and water: Different types of electrical generators have been employed from traditional fossil fuel units to bike power. 
GET Infrastructure/library: The Occupy Wall Street library became a powerful symbol that the camp had a rich intellectual life. It contained more than 5,000 donated books about all kinds of subjects.
POST Infrastructure/livestream: The livestream was a key part of how events at Zuccotti were relayed to outside parties. There was an official livestream but also unofficial ones. The key point was that live video can be very compelling, particularly during periods of conflict with government authorities.
POST Infrastructure/blanket cell-phone documentation: As in protests across Europe and North Africa, the presence of thousands of individuals recording their experiences has changed how the protests are viewed by the outside world. Instead of being experienced through traditional news media genres, a bewildering array of personal narratives have been transmitted by participants in the protests. Streams of live tweets, video streams of meetings, photos posted from the front lines of battles with police. All have played a role in making the protests feel much more active than they would if one read only distilled media accounts. 
POST Infrastructure/storytelling: The Occupied Wall Street Journal produces stories about the occupation and is actually distributed as paper to people in the local area. The literary magazine N+1 has also produced a ton of occupy-related content, including a printed gazette. OccupyWriters also publishes new work about the occupation by high-profile writers.

*Strategy*

GET Strategy/studied police antagonism: Occupy protesters have courted some confrontations with police officers while shying away from others. While the occupations have been almost exclusively non-violent, they have also refused to heed police orders. Hundreds have been arrested and a few injured in clashes with police. In return, protesters have gotten to document the heavy force the police have deployed. Images of hundreds of riot police facing down unarmed protesters has catalyzed support for the movement.

GET Strategy/open source ideology: From the beginning, the occupation was meant to take on a life of its own. Organizers and occupiers alike have not tired to maintain control of the message or methodology for spreading ideas or occupations. Anyone who wants to support Occupy Wall Street can just do something, trusting they'll be able to connect to the movement. Hence OccupyHistory and hundreds of like sites.

GET Strategy/General Assembly: The occupations are governed by general assemblies in which consensus rules. These are generally run by organizers who are familiar with the consensus method. The GAs strive for inclusiveness and bring the whole group together on some predictable schedule. Anyone can speak at the meetings and detailed minutes are taken.   

GET Strategy/working groups: While the big decisions are made by the GA, the thousands of other tasks involved in running the camp have been farmed out to working groups that focus on specific issues. For example, the Internet Working Group works on the infrastructure requirements of the protesters. 

GET Strategy/social media: Occupy Wall Street had a social media strategy from the beginning. They encouraged all protesters to record their experiences with cell phones and cameras and then used that media to drive awareness of the protest in its early days. Since then, a whole network of social media has emerged from Twitter accounts to Facebook pages to wikis. This web is woven together by a media team as well as outsiders who have begun to act as signal amplifiers and filters. A particularly effective outside effort was the WeArethe99Percent tumblr, which presented stories of everyday people who were struggling despite their hard work.

DELETE Strategy/Marxist ideology: Despite the dogged determination of some on the right to read any critique of capitalism as pure Marxism, this is just not the case. While some protesters may espouse the desire for massive and structural changes to our economic system, they are not calling for a Marxist revolution. As journalist Bruce Nussbaum put it, "OWS is against Crony Capitalism, not Capitalism. It's FOR Entrepreneurial Capitalism... OWS has splits. Some want a share economy. Others are nihilist. But most see Steve Jobs as a hero."

DELETE Strategy/Mainstream media mediation: In the early days of the protest, it garnered little attention. An NPR editor said they did not cover the protest because it did not "involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective." So, the protesters made their own media and distributed it (see above on social media). While media attention is easier to get now, the channels the protesters created in the early days remain active and provide a direct transmission of what the occupiers think is happening.

*Tactics*

GET Tactic/camp outs: Occupation has meant actually living in Zuccotti Park. That means the protesters have had to learn how to camp out in a city. The structure and rules of the mini-settlement became part of the narrative of the protests, but there were also many practical considerations that were worked out at OWS before the police booted the protesters.

GET Tactic/linked-arm peaceful resistance: To defend the settlement police were attempting to clear out, protesters linked arms around the camp, forcing police who wanted to clear them to physically move them. 

GET Tactic/veterans in front: In major clashes with police at Boston and Oakland, the group Veterans for Peace has played a central role. They have positioned themselves between riot police and the protesters protecting the camps. Police have to go through the flag-wielding veterans. This has created very powerful media and highlighted the way state power was being deployed against people who'd served the country. 

GET Tactic/medics: Occupiers built their own medical infrastructure to tend both to confrontation-induced injuries as well as more every day problems. Most of the medics are street docs with some first-aid training, not MDs.

GET Tactic/legal: Legal battles were anticipated and support organized. Protesters were instructed to write the phone number for legal help on their bodies in case they were arrested. The National Lawyers Guild initiated a mass defense for occupiers. A variety of other legal help and counsel has been given and received as well.

The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that's surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied.

This idea crystallized for me yesterday when Jonathan Glick, a long-time digital journalist, tweeted, "I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway." If you get the idea, go ahead and skip ahead to the documentation below. If you don't get, let me explain why it might be the most useful way of thinking about #Occupy. 

API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface. APIs allow data to be pulled from an online source in a structured way. So, Twitter has an API that lets app developers create software that can display your Twitter feed in ways that the company itself did not develop. Developers make a call to that API to "GET statuses/home timeline" and Twitter sends back "the 20 most recent statuses" for a user.

What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).

A key feature of APIs is that they require structure on both sides of a request. You can't just ask Twitter's API for some tweets. You must ask in a specific way and you will receive a discrete package of 20 statuses. We decided that breaking down the inputs and outputs of Occupy Wall Street in this way might actually be useful. The metaphor turns out to reveal a useful way of thinking about the components that have gone into the protest. Obviously, many of these tactics owe a debt of gratitude both to traditional organizing training (e.g. consensus decision-making processes) as well as more recent protest movements in North Africa and Europe (e.g. taking the square, distributed leadership). Nonetheless, it is Occupy Wall Street that pushed many of these ideas out across this country.

So, here's your guide to the Occupy Wall Street API.  I realize that this is not a realistic API, just a useful frame, but we employ, for verisimilitude, the REST architecture, just like Twitter. That means we only have a few actions: Get (retrieve info), Post (create or update info), Delete.

*General*

GET Occupation: Occupying physical space stands in for a greater metaphorical occupation of the commons. Actions to permanently occupy or reoccupy a park focus and energize a larger group of temporary protesters and armchair supporters at home. The physical location provides an anchor for virtual activities. 

GET Decentralized leadership structure: Repeat mantra that the movement is 'leaderless.' In practice, have no single leader on whom the media and/or public can focus. Avoid profiles of organizers. If necessary, elect a dog as leader of the occupation, a la Denver. 

GET Loudly inclusive userbase: Do not require any particular identification, such as labor or ethnic identity. While youth-driven, make sure to highlight examples of older occupiers.

GET Money: With the approval of the General Assembly, other occupations can draw on the funds raised by the main Occupy Wall Street fund. This is not required. Accounting battles in these situations can and have gotten messy.