All you had to do was look as though you might want to join Occupy Wall Street and NYPD picked you up, strip-searched you, and detained you without cause, finally letting you go a day later.
Thus one New Yorker who, blocks away from where the protest was occurring, was picked up along with her friends while shopping for coffee far from the protests.
"They were arrested on the belief that they were about to go to a protest," said the group's lawyer Vijayant Pawar. "But they were not going to a protest. So either the NYPD was following them for quite some time or the NYPD just thought they looked like protesters." And so what if they were? "I don't know that you can paint someone with that brush," Pawar explained to Gothamist. "They had not been arrested before and have not been arrested since then. They were not going to protest that day. Were they part of the OWS movement? It's hard to say who is." ...Daily Intel
New York's taxpayers are paying for the KGB tactics of their police now.
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Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street has been doing some interesting things since last year. For example:
Members of Occupy Wall Street — various branches of which have recently been saving families from foreclosure and aiding victims of Hurricane Sandy — have launched a new initiative. Coined the “Rolling Jubilee,” Occupiers are raising money to buy distressed debt from financial firms. But while purchasers of debt usually hound debtors in order to make a return on their investment, Occupy plans to simply abolish the debt for the lucky individuals whose accounts they grab. ...Think Progress
And some days ago, as the East Coast was being battered by Sandy, Occupy Sandy -- an offshoot of OWS -- was helping people caught by the storm.
Anna Lederman, a Russian-speaking nurse working with Occupy Sandy, walked up fourteen flights of a pitch-black stairwell in the Surfside Gardens housing complex in Coney Island on Monday and knocked on an apartment door, the only light coming from her small headlamp. An elderly woman wearing a babushka, walking slowly with a cane, told Lederman in Russian that she was all alone. She had her medications, but could not get down the stairs, and needed food. “This,” she said, “is like the second blockade of Leningrad.”
Many New Yorkers affected by the storm have complained about the uneven response from the city, FEMA, and Red Cross. Veterans of the Occupy movement, with experience in New Orleans at the Common Ground Clinic after Katrina, and in Zuccotti Park last year, have stepped in to fill the gap. “That’s one of the reasons we mobilized here first,” said Becca Piser, a street medic trained as a first-responder. “No one’s telling us where to go or not to go.” ...Daily Intel
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With any luck, OWS will be coming to Washington.
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