via Occupy Los Angeles:

On July 12th, participants in OccupyLA met to raise awareness for unlawful arrests of activists that had been targeting a lobby group with a stranglehold on power over local and state politics. The activists handed out chalk and shared the story of unlawful arrests and police repression. The LAPD responded by amassing in riot gear and issuing a tactical alert effectively shutting down the Downtown LA art walk and trapping many patrons inside of local businesses as a response to chalk art being drawn on the sidewalk. The mainstream media misrepresented the sequence of events, blaming occupiers for the near riot in Downtown LA even though the police were responsible for escalation.

The public, frustrated by the absurdity of police violence over 'sidewalk chalk', filled the streets demanding that the police cease their intimidation over what many consider a fundamental right to free speech and assembly. The law enforcement arm of the state saw fit to intervene violently in a peaceful expression of free speech and 'do it yourself' art, on behalf of the private interests that control the downtown space. They shot the crowd with the near lethal force of rubber bullets and foam grenades inciting fear and panic so that their violent intervention appears justified. In light of recent police murders in Anaheim, it is important we show that crowd control tactics taken against any who dare protest are not acceptable uses of force by any police state. More than that, these acts of terror by the police state will not deter us from assembling and seeking justice for our communities.

The political and financial elite cannot bear to see us assemble, cannot bear for us to share ideas and strategies or grow our vision and movement into revolution. We know that this is not about chalk. It is about whose interests are affected by our message, whose interests are protected when so-called public servants protect lifeless sidewalks from the messages of a frustrated populace. It is about censorship, political freedom and the merger of corporation and state working to silence the voice of the people. It is about the extrajudicial authority of the national security apparatus for the mere purpose of intimidating the masses into silence.

On August 9th, Occupy Los Angeles calls for you to fill your squares and take your streets and sidewalks with chalk. Call to all people everywhere to show that dissent is as simple as writing your grievances on the sidewalk, as accessible as hopscotch in the streets- reclaiming public space and engaging in public dialogue and expression. Join us (if you're close enough) for a day of solidarity and fun to celebrate the human spirit and chalk for our collective liberation. Together we will remake the art of public life in our alley ways, on the doorsteps of banks whose only allegiance is to profit, and in the streets built by our labor.

In solidarity, regardless of all nations and borders, we will engage in willful public expression against political repression.

SUBMIT CHALK PHOTOS HERE: http://chalkitout.tumblr.com/

NOTE: Be aware that your actions make evoke a police response and it is important all participants are familiar with local private and public property laws so that they can assess their own level of risk and make informed decisions.

James Holmes has been officially charged with 24 counts of murder and 116 counts of attempted murder. Holmes is the sole suspect in the shooting at a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 and injured 58. Before his appearance in court today, his second so far, the former head of the Colorado public defender’s office predicted, “There’s probably charges that can be brought [on behalf] of anybody who was present. The state will need to decide how they approach all of those charges." The judge was also set to hear arguments regarding a package Holmes mailed to his psychiatrist that his lawyers argue was illegally apprehended and leaked to the public by the government.

A libertarian group is trying to score political points off the Aurora shooting with a controversial new billboard. From top to bottom, the left side of the billboard reads “Kills 12 in a movie theater with assault rifle,” followed by a photo of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes, followed by the text “Everyone freaks out.” The right has a picture of president Obama with the text “Kills thousands with foreign policy ... Wins Nobel Peace Prize.” The ad was put up by the Ralph Smeed Foundation. “We’re not saying that Obama is a lunatic," insisted one of its members.

From Leah Nelson:

The billboard is the work of the Ralph Smeed Foundation, an obscure libertarian organization that apparently takes great pride its rotating roadside messages.

A spokesperson for the organization explained to the Idaho Statesman:

“We’re all outraged over that killing in Aurora, Colo., but we’re not outraged over the boys killed in Afghanistan. … We’re not saying that Obama is a lunatic.”

Who the hell his Ralph Smeed, you ask?

According to the foundation’s official biography/hagiography, he was “a not-so quiet blend of Barry Goldwater, Walter Matheau and H. L. Menkin” who served as a Goldwater delegate to the 1964 GOP convention, where the scurvy “Rockefeller Republicans” did “everything they could to sabotage Goldwater’s campaign and thus followed one of the worst defeats that any Republican candidate had ever suffered.”

In a 2010 article written not long before Smeed’s death, the Statesman wrote:

Smeed, 88, is a Caldwell businessman and former newspaper columnist who calls himself the "Curmudgeon." He is famed for his iconoclastic billboard near his Farm City development and on the way to the College of Idaho, which he attended in the 1940s. For decades, the billboard critiqued politicians and other public figures with pithy jibes.

Protests against the police continued through the weekend in Anaheim, California, with one protest on Saturday that was by all accounts nearly silent and completely peaceful, and Sunday's protest being the total opposite

The Youtube video above, courtesy of @timcast, (Caution viewing the video as it may not be suitable for work due to some language, and graphic images.) shows a few of the arrests as they happened in Anaheim on Sunday. Police on foot and on horseback have guns pointed everywhere, at protesters, and at journalists. Even Tim Pool was stopped by an armed officer in riot gear and forced to produce several different forms of identification.

The OC Register reports on some of the arrests Sunday:

Two protestors – Mark Dameron of San Diego and Corbin Sobrita of Escondido – were arrested in front of the Anaheim Police Department's headquarters on Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim police Sgt. Bob Dunn said, where a crowd of more than 200 was demonstrating Sunday afternoon.

A third protestor, Nathaniel Sierdsma of San Bernardino, was arrested a few blocks away, at Broadway and Clementine Street, Dunn said. All three were arrested on suspicion of resisting arrest, failing to obey an order and being a pedestrian in a roadway.

Five others whose identities weren't immediately released were arrested later Sunday, Dunn said. The reasons for their arrests weren't immediately available.

On Twitter, these photos of arrests during the protest were making rounds, each is labeled, and please note that not all are from the protests.

Police again blame "outsiders" for arrests on Sunday, and the OC Register reports on some of the various groups that turned out for the protest. Iris Thomas, whose nephew Martin Angel Hernandez was killed earlier this year, participated in Sunday's march and had this to say, "I'm glad to see so many people can get together. It just grieves me it took so many lives being lost for people to pay attention." Then, looking around at the groups of unfamiliar people, she added: "There are a lot of agendas here. A few of us will still be here when everybody else is gone."

By all accounts, even on Sunday it seems that protesters were peaceful, however the police seemed to be conducting all-out urban warfare on the unarmed population, if the videos and photos I've seen thus far are any indication.

So what happened on Saturday? It seems that the protesters held their march, and went all the way to Disney, but the police in riot gear stayed home.

To prepare for Saturday's anti-police protests, Anaheim police filled water barricades and surrounded headquarters with them to keep protesters away. Photo credit: Occupy Ventura.

Susie passed this article from The Atlantic on to me that highlights many of the documented instances of police misconduct cited in the 8 month study and investigation undertaken by law clinics at NYU, Fordham, Harvard, and Stanford, "Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street." I wrote my own summary of the report here, but only highlighted two of the documented cases of misconduct involving police treatment of occupy protesters.

These are all worthy of noting, and I received the above Youtube video this morning from a reader that seems like a perfect accompaniment:

A café employee at work near Union Square heard a passing Occupy march, went outside, and decided to begin filming after seeing police using what he felt was excessive force on protesters. Video evidence shows a white-shirted police officer pushing the café employee, camera in hand. It appears that the employee then began speaking to the officer while holding both hands in the air as the officer approached him. In an interview, the employee stated that he asked the officer why he was pushing and told the officer, "I'm just taking pictures." Video then shows the officer grabbing the employee by the wrist, and flipping him hard to the ground face-first, in what was described as a "judo-flip." The employee stated that he was subsequently charged with "blocking traffic" and "obstructing justice."

Video shows that an officer drove a scooter at a crowd of people, including journalists and legal observers. The video then shows a legal observer lying on the ground screaming, his foot under the scooter. A second video shows the observer on the ground with his foot under the scooter. A third video shows that the observer kicked the scooter off or away from his leg, at which point officers dragged the observer several feet and began to cuff him. While he was being cuffed, an officer pushed the observer's face into the pavement by pressing his baton across the back of the observer's neck.

A member of the Research Team observed an officer push and then throw a male protester into the air for no apparent reason as he walked, with many other protesters, near parked police scooters. The protester fell hard to the ground and was not arrested.

A journalist stated that when he asked a non-uniformed officer for his name at a march, the officer pushed the journalist against a wall and held him there, threatening him that if he kept asking questions, he would get "his f-cking ass beat." The journalist recorded interviews with two bystanders immediately after the incident. One bystander stated that he witnessed the officer using abusive language toward the journalist. He then told the journalist that the officer "put his chest in your face and pushed you around." The other bystander told the journalist that the officer "[got] up in your face and [shouted] at you. He pressed you against the wall of the supermarket."

More at The Atlantic, or click on the link above to read the report directly.

Current cover of "Newsweek" magazine.

Good morning, today is Monday, July 30, 2012.

On this day...

First I'd like to highlight this day in 1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs Medicare, a health insurance program for elderly Americans, into law. But he wasn't finished there, Medicaid, a state and federally funded program that offers health coverage to certain low-income people, was also signed into law as an amendment to the Social Security Act.

1619: The first representative assembly in America convened in Jamestown, Va.

1729: The city of Baltimore was founded.

1792: The French national anthem, "La Marseillaise" by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, was first sung in Paris.

1863: American automaker Henry Ford was born in Dearborn Township, Mich.

1930: Host Uruguay won soccer's first World Cup with a 4-2 victory over Argentina in the final in Montevideo.

1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill creating a women's auxiliary agency in the Navy known as Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES.

1945: The USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine; 880 men lost their lives.

1966: England won the World Cup when Geoff Hurst scored a hat trick in a 4-2 victory over West Germany at London's Wembley Stadium.

1971: Apollo 15 astronauts David R. Scott and James B. Irwin landed on the moon.

1975: Former Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in suburban Detroit. (His remains have never been found.)

2002: Expelled from Congress a week earlier, James A. Traficant Jr. was sentenced to eight years behind bars for corruption.

2008: Ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was extradited to The Hague to face genocide charges after nearly 13 years on the run.

Ruby Brown of North Minneapolis won a renegotiated mortgage from Bank of America, just days before her home of 17 years was to be auctioned off in a sheriff's sale. Her settlement marks the fourth negotiated victory for Occupy Homes MN, the activist group formed to help troubled homeowners in the Twin Cities area fight to avoid foreclosure, and homelessness.

Via:

Brown fell into foreclosure after years of struggling with inflated payments in an adjustable rate mortgage — a predatory lending practice which is now illegal. She eventually received a trial modification and complied with its requirements for 12 months, but was dropped from the program anyway. The confusion surrounding her modification prompted her to ask the question: “The people at the top (of Bank of America), do they really know what’s going on?”

Brown began working with Occupy Homes MN and Neighborhoods Organizing for Change six months ago. Like others who have taken the pledge to stay in their homes, she felt her shame dissolve. “It generated a fight in me,” she said. “I didn’t realize there were so many people in the same situation, that it wasn’t just me.”

Ruby Brown has a message for others going through similar situations:

“Come out of the foreclosure closet. You know, there’s help. There are people around the country that are fighting. There’s power in numbers. There are a lot of people going through the same thing. There’s no shame in what is going on. It’s not your fault. It’s an epidemic, and we have to fight for the antidote.”

Via OccupyWallSt.org :

August 23rd to 26th, 2012 the Occupy The Midwest Conference will be taking place in Detroit, Michigan, hosted by Occupy Detroit. The summer conference will be the second gathering of Occupiers from around the Midwest, following the widely acclaimed success of the previous conference held during the spring in St. Louis, MO.

Occupiers from around the Midwest region will be meeting in Detroit for organizational meetings aimed at connecting Occupy movements for future projects, innovative "teach-ins" and workshops, fellowship, and entertainment. The theme for the summer conference is “Another World Is Possible”, highlighting a wide range of ideas from the Occupy movement aimed at improving the world through better local communities, while inspiring initiatives from citizens internationally. The failure of our current outdated systems has led to a demand for new and improved methods that meet the needs of all citizens, independent of a corrupt economic and social structure that benefits only a few at the expense of the many.

Regardless of someone's current level of involvement in the Occupy movement or activism in general, anyone concerned with social and economic justice is encouraged to attend the conference to exchange their ideas and visions for a better world. Topics like developing regional and local strategies, launching innovative DIY projects, urban communal living techniques, cooperative community building, and many others will be addressed. This conference will serve as an opportunity for everyone to gain skills that will immediately benefit our communities and promote self-reliance free from the limited corporate owned products and services that exist today.

Detroit was selected for the second Occupy The Midwest Conference because it serves as an unfortunate example of our failed economic system. Detroit was once a proud and iconic American city that represented the effort, pride, and character of the working class, serving as the epicenter of the American auto industry, while also acting as a major force in the entertainment industry. Today Detroit ranks amongst the highest rates in unemployment, empty housing, and crime, following the collapse of the auto industry and subsequent housing market collapse. No city in America better represents the harmful effects of corporate greed and political corruption than Detroit.

Occupy The Midwest is proud to meet in Detroit this August, not only to reinvigorate its citizens and communities, but also occupiers from around the country, providing unique opportunities to collaborate on projects that will have a direct impact in improving the lives of all people, regardless of economic status. While strengthening the relationships established at the spring conference, and building new relationships, Occupy The Midwest's summer conference will mark the beginning of a new phase of the Occupy movement, creating ideas and momentum that will evolve into an unstoppable community involving everyone who is passionate and truly believes that Another World Is Possible.

Click here to register.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Occupy The Midwest is a coalition of Occupy movements from cities around the Midwest region, uniting in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy people's movement worldwide.

http://www.occupythemidwest.org/
@occupythemidwes
OccupyTheMidwest@gmail.com

Watch the full documentary now 1 hour, 58 minutes.

Filmmaker, author, and political activist Michael Moore examines America’s obsession with guns and violence in his third feature-length documentary, the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine," which gets its title from a pair of loosely related incidents.

On April 20, 1999, shortly before they began their infamous killing spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attended their favorite class, a no-credit bowling course held at a bowling alley near the school, the same bowling alley which would become the scene of a robbery and triple homicide two years later.

Moore skillfully lays out arguments surrounding the issue and short-circuits them all, leaving one impossible question: why do Americans kill each other more often than people in any other democratic nation?

Moore focuses his quest around the shootings at Columbine High School and the shooting of one 6-year-old by another near his own hometown of Flint, Michigan.

Many thanks for this film, and continuing to ask the tough questions on violence in America, to Michael Moore.

"ALEC Rock" turns Schoolhouse Rock on its head in this instructional film illustrating how Washington really works. In the hands of the ALEC Exposed Project, "I'm just a bill on Capitol Hill" becomes "a bunch of corporations bribe politicians and together they secretly dictate policy."

Produced by Mark Fiore.