Good morning! Today is Wednesday, May 23, 2012. You're half-way to the weekend, so hang in there.

Tom Morello sings "Stray Bullets" with Iraq Veterans Against War during the #NoNATO rally in Chicago on May 20, 2012. The sound system had stopped working at the start of the rally, but Morello came down into the crowd and finished the song and played his accoustic guitar.

Enjoy, and see you all in the morning.

An army of guitarists took to the streets of New York City as part of Occupy Wall Street’s May Day resurgence. Led by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, the ‘guitarmy’ marched peacefully while strumming protest songs including Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land to Morello’s World Wide Rebel Song. The foot soldiers of the guitarmy ranged from seasoned activists and Zuccotti occupiers to high school students at their first protest march.

The full transcript of an excellent interview with Morello by Bill Moyers is after the jump.

Continue reading »

I previously reported on the Chicago police stopping and detaining Occupy journalists Tim Pool and Luke Rudkowski on May 20th during the #NoNATO protests, but in this video, a credentialed photographer is targeted.

Via:

Tracey Pollock, a credentialed photographer for The UpTake, is attacked by police in Chicago during an anti-NATO protest on Saturday. Before the attack, police were using their bicycles as weapons to force back the crowd which was staging a march without a permit.

Police had formed a barricade; as you can see from the video, there was some sort of incident along the barricade. Pollock tried to get closer to see what was happening when a police officer reached up, grabbed her lens and tried to rip her camera away.

The officer then pushed her over some bicycles.
Pollock was wearing a large press badge and as you can hear from the audio, even bystanders could tell she was part of the press. Protesters behind the bicycles pulled her to safety.

Pollock was bruised in the incident but not seriously injured. She says she never crossed the police barricade.

I shudder to think what might have happened if the protesters hadn't been able to reach Tracey. There is no doubt there is much government support behind such treatment of the media, and the brutality heaped on protesters as well. How else could they continually get away with it?

[Note: Language may not be suitable for work.]

The first live on-location Moment of Clarity comes to you from the NATO protests in Chicago.

[Get more at LeeCamp.net]

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! sat down and talked with Scott Olsen in Chicago on March 20th, right after he and other fellow veterans tossed their military service medals during the #NoNATO protests.

Goodman: We're joined at the NATO summit in Chicago by Scott Olsen, who survived two tours in Iraq but almost died when he was hit with a police projectile at an Occupy Oakland protest last year. Olsen returned four of his medals at Sunday's antiwar march. When asked why he's joined the Occupy movement and is protesting against the heavily-policed NATO summit, Olsen says, "I am going to make every effort I can to show them that we're doing the right thing. No matter what they do to any of us, we've got each other's backs and we're going forward."

Full transcript of their discussion available at Democracy Now!.

Tall Tale Productions filmed the action in Chicago between May 18 - May 21st, and put together this great five minute compilation set to music.

In a press release, Anonymous has claimed to have leaked 1.7 GB of data stolen from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, a Department of Justice agency that collects and analyzes crime data. The file has been leaked to The Pirate Bay. This is a Monday Mail Mayhem release.

Greetings world,
We are Anonymous.
Today we are releaseing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now.
Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things such as internal emails, and the entire database dump.
We Lulzed as they took the website down after being owned, clearly showing they were scared of what
inevitably happened.

We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information.

We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.

The price we pay very often is our own freedom. The price governments pay is the exposure of their corruption and the truth being revealed, for the truth will set us free in the end.

So once more we call on you. Hackers, activists, and freedom fighters; join us in our struggle against these corporate

Then a man without a mask says the following:

What’s next? What’s next is… all they can do is shut down the Internet itself. And we see, how that went for them, in Egypt. And we the people know, that when the government shuts down the Internet, that’s when it’s time to shut down the government.

Then he puts the Guy Fawkes mask on,and repeats the Anonymous slogan:

We are Anonymous
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us

He then adds an extra warning, “And now, expect a whole lot more.”

Is this data actually part of what was foretold by Christopher Doyon, aka "Commander X"? Doyon is the Anonymous member who is hiding in Canada because he's wanted in the United States and facing a 15 year prison sentence for a prior hack attack:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

I still find myself incredulous at the possibility that government employees with access to every classified government database could've turned over the keys to the kingdom, but it seems that Anonymous wants to convince us of exactly that.

At the Public Banking in America Conference in Philadelphia in April, 12-year old Victoria Grant explained why her homeland, Canada, and most of the world, is in debt. It was a reprisal of a speech she'd given six weeks before at a Rotary Club for 600 people, a clip of which quickly went viral. "Have you ever wondered why the bankers from the largest private banks are becoming wealthier and the rest of us are not?" she intones in her precocious cadence. "What I've discovered is the banks and the government have colluded to financially enslave the people of Canada."

Let's hear it for young activists. They might end up saving the world.

Good Morning! Today is Tuesday, May 22, 2012. So who's making the coffee?