Good morning, and TGIF!

This week, a group of clergy in San Francisco removed $10 million from Wells Fargo with an Ash Wednesday press conference calling on the bank to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct.

Think Progress has the full story here.

"Anonymous" has been exceptionally busy of late. This week, they hacked into the L.A. county police and sheriff databases, replacing them with contact information and nude pictures.

The Occupied Wall Street Journal has an in-depth piece on the different levels of lethality of tear gas, and the companies that manufacture it.

What Big Banker ran up a $133.54 tab and left the waitress only a 1 percent tip, and a note that said "GET A REAL JOB."?

Continue reading »

This is the video for the song 'Occupy Wall Street' written and performed by Spencer Livingston. Produced and engineered by Peter Malick.

'Occupy Wall Street' is available on itunes, amazon, and rhapsody.
All Proceeds from the sale of this song will be used to support the current 'Occupy' movement.

During a brief clash with police, Occupy SF protesters were beaten with batons, and sprayed with pepper spray, after an energetic day of protests in the city's financial district, a federal courthouse, and rallies.

Via Reuters:

Hundreds of Occupy activists clashed with police and stormed a vacant hotel in San Francisco on Friday, capping a day of protests in the city's financial district and separate anti-Wall Street rallies at federal courthouses across the country.

The rallies were seen as a bid by the Occupy Wall Street movement to reenergize protests against economic inequality and excesses of the U.S. financial system weeks after demonstrators were driven from tent camps in a wave of evictions nationwide.

The raucous takeover of the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco's upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood followed a march from downtown by about 1,000 demonstrators chanting, "Whose streets? Our streets!" and "Cops go home!"

The protesters were met by a phalanx of police in riot gear who had set up barricades at the front entrance to the U-shaped hotel complex, which stands several stories tall and takes up an entire city block.

The crowd surged toward the barriers to try to remove them and briefly scuffled with police, who jabbed protesters with batons and doused them with pepper spray, forcing demonstrators to retreat. Police said demonstrators hurled rocks, bottles and bricks at them, with two officers suffering minor injuries.

One man lay on the ground surrounded by fellow protesters yelling that he had been struck in the head. Demonstrators regrouped to march around the block, some breaking windows of a nearby car dealership, as police largely dispersed.

The following video shows the protesters as they occupy the Cathedral Hill Hotel. Note the protesters who take to the roof of the building to hang a banner. Via KCBS:

Despite the brutal cold, several hundred occupiers set out at a brisk pace from Zuccotti Park and headed north on Church Street for the evening''s candlelit march, vigil and performances at Riverside Church.

This video was just uploaded a few days ago, and turned up in my email box with other videos of the vigil in NYC on January 15th. It is actually from last October at Zuccotti Park, but it's perfect for today as well as a man with Occupy Wall Street recites Dr.King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Ask and you shall receive? Difficult to believe it was so easy. Recently obtained internal emails between Oakland City Hall and police through a public records request that give a look into the mindset of Oakland officials during the violent police raids of Occupy Oakland that began last October.

During that same confrontation, Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran with Veterans for Peace, was injured in the head, and images of his wounded body being dragged off and of officers tossing a gas grenade into a crowd of people helping him made him into a symbol of the Occupy protest.

Via:

In one message written Oct. 13, a sergeant said he'd been confronted by protesters camping at Frank Ogawa Plaza and that one implied they would remove officers by force if they entered the camp without permission.

Five days later, Deputy Chief Jeffrey Israel told Chief Howard Jordan,"We can either wait for a riot, or order them to cease their night time occupation."

Soon after, images of the protest began making national and international news.

A Washington, D.C., crisis manager recommended that Oakland apologize, but the mayor's team disagreed and re-crafted the message instead.
...
When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan's advisers.

"Not sure how you want to share this good news," he wrote. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland."

Making no mention of the hell the Occupy Oakland protesters have suffered at the hands of the Oakland Police, KTVU does mention "just how stressful of a situation it was for leaders."

Not one email was written by Mayor Jean Quan in all of the over a thousand communications received. Face-to-face communication - her preference, says her office - leaves no evidence that could be used in a court of law. The emails sent out by police, the crisis manager, followed by their actions on Occupy Oakland protesters seem to indicate just what the Mayor's orders were.

A petition for the recall of Quan was certified just last month when she failed to heed calls for her resignation in the aftermath of the Occupy Oakland raids.

[Via Flickr]

Wow, New York! Aren't you glad Bloomberg got rid of those dirty hippies and got these guys to take their place?

In the above video, one of the bald guys wearing black sunglasses and a yellow vest tells an inquisitive videographer "Your fly is down, f-ggot." It happens at about the 1:50 mark.

Who wants to see smiling hippies in the morning that offer you coffee or free blood pressure checks? Morning people, bah, humbug!