The first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street was a joyous affair for the 99%.

Yet regrettably, it was also a day that illustrated how Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ‘private army’ has been increasingly unleashed to beat, arrest, imprison, and broadly suppress OWS.

Please post your videos, photos, and stories about how your rights were infringed on the Occupy Bloomberg’s Army Facebook page.

Occupy is a nonviolent movement, but this has not prevented Bloomberg’s Army from engaging in targeted arrests of specific organizers as well as random street ‘snatch and release’ intimidation tactics.

On September 17th not even the constant drone of helicopters overhead could drown out the screams of ‘I’m a journalist’ from the reporters who were arrested merely for practicing their and our right to freedom of the press.

And not even a cry of ‘I’m a City Councilmember’ was enough to staunch the established policy of brutality within the Mayor of Wall Street’s Police Department.

The message being sent by Bloomberg’s Army is being heard loud and clear. In Bloomberg’s New York: anyone who supports Occupy Wall Street in any fashion is being made an example of.

Were you one of these people extra-legally arrested or assaulted, or have you witnessed someone who was?

Post your videos, photos, and stories on the Occupy Bloomberg’s Army Facebook page.

We will not be stymied by the over 180 arrests on our anniversary, nor intimidated by the unprovoked and random nature of so many of them.

We will fight for our right to protest Wall Street while we protest Wall Street itself.

All Roads Lead To Wall Street

[Via]

To The Last Drop, Part One:

Communities prepare to rise up, but they can't do it alone.

For every barrel of bitumen that comes out of the ground in Northern Alberta, Canada, another 1.5 barrels of toxic waste is created and dumped into tailings ponds that are carved out of the once pristine wilderness. That waste may now be leaking into the Athabasca river Delta, poisoning indigenous communities for hundreds of kilometers downstream and causing rare cancers once unheard of. The Alberta government and its industry-funded studies say every thing is okay with the water. Independent observers say otherwise. Watch as Al Jazeera uncovers how industry and government are working to silence dissent and how communities are beginning to fight back.

To The Last Drop, Part Two:

Thousands of people from civil rights groups walked down New York City's Fifth Avenue in total silence Sunday, marching in protest of "stop-and-frisk" tactics employed by city police.

The quiet was interrupted only by the tapping of feet on the pavement and birds chirping as protesters strode along Central Park from Harlem to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's town house on the Upper East Side townhouse.

For almost 30 city blocks, the march moved slowly and silently. Then, as they passed Bloomberg's home on East 79th Street, the crowd erupted in protest chants. The house was blocked by police barricades.

It was not known if Bloomberg was at home when the protesters passed.

Critics say the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and searching people who police consider suspicious is illegal and humiliating to thousands of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics. Last year, the NYPD stopped more than 600,000 people, up from more than 90,000 a decade ago.

Via:

Tensions increased between police officers and a group of protesters who tried to keep walking down Fifth Avenue below East 77th Street.

Police officers on scooters lined both sides of the avenue and officers on foot formed a line to keep people on the sidewalk. Several scuffles broke out between screaming protesters and officers who pushed them behind barricades on the sidewalk.
...
"The silence ended and the people's voices came out," said Matthew Swaye, 34, a former Bronx school teacher and self-described longtime Occupy protester.

"We were told to go home and we weren't ready to go yet," said Swaye, who added that his wife, Christina Gonzalez, 25, was one of the protesters arrested in the melee.

The practice of silent marches dates to 1917, when the NAACP led a protest through New York against lynchings and segregation in the U.S.

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