Saturday, November 26, 2011

Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Is Anything But True

There has been a flurry of speculation surrounding various reports suggesting that a “coordinated,” nationwide crack-down on the Occupy Movement is underway. The problem with these stories lies in the fact that the word “coordinated” is too vague to offer any analytic value.

The difference between local officials talking to each other — or federal law enforcement agencies advising them on what they see as “best practices” for evicting local occupations — and some unseen hand directing, incentivizing or coercing municipalities to do so when they would not otherwise be so inclined is not a minor one. It’s not a matter of semantics or a distinction without difference. As I wrote recently, “if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.”

But there has not been a single report offered by any media outlet suggesting that anyone – federal officials or police organizations – is directing or in any way exerting pressure on cities to crack down on their occupations. Instead, there have been a lot of dark ruminations that such an effort is underway – notably by Naomi Wolf in an error-filled blog-post and a somewhat bizarre column for The Guardian in which Wolf takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege.

Before digging into Wolf’s claims, let’s review what has actually been reported.

1. Five major occupations were evicted in different cities in a span of less than a week. Although they didn’t follow the same pattern, there were similarities in the tactics employed by these different municipalities.

2. A police membership organization called the Police Executive Research Forum, PERF, organized two conference calls between local law enforcement officials to share information on OWS, including, presumably, how best to evict them.

3. The US Conference of Mayors organized two conference calls between various city officials to discuss the same issues.

4. The Examiner, quoting an anonymous source in the Justice Department, reported that DHS and the FBI were sharing information and advice with local law enforcement agencies. But the source stated quite clearly that “while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.”

5. Chris Hayes reported that a lobbying firm had offered a plan to the American Bankers Association to vilify and marginalize the Occupy Movement. The ABA insisted that it hadn’t acted on the proposal.

6. DHS vehicles were reportedly spotted near at least one eviction.

Among the “advice” reportedly disseminated by DHS was that cities should demonize their occupations by highlighting health and safety violations, and evict them without warning in the dead of night. As a supporter of the Occupy Movement and a civil libertarian, I find that offensive and inappropriate – DHS should be worried about terrorism, not political dissent.

But missing here is any suggestion that cities are being compelled to crack down on their Occupations in any way – mayors of all of the municipalities that evicted camps in recent weeks had made it very clear that they were going to do so. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan held three press conferences urging people to leave Frank Ogawa Plaza and promising that they would be removed by force if they didn’t comply. Local officials have an agenda, but it is not a hidden agenda, and thus not a particularly shocking story.

I don’t find it in the least bit surprising that law enforcement officials communicate with each other, and such communication is in no way an assault on local communities’ autonomy. Every day professionals dealing with similar issues get on conference calls, send messages to list-servs or otherwise talk shop – it’s just part of our “interconnected world.”

Having established a baseline of reality, let’s turn to Wolf’s claims.

Here’s how she opens her blog-post:
Now is the time to get cops on board with the OWS movement — especially now that Alternet has broken the story that municipal police are being pushed around by a shadowy private policing consultancy affiliated with DHS. If you study any closing society decent people get handed monstrous orders and are forced to comply, and right now municipal police are being forced to comply with brutal orders from this corporate police consultancy, by economic pressure.
AlterNet has “broken” no such story – nobody has. We have asked Wolf to retract this claim, but as of this writing, it still remains on her site several days later.

PERF is not “shadowy” – they are quite happy to talk to the media and recently sent a spokesperson to appear on Democracy, Now! PERF is a membership organization without any actual police powers. It can’t “order” anybody to do anything and has no means to apply “economic pressure.” Its only “affiliation” with DHS is that PERF’s Executive Director, Chuck Wexler, also sits on a DHS “advisory board” (along with a dozen police chiefs, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton).

PERF organizes conference calls among police officials to discuss areas of common concern. Last year, it held a conference call among police chiefs who were worried that Arizona’s harsh immigration law, SB 1070, would drive a wedge between law enforcement agencies and the immigrant communities they are supposed to protect and serve. Fox “News” ran a story at the time alleging that PERF was some sort of far-left police organization and therefore illegitimate. Now we’re getting a similar story from progressives, which is discouraging.

Having basically invented a tale of arm-twisting at the national level – of a “shadowy” police organization affiliated with DHS issuing “brutal orders” to hapless mayors – Wolf then leaps even further afield with her Guardian column, in which she adds the dark accusation that Congress is involved, and is ordering this national crackdown to preserve a grift from which law-makers are profiting. The headline of the piece is “The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy,” but there is nothing truthful about what follows.

Here, we should pause to add another credible report to our factual baseline. CBS recently ran a report showing that members of Congress were using information that wasn’t available to the public to make tidy profits on the stock market. It’s insider-trading when ordinary citizens do it, but a loophole in the law makes it perfectly legal – if wholly corrupt on its face – for legislators to engage in the exact same practices.

This is extremely troubling, but wholly unrelated to Occupy Wall Street unless one engages in the kind of intellectual contortionism Wolf attempts. Indeed, the Guardianpiece borders on incoherence as it is, in the literal sense, a series of non-sequiturs – unrelated claims that simply do not follow one another.

She opens by recounting some of the more outrageous examples of police violence in recent weeks. Then she adds, “just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened.” Did we have the picture or were we asking a lot of questions? Either way, what follows should address this in some way. But it doesn’t:
The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests.
This is a disturbing story pertaining specifically to New York. It's a non-sequitur here.

Wolf then offers some more tales of protesters facing police violence. She then cites Chris Hayes’ report as some sort of evidence that these crackdowns weren’t the result of local decisions.
Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors’, city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.
This is just sad. The memo Hayes unearthed was drafted on November 24, more than a week after the evictions of camps in Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Denver, Salt Lake City and Portland. There was no “message coordination” of any kind – it was a proposal that was reportedly rejected. It wasn’t produced by or sent to any organ of government – it was a memo by scummy lobbyists looking for a pay-check from the banking lobby.

Wolf then continues to throw everything she can get her hands on at the wall in the hope that something sticks…

I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response. 
That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted. 
The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening. 
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act…. 
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors. 
When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
I have probably interviewed 50-75 participants in the Occupy Movement, at multiple camps in the Bay Area, and heard all sorts of proposals and “demands” for healing our economy. But I have never heard any Occupier call for “draft[ing] laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.”

This seems to be the heart of her argument – Congress critters have a nice little rip-off going, they feel threatened by the Occupy Movement’s efforts to bring greater transparency to government, and as a result, they are “ordering” a nation-wide crack-down. But this central claim is based on emails she supposedly got from readers that seem pretty divergent from what the rest of us are hearing.

Wolf has that problem covered, however. Because even if the Occupiers don’t know that this is high on their list of demands, the police informants who have infiltrated the movement are able to discern their agenda even before the protesters have come up with it…
Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists’ privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process… [is] two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.
Convenient!

Wolf then offers a classic example of trying to shoe-horn reality into a theory with no factual basis. She set out to write a column indicting Congress for a nationwide crack-down that hasn’t actually been unearthed and, in order to do so, she needs to hopelessly muddle the chain of command…
For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).
DHS is a cabinet-level executive branch agency. It does not “report” to Homeland Security Chair Peter King in some kind of chain-of-command – in fact, it doesn’t “report” to Congress at all except for a handful of official reports required by law. King can hold hearings and call DHS officials to testify before his committee, but he has nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the agency.

The allegation is that DHS offered local cities advise on evicting their local camps. I don’t know what she means by “freelance” in this context, but that is the kind of action, like thousands of actions DHS initiates each and every day, that wouldn’t require any sort of high-level sign-off. DHS was created in part to facilitate greater communication and intelligence-sharing between federal and local law enforcement agencies – advising local authorities is one of its defining roles.

But it’s the next paragraph that actually makes one’s head hurt…
In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.
Got that? That DHS took part in those conference calls (a claim that confuses two separate stories, as it hasn’t been alleged that DHS had anything to do with the calls organized by the US Conference of Mayors) shows that “Congressional overseers with the blessing of the White House” told DHS to “authorize” mayors to order their police to crack-down.

This is little more than gibberish – policing protesters is a local matter and no mayor in the country requires federal “authorization” of any kind, by any agency, to order their cops to evict an occupation.

Wolf wraps up with a feverish flourish…
So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.
When you don’t “connect” wholly disparate “dots,” what you get is far less dramatic. Mayors in a handful of cities, responding to local political pressures, decided to break up their local occupations — decisions that were announced to the press well in advance — and were advised as to how best to do so.

One doesn’t have to like that fact to recognize that it’s hardly shocking, and anything but a sinister assault on local communities’ autonomy.

29 comments:

Andross said...

One minor point: you say that the lobbiests' memo was never sent to a "government organ." While this is technically true, it did manage to pass the desk of the speaker of the house, and other prominent republican lawmakers. This should not be overlooked. Great peace, in any case.

Joshua Holland said...

OK, but it was prepared for ABA, not for DHS or any federal agency. That's the point.

Anonymous said...

" DHS vehicles were reportedly spotted near at least one eviction."

That is probably Portland, Oregon. I've heard people here talk about it but I haven't seen pictures. One of the parks where the Portland protesters camped, Terry Schrunk Plaza, is Federal property. It's near a Federal building. One would expect to see DHS vehicles nearby, protest or not.

For more details, here's one of our local journalists' blog post:

http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2011/11/25/more-questions-about-city-hall-the-feds-and-occupy-portland

txvoodoo said...

So wait - Wolf implies that Peter King takes his orders from President Obama?

Peter King? Really????

Anonymous said...

This is poorly written misinformation, hope nobody takes this clown seriously

OccupyBayStreet said...

Quite a send up. You are forgetting that the arrest of Jonathon Meador at Occupy Nashville also somehow involved the DHS according to several reports, including this Washington Post blog piece http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/occupy-arrests-reporter-jonathan-meador-records-own-arrest-video/2011/10/31/gIQAgwblZM_blog.html

which refers to DHS commissioner Bill Gibbons and a statement by a DHS spokesperson in this telling paragraph:

“The Department of Safety and Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons has spoken to Chris Ferrell, CEO of the Nashville Scene’s parent company,” Dalya J. Qualls, a spokeswoman for the department said in an e-mailed statement. “We plan to review all of the materials documenting the arrest or Mr. Meador and depending on the review will respond appropriately. It is not our intent to interfere with a journalist doing his or her job.”

Naomi Wolf maybe doing her classic schtick of getting nearly every single fact wrong, but still somehow managing to get the story basically right. I've been amazed by the phenomenon for at least a decade.

Joshua Holland said...

No, OccupyBayStreet, that item refers to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, not the federal agency.

They were involved, as I understand it, because the occupation was on the site of a Tennessee state building over which they have jurisdiction.

OccupyBayStreet said...

Again, here, thanks for the clarification. I've spent more time than I want on google trying to find the local paper that actually used DHS initials. It caught my eye big time when it first came out. Then saw the follow up when I went to search for it later in the Washington Post. That's why you are the professional reporter!

Zee said...

So, oddly enough, the memo was actually circulating prior to Nov 24. I ran across it and emailed it to my Dad (a lawyer/lobbyist!) ha! I did that on the 19th of Nov (exactly a week prior to the written date - I noted that discrepancy at the time) - and because I'm just some nobody on the Twitter, I'm assuming more important people saw it before me...

To assume local officials don't talk to each other - casually or officially - or federal level officials is ignorant. If you have a problem, sometimes you contact other people have dealt/are dealing with it. If you don't you probably suck at your job. Or everything.

But, I do believe that there are people who are getting a bit nervous about the Occupiers... it's all about the money. It always is.

Greg Gerke said...

Joshua,

Why are you letting Dirty Hippies take this off your blog? Who are you helping by writing this? It seems the answer is yourself. All of this reminds me of Foucault's Pendulum. Are you really going to make this about dates of memos and jurisdictions? Chompsky said, The biggest conspiracy is that there are no conspiracies. Like Wolf's account, yours purports to know what exactly is going on, but how can you? No one knows. There are undercover police and agent provocateurs involved - fact confirmed by the outing of one by himself and the nyc citibank arrest videos. Who else is there? No one knows.

Joshua Holland said...

I posted it there because I have access. But it's also on AlterNet.

Helping myself? No, I like my Saturdays ;-)

abcedertree said...

First, please clear me up on one of Wolf's claims: "Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping."

Is there any truth to that? The word "involvement" is what interests me most.

Beyond that, it's obvious that Naomi Wolf took liberties with the truth regarding proof of federal involvement in Occupy protest crackdowns, but your own article also troubles me. Your assessment appears to do as much contorting to avoid seeing connections as Wolf's contorts to make connections.

Reporters escorted away from covering the Zuccotti eviction: a "non-sequiter"? CBS's report on congressional inside-trading: "wholly unrelated to Occupy Wall Street"? Her list of OWS demands: fake?

The last I'd heard, there was no official OWS membership card for this "open" movement, but you seem pretty convinced that the 75 or so individuals you personally interviewed at one location represent the core of OWS values. Regardless of whether Wolf made up the list of agenda items she supposedly received, all three of them SHOULD be primary goals of the Occupy movement. In October, Micah White, senior editor at Adbusters, named the first two items in Wolf's list, but anyone hoping to achieve those two goals will fail if they are blind to the third one that Wolf listed.

So it seems to me the question might well be, is Naomi Wolf honestly reporting the news as is, or is she trying to instigate her own involvement in OWS?

Should she have simply passed on the information reported by CBS? Would that information be as well-known if she had not presented it in the AS YET unproven case of federal involvement? It depends upon what's at the top of one's personal agenda: "see OWS succeed" or "take down Noami Wolf".

Joshua Holland said...


Reporters escorted away from covering the Zuccotti eviction: a "non-sequiter"?


Well, it was done by NYPD, so, yes, it has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether there is some federal direction at work behind the scenes.

Mary Lou said...

This seems to be more about your desire to take down Naomi Wolf than it is to discern any federal connection in the evictions of OWS over one week's duration.

Proving a conspiracy/concerted effort has more to do with the time-connection of events, the striking similarity of talking points and the use of similar weapons than it does the limited jurisdictions of particular state and local agencies. Whether they were "told" "ordered" or "encouraged" to use the same weapons and evict at the same time, the fact of the matter remains. All of the protesters who got sprayed in the face or brutalized, felt it in the same way in the span of a week. You make distinctions, such as Tennessee Homeland Security vs. Department of Homeland Security, that are without a legal difference. It makes no difference for purposes of this discussion whether the phone calls took place between a federally funded agency or a Congressman and a city.

You refuse to recognize well known principles of agency and authority. When companies get together to fix prices, you can rest assured they do not use the words "market share" and "price-fixing". It does not change the facts. Don't be naive and we won't be overdramatic.

The top three goals are believable for anyone who can realistically look at the problems. "Delaware" is code for big corporations which are typically incorporated there because of lax corporate rules. credit card companies, banks, and the biggest corporations such as health insurers are Delaware corps. It is not insider trading, it is acquisition and trading of stock and then voting on the same corporation's future fate that is the problem. CBS did not break this story. It is a well known fact that comes to the public attention every election cycle.

Corporate entities are used to avoid liability, not to gain free speech rights. For over one hundred years corporations have NOT been persons. It is a legal fiction. Legal fictions do not acquire personhood by means of expiration of 100 years. Citizens United must be overruled or citizens will lose their fundamental rights. Glass Steagall must be reinstated to prevent another global economic meltdown. The MERS, the MBS and credit default swaps combined with the speed and instability fostered by these systems created the credit crunch, the liquidity crisis and the resulting jobs crisis. But it started with Glass Steagall. Investment banks and other non bank banks are not members of the Federal Reserve. They do not play by the rules. They play roulette. With our pensions, our public trusts and our police, fire and teacher pay.

Joshua Holland said...

Why would I have any desire to "take down Wolf"? She seems like a nice person and I'm sure her hearts in the right place.

You refuse to recognize well known principles of agency and authority.

I don't know how you're coming to that conclusion. This piece is not in any way about generalities. It's about specific, baseless claims that way too many people are buying.

Eliot said...

I take her piece to be about cohesion from the top. Your rebuttal to Wolf's article and it's hypothetic nature, may be true—it does lack professional diligence—but could it be an accurate representation of how the powerful could try to squelch the OWS movement?

Peter King, http://youtu.be/skbYeg478Hg may not be in the DHS chain of command, but does he have any influence over their purse strings?
OWS's three answers to “What is it you want?” from Wolf's question; the first two are dead on i.e., Glass-Steagall and Citizens United. From my interaction with occupiers and the third is not, but I have heard a lot of talk about, "how does a member of the House or Senate turn $174,000 into millions?" and "Why are they getting richer since the downturn?"
Mr. Holland, do you think the gist of what she wrote is wrong or is it just the liberties she took that you have issue with?

James said...

Thank you for your reporting, Mr. Holland:

I do not trust our government to be in the best interest of our people. As for the Wolf article, yes I agree with almost everything you've said about it, except one underlying reality: The Government will definitely control, on a National basis and scale, when and if it sees fit to do so. The process for that already exists in the form of the following::
- The president has the power to suspend the Constitution in a national crisis and turn over the reigns of govt to FEMA. FEMA was created in 1979 through executive order 12148 issued by Carter. The president can then appoint military commanders to control all state and local governments.
- A separate executive order no 12656 declared that National Security Council would be the principal body directing national emergency powers. FEMAs enormous powers can be triggered by the president during any perceived domestic or foreign crisis.
- Executive orders e.g 10990 govt can seize all modes of transport
- No 10995 govt can seize all communications media
- No 10997 seize all fuels and resources no matter who owns them
- No 11921 control over energy sources, wages, credit and flow of money in US financial institutions in national emergency. This order provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the president, Congress cannot review the action for 6 months.

Yes, in national emergencies this would appear logical and reasonable. If this is applied to civil unrest because the citizenry are protesting and/or demanding a change in governmental policy and actualization of same, forcing a change in the governmental structure, then no.

It is naive to think that the abuses already rampant in our government will not expand and increase when it suits this government.

I'm pleased that I've discovered your approach, logic, fact finding, and reporting, Mr. Holland: Quite refreshing and, so far, accurate.

I, like you, will examine and ruminate on those facts but I will also see if they align with behavior, which in the end, will determine the actual truth, regardless of "facts".

For example, Mr. Holland:: This Monday or Tuesday the Senate will vote on a bill that allows the US military to imprison civilians with no formal charges and hold them with no trial.
The ACLU reports even US citizens wouldn't be immune as the legislation aims to declare national territory part of the "battlefield" in the War on Terror.
Termed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and drafted behind closed doors by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) the NDAA would:
1) Explicitly authorize the federal government to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others picked up inside and outside the United States;

(2) Mandate military detention of some civilians who would otherwise be outside of military control, including civilians picked up within the United States itself; and

(3) Transfer to the Department of Defense core prosecutorial, investigative, law enforcement, penal, and custodial authority and responsibility now held by the Department of Justice.


At the end of the day, this is a time for us as a Nation where we will have to admit to our laziness and chose to change our participation in this country as citizens. We have not held those we elected accountable perhaps because we haven't held ourselves accountable nor our duty as citizens. We are beginning to do that, slowly.

The storm that is approaching will be like no other. Glad that you are a part of its information gathering and exposure. Keep up the good work.

We have a saying in the South: "It don't sound right if it ain't said right." Be certain you always say it right, Mr. Holland.

Jed B. said...

Let's ignore the party affiliation of the mayors and people running the federal government and pretend they aren't Democrats.

Let's also pretend that Obama and Hillary Clinton aren't backing up the dictatorship in Egypt with guns, trained torturers and tear gas. Just as the Israelis are supplying expertise to the Indian government and Greece in how to put down their own restive populations. And that that Israeli assistance isnt really subcontracting for the USA, since the Dems and Republicans agree on backing up that sordid enterprise.

Let's further pretend that the most participatory democratic movement in a generation isn't facing CONSTANT police violence all over the country.

Yeah. Hope. Change. War. Austerity.

And then back in reality...

Go Fleet said...

Good to become browsing your weblog once more, it has been months for me. Well this article that i've been waited for so lengthy. I need this post to total my assignment inside the university, and it has exact same subject together with your post. Thanks, excellent share.
fleet gps tracking

Constitution2010 said...

Naomi Wolf had bugged me in the past and I can’t remember what it was. I remember it wasn't that big a deal.

I believe we benefit from allowing Wolfe to jump to some conclusions to accurately describe a CLEAR PATTERN of OUTRAGEOUS VIOLENCE PERPETRATED ON DEFENSELESS, NON-VIOLENT AMERICAN CITIZENS MERELY EXERCISING THEIR RIGHTS UNDER THE CONSTITUTION. That is a fact, Josh Holland.

As far as I am concerned, Naomi is peering into that dark, dank void of corruption and predatory multinational corporate stranglehold on every level of government and finance hell-bent on maintaining the status quo. Peering into that abyss of lies and secrecy, why would one NOT assume the obvious: that they are and have been coordinating an orchestrated assault on the Occupy Movement? Such an attack is being sustained by the poor and working classes and has been for the last FORTY YEARS! Holland is very much impressed with his own reportage but I don’t trust him knowing what is and what is NOT being orchestrated ALL THE UP TO THE WHITE HOUSE!

Holland has done some good work in the past; I just wonder why he went out of his way to discredit Naomi.
I am going with Naomi Wolf on this one just on the grounds "they" deserve a frontal assault like the one she delivers here quite soundly. "Their" assault on me and you and the rest of us was NEVER fact-based so exactly what is your problem, Josh Holland? Who called for YOUR quasi-debunking of a piece that was clearly written in a way that penetrates that Kevlar armor of lies ceaselessly oozing from their terrorist/corporate propaganda outlets like FUX, ABC, NBC, CBS and now of course, NPR.

I detect a misogynistic/sadistic pleasure perhaps being derived from this blatant attack on Wolfe with the snide inferences and the needlessly aggressive almost line by line analysis. The very title of Holland’s piece exuding rancor and snide: exhibit A:
Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Is Anything But True
Nice, Josh!

Let THEM, THE ENEMY, the traitors conspiring to overthrow our democracy and sacrifice ALL in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, attack Naomi Wolfe. Let THEM, THE ENEMY, muster their own meager mental resources to attack Naomi Wolfe. I don't need ONE OF OUR OWN ATTACKING ONE OF OUR OWN, thank you very much, Josh Holland, no matter what personal pleasure you may have derived from this particular exchange. I also consider this, of course, a side-winding attack on the Occupy Movement itself, as YOU are attacking a defender of the defenseless and THAT is an attack on the movement itself.

So SHAME ON YOU, Josh Holland! Your lack of judgment and calloused twisted sense of ego and journalism has alerted me to now be wary of Alternet, a hitherto trusted news source of mine for years. I will not suffer another whiff of this kind chicken shit journalism coming from Alternet’s pages and will take measures to distance myself from it if it occurs in the future.

What IS your major malfunction, Holland?! Whatsamata? Never been published in The Guardian?

carl can said...

Sounds very interesting! I will check this out! colonial style house plans

killkillneil said...

As I'm sure you're aware; she's responded:
http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/153296/naomi_wolf_versus_joshua_bit.ly:_was_there_a_coordinated_federal_crackdown_on_occupy_wall_street?page=entire

kevinschmidt said...

Looks like payback is a bitch for you after posting your pathetic smear job on Maomi Wolf, that no one believed anyway:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/02/crackdown-occupy-controversy-rebuttal-naomi-wolf

So how does it feel to be completely discredited? That's what you get for being a liar and a hack.

Joshua Holland said...

That's hilarious Kevin. Sh's not even coherent!

Anyone with two braincells to rub together knows who the hack is in this story.

My response to Wolf's non-response will be up in a bit.

Constitution2010 said...

Anyone with two braincells would know your attack on Naomie is a waste of time & energy. This is where I bite my tongue and spare the blasphemes your sad little ego deserves.

Mr. Raven said...

Yes the U.S. Federal government and Israelis NGOs would never coordinate actions on the Federal level against the occupy movement how could anyone think that?

"PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview."

http://exiledonline.com/max-blumenthal-how-israeli-occupation-forces-bahraini-monarchy-guards-trained-u-s-police-for-coordinated-crackdown-on-occupy-protests/

hilda dada said...

Your blog is very informative.This is obviously one great post.i keep on reading articles from here.thanks for sharing.. kaizen events

Anonymous said...

Does JH consider this to be 'anything but true'

Garden Plot / CONPLAN 2502 (Civil Disturbance Operations).
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/garden_plot.htm

Civilian Inmate Labor Camp.
http://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/pdf/R210_35.PDF

http://www.libertyforlife.com/jail-police/us-concentration_camp-locations.htm

http://oilempire.us/redalert.html

http://www.uaff.us/femacamps.htm

Dani said...

Great post. Thanks for Awesome tips Keep it up urdu Poetry