Occupy Wall Street: What’s It All About?

For 12 days, the Occupy Wall Street movement has taken to the streets of downtown Manhattan and used Zuccotti Park as a base, a location not far from the former site of the World Trade Center.

But it wasn't until the protesters' march from Liberty Street and Broadway to Union Square on Saturday, Sept. 24, that the media and the rest of the country began to really take notice. Nearly 80 people were arrested for blocking traffic and committing other minor offenses, while reports of excessive police force, including a group of girls who were pepper-sprayed, flooded the Internet and TV news broadcasts.

The incident on Saturday not only set to further galvanize the group, it also grabbed the attention of celebrity activists Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore. Both visited the park this week along with popular political activist Dr. Cornel West. Now, copycat groups are popping up in other big cities across the country, from Boston to Chicago to San Francisco.

Accounts of who these protesters are and what they are actually protesting have been mixed and not always entirely clear. No single and unified message has been delivered, but for many of them, an interest in effecting change to the U.S. system of capitalism ranks high on their wish list.

So The Daily Ticker's very own Aaron Task took to the park to find out for himself what this movement is all about.

He found a leaderless movement comprised of people from all walks of life. But they did seem to have common threads for what brought them to demonstrate. Two prominent themes include dissatisfaction with the growing income inequality between the wealthy and the poor in this country and dissatisfaction over big corporate interests, rather than ordinary voters, controlling Washington.

Here are some thoughts from the front line:

--"Personally I am here to tell these big corporations to get their money out of my politicians' pockets so my politicians can work for me and for my family and my friends like we elected them to do." - Steve, unemployed college graduate and aspiring actor.

--"This tremendous wealth in a few hands is ruining our democracy. The income distribution over my lifetime has changed in the most extraordinary way." - Evalie, the Granny Peace Brigade

--"There is something seriously wrong when you've got a very, very tiny percentage of the country, a small number of the country, controlling so much of its wealth" - Bill, unofficial spokesman for Occupy Wall Street

--"We feel that corporations have more of a voice and more rights than individuals, and we are here to talk about it." - Ryan, associate producer

In the accompany video, Aaron also asks the protestors it's possible for this movement to engulf the masses, and even turn violent, similar to the protests in Greece or those across the Middle East earlier this year.

Source;Yahoo! Finance

Find more related post here: Occupy Wall Street

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Syrian troops fire at anti-regime protesters

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian security forces opened fire on protesters Friday as thousands rallied across the country to call for the downfall of President Bashar Assad's regime, activists said. Troops also clashed with armed anti-regime forces in central regions.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said one person was killed in the central city of Hama and at least seven people were wounded in another central area, Homs.

In this citizen journalism image made on a mobile phone and provided by Shaam News Network, Anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad protesters, shout slogans as they protest at al-kessour area, in Homs province, Syria, late Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011. Angry supporters of President Bashar Assad's regime hurled tomatoes and eggs at the U.S. ambassador to Syria as he entered the office of a leading opposition figure and then tried to break into the building, trapping him inside for three hours. (AP Photo/Shaam News Network) EDITORIAL USE ONLY, NO SALES, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS IS UNABLE TO INDEPENDENTLY VERIFY THE AUTHENTICITY, CONTENT, LOCATION OR DATE OF THIS HANDOUT PHOTO

The protests spread from the capital, Damascus, and its suburbs to the southern province of Daraa, the northwestern province of Idlib as well as Hama and Homs.

Many of the protesters expressed solidarity with residents of the rebellious town of Rastan just north of Homs, where fighting has been raging for three days between troops and army defectors.

Amateur videos posted online by activists showed thousands of people shouting in support of the rebellion in Rastan, where fighting continued Friday.

"Rastan will overthrow the regime," read one banner waved by protesters in the Damascus neighborhood of Qadam. Many of the protesters there covered their faces with scarves or masks to hide their identities.

The Syrian government has banned foreign journalists and placed heavy restrictions on local media coverage, making it difficult to independently verify events on the ground.

The U.N. says some 2,700 people have already died in the government crackdown against the uprising that began in mid-March.

The protests on Friday followed the week's main Muslim prayer services and were similar to demonstrations held across Syria every Friday for the past six months since the uprising against Assad erupted in the country's south.

A military official said Friday that two days of clashes between Syrian troops and anti-Assad forces in Rastan killed seven soldiers and policemen.

The official said 32 Syrian troops were also wounded in the fighting as government forces conducted a "qualitative" operation on Thursday and Friday in an effort to crush "gunmen" holed up inside the town.

The government describes its armed opponents there as "terrorist armed groups," not army defectors.

The official said the gunmen had terrorized citizens, blocked roads and set up barriers and explosives, and were responsible for the deaths of the seven troops. The comments by the unidentified official were carried by state-run news agency, SANA, on Friday.

Rastan has witnessed some of the fiercest fighting in the six-month uprising against Assad, pitting the military against hundreds of army defectors, according to activists.

The town, from which the Syrian army draws many of its Sunni Muslim recruits, has seen some of the largest numbers of defections to date. A prominent human rights activist estimated there were around 2,000 defectors fighting in Rastan and nearby Talbiseh as well as in the Jabal al-Zawiyah region in the northern Idlib province.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The defectors, as well as reports that once-peaceful Syrian protesters are increasingly taking up arms to fight the six-month old government crackdown, have raised concerns of the risk of civil war in Syria.

Syria has a volatile sectarian divide, making civil unrest one of the most dire scenarios. The Assad regime is dominated by the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, but the country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.

The report carried by SANA Friday was an acknowledgment of the stiff resistance and ongoing clashes in Rastan.

The military official said the confrontation resulted in the killing and detention of many of the gunmen. He said Syrian troops were still pursuing members of the terrorist groups in an effort to restore security to Rastan.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Facebook Posts On Occupy Wall Street Protests Light Fire Under Mainstream Media

Facebook posts complaining that the mainstream media isn’t covering U.S. protests called Occupy may have had the desired effect: coverage.

The original demonstration, Occupy Wall Street, has been going on for 12 days as of this writing, with people camping out or threatening to do so in New York City’s financial district, to protest businesses’ influence over U.S. politics and lack of any immediate resolution of the global financial crisis.

These protests take inspiration from recent demonstrations in the Middle East, which were organized via Facebook and other social media.

A Google search for news stories about Occupy protests turns up 1,200 articles; the first five results shown:Time, New York Daily News, Huffington post, Reuters and the U.K. Guardian, in that order.

Quite possibly the Facebook posts complaining about a dearth of coverage in the mainstream media might have inspired reporters to get cracking.

And yet, Facebook users continue to complain about the shortage of mainstream media coverage of Occupy — which started on Wall Street and is just beginning to spread to other cities — several days after the desired articles have been showing up.

Public posts on the topic of Occupy Wall Street, along with calls to do similar protests in other cities, are going up on Facebook at an average rate of about once every six seconds as of this writing.

Notable among these posts: Shares of videos by the hacktivist group Anonymous calling for people to continue to post about the protests and rally others to ongoing protests; in the most recent of these, embedded beneath this post, Anonymous thanks the press for covering protests and asks all users of social media to keep posting about Occupy.

Readers, what are your friends saying about Occupy Wall Street and similar events planned for other U.S. cities?

Main image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Source: Internet

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Occupy Wall Street gets union support

NEW YORK, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- The union representing New York City transit workers has come out in support of Occupy Wall Street protesters demanding U.S. social and economic policy changes. 

The protesters, who argue U.S. social and economic policies unfairly favor the rich, secured the backing Thursday of the largest and most influential branch of the Transport Workers Union of America. 

Demonstrators march though the Financial District under a heavy
police presence as they protest the economic system on
September 20, 2011 in New York City. People are taking part in the
multi-day protest organized by "Occupy Wall Street" by camping
out in near-by Zuccotti Park and marching through the financial
district as people make their way to work. UPI/Monika Graff 

Local 100 President John Samuelsen said the branch's 38,000 city transit workers and 26,000 retirees share the protesters' view that while the richest New Yorkers get tax breaks, lower-income residents are struggling financially and forced to foot the bill for what they characterize as Wall Street's excesses. 

"They see the injustice in that and are highlighting the injustice by protesting, and we're supporting that effort," Samuelsen was quoted in the New York Daily News as saying. 

The protesters -- marching since Sept. 17 in the financial district, especially at the opening and closing stock-exchange bells -- also got advice from a small grassroots political party for a specific demand they could call for. 

They could call for a 50-cent Wall Street stock-trade surcharge, which it said would boost the U.S. economy at least $350 billion a year, Light Party founder Da Vic Raphael told United Press International Thursday night. 

"The Republicans say we don't want to spend more money because it will incur more debt," Raphael said. "So where is the money? On Wall Street. 

"The fact of the matter is, the people who precipitated this financial crisis are the people who continue to make a lot of money," said Raphael, whose party claims to represent "a synthesis of the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian and Green parties." 

He said the financial-transaction surcharge would be "a windfall" economic stimulus that "everyone needs to get behind." 

About 1,000 unionized registered nurses demonstrating outside the New York Stock Exchange in June called for the surcharge, saying the billions could "go back to our communities and go back to jobs and go back to healthcare." 

"Main Street bailed out Wall Street. Now it's time for Wall Street to bail out Main Street," Raphael told UPI. 

Occupy Wall Street did not immediately respond to a UPI e-mail requesting a comment. 

The movement, whose Facebook page had more than 5,400 supporters when UPI checked Thursday night, was recently accused of not having specific demands or a long-term strategy, despite its growth to scores of other U.S. cities, including sit-ins planned for Los Angeles Saturday and Washington Oct. 6. 

It has also received support from filmmaker Michael Moore, actress Susan Sarandon and activists Cornel West and Noam Chomsky. 

University of Michigan political science Professor Michael Heaney, who has studied social protest movements, told the Los Angeles Times the movement's demands could be as vague as simply calling for financial bailout programs to apply to individuals rather than banks.

© 2011 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

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Al-Qaida's al-Awlaki killed in airstrike

File - This October 2008 file photo by Muhammad ud-Deen
shows Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Yemen's Defense Ministry
said in a statement Friday Sept. 30, 2011 the U.S.-born al-Qaida cleric
Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed. (AP Photo/Muhammad ud-Deen, File)

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — The Yemeni government has released an official statement saying the U.S.-born al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed. The government says al-Awlaki was targeted and killed 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the town of Khashef in the Province of al-Jawf. The town is located 87 miles (140 kilometers) east of the capital Sanaa. The statement says the operation was launched on Friday around 9:55 a.m. It gave no other details. If the death is confirmed, al-Awlaki would be the most prominent al-Qaida figure to be killed since Osama bin Laden's death in a U.S. raid in Pakistan in May. 

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Anonymous - Occupy Wall Street - We are the 99% - Revolution Has Begun

Source: Internet

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Internet Censorship of Occupy Wall Street

Source: Internet

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Having YouTube issues? Here’s why

Rest in peace, YouTube. Or that’s what we would say, if YouTube wasn’t ping-ponging back and forth between usable and downright inaccessible.

At the time of this posting, YouTube has been experiencing issues for over 15 minutes from what we’ve noticed, denying several users access since the service disruption. For a social platform as large as YouTube, we’re curious to see whether this will greatly affect Partners and active YT consumers, or whether this is simply an excusable hiccup.

The site has continued to fluctuate during our update, and while trying to load up the popular video-sharing social network at around 1:20PM PST today, we received the following service error:

Several of our editors have attempted to access YouTube after being alerted to the above, only to turn up the following after refreshing youtube.com:

“502. That’s an error.

The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

Please try again in 30 seconds. That’s all we know.”

What’s going on, YouTube? Our sources say it “lost a rack in NY”, though we’re being reassured that “it shouldn’t take long to get back up.”

The YouTube Twitter account has also just posted this tweet confirming the error:

In a comment on Google+, one reader revealed that although he’s been seeing several users reporting the error, he’s had no problems accessing the service. Another source has also pinged me to confirm this statement, which leads us to believe the issue has only managed to affect some users rather than all consumers on YouTube.

Update 2:18 PMThough videos now appear to be functioning just fine, comments are still down across the platform.

Other currently known issues: The subscribe button is also unavailable, while users are experiencing problems viewing their actual subscriptions on the YouTube homepage.

We will, of course, keep you updated as things continue to progress. For the rest of you antsy folk who simply cannot wait for YouTube to resume normal function, sit tight and sound off in the comments.

Source: The Next Web

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Lawrence O'donnell with "The Last Word" on NYPD Police Brutality during #OccupyWallStreet

 

An excellent piece of main stream coverage on this past weekend, I'm sure this video wont be up long, but figured the folks looking at the vids on this channel would appreciate it.

Source: AnonOps

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700,000 websites hacked in a single shot by TIGER-M@TE

The largest hack ever made in a single shot !!!!

TiGER-M@TE had hacked 700,000 websites hosted on InMotion Hosting network in a single shot

Tiger-M@TE had given some of the domain i.e. about 2,00,00 to Zone-h (http://zone-h.com/archive/notifier=TiGER-M%40TE)

He claim "I hack 700000 websites in one shot, this may be a new world Record. After submitting 200,000 domains,zone-h was going down again and again and became almost unresponsive in the end.so i was unable to submit all websites.so i've listed all domains in attachment. It was not just a server hack, actually whole data center got hacked."

HIS PREVIOUS HACK: http://arazstenblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-bangladesh-site-own3d-by-tiger.html

 At InMotion website they gave an announcement saying:

" Dear Customer,

At around 4am EST, our system administration team identified a website defacement attack affecting a large number of customers. We are still investigating, but it appears that files named index.php have been defaced.

We are evaluating how this has occurred and our security team will have more information shortly.

11:30am EST Update

If you have a backup of your site, you may upload your index.php files to correct this. You may need to do this for each directory. If your site uses an index.html or index.htm, you will need to upload those files, then delete the index.php. For more help, please see How to Restore a File from your own Backup.

It is possible our automated restore system will also be working on correcting the issue while you are. If you see this happen, just upload again.

If you do not have a backup of your site, it is best to wait until our automated system has completed its attempt at restoring. At this point, we feel that should solve a majority of the defaced sites.

1pm EST Update

Systems has been successful in restoring a portion of the affect sites. They are refining their repair method now and should be able to begin deploying the update to additional sites shortly. Please bear with us for another 1 hour when we feel we will have more information to share.

Best Regards,

The InMotion Hosting Team "

Source: Internet

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Circle numbers appear in Google search

If you’re an author and decided to take the markup steps that Google+ announced a while back, your Google+ follower numbers are showing up next to your profile in Google search results.

In June, Google explained the new markup language this way:

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

A source confirmed that the next step of that feature, actually showing the number of Circles you’re in on Google+ in Google search results has been turned on.

The results look something like this, so if you’re searching for people or content on Google, you may spot this in the wild:

If you’d like to add this information to your site or blog to have the number of Circles you’re in to show up in results too, Google has set up a help center area to give you a hand.

While this is great for authors, we think that most Google+ users would want to turn this on for themselves, so hopefully Google makes that a feature for all soon, without having to do any coding on a website.

Would you even want this information to appear in Google search results or would it creep you out? Let us know in the comments.

Source: The Next Web

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Noam Chomsky about #OccupyWallStreet : Video

View Photo's of Occupy Wall Street September 28, 2011 (SHARE IT!)

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