Re those arrested during Tuesday night's de-occupation of L.A. City Hall

http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/12/02/30170/prosecutors-file-criminal-charges-against-46-occup/

Key passage from the article (highlighting by me):
Most of those released qualified for a pre-filing diversion program, which allows nonviolent offenders without a criminal record to choose to complete a 90-day educational program to avoid prosecution for a $375 or $400 fee, [Earl]Thomas [chief of the criminal division for the City Attorney's office] said. He said they will receive information on the program in the mail.




The City Attorney’s Office can still file charges for a year according to the statue of limitations, Thomas said.



“If they complete the program and stay out of trouble for that year, while the statue is running, they have an opportunity to keep their record clear,” Thomas said.



The curriculum includes information about being a good citizen, the government, constitutional rights and the consequences of an arrest, among other issues. The course can be completed from home and fee payment can be made in installments, Thomas said. He said officials are looking at bringing in constitutional experts on the First Amendment including retired Supreme Court Justices to talk to participants.




The City Attorney’s Office made a request Thursday to include a condition within the release that would prevent people from returning to the City Hall lawn, but the court apparently denied that request, Thomas said. He said the Office has not had a chance to review cases processed Friday.

Various links/Twitter posts on the fall of Occupy L.A. City Hall.

"During the park closure, a First Amendment area will remain open on the Spring Street City Hall steps." --[Los Angeles mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa--Neon Tommy (via Twitter)

Dear Media: When the police tell you to leave IS WHEN YOU STAY. You're supposed to be a check on this kind of power!--Wil Wheaton (via Twitter)




Notable unlawful assemblies: Second Constitutional Congress, Southern lunch counter sit-ins.--Devin Faraci (via Twitter)

For Context for non-LA ppl, #occupyLA is about 3 blocks from a permanent tent city for the homeless, never shut down for health reasons.--Nick Robinson (via Twitter)

RT @KPCCLive: As far as we can tell, LAPD did not ever employ non-lethal enforcement like bean bags, tear gas.--Kevin Roderick (LA OBSERVED) via Twitter.

‎3:14 AM Just now on OccupyFreedomLA Ustream, a witness says she is looking at about 20 undercover police officers fist bumping with uniformed officers. They apparently looked just like all the occupiers clad in 99% t-shirts--via laist.com


http://laist.com/2011/11/30/occupy_la_raid_the_morning_after.php
 

#OccupyLA peaceful protestors held on $5,000 bail for "unlawful assembly" To date, Wall Street Banksters go uncharged & are free. #OWS~OA--Official Occup L.A. tweet


http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/media-choreography-and-the-occupy-la-raid/249277/

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/30/occupy_wall_street_camps_in_los

Ruth Fowler of Occupy L.A. on what happened outside the LAPD-allowed "media pool":
http://www.occupylosangeles.org/?q=node%2F2445

HERDING OCCUPY L.A. OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND BLUES

New poem HERDING OCCUPY L.A. OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND BLUES

(for poet Scott Wannberg and his Canine of Truth Sparky)




get along little protesters



get out of the street



get onto the sidewalk



fold your banners



and pack up your tents



because you're making



THE LOS ANGELES TIMES



and television journalists mad as Heck



now the hounds are baying for Charlie Beck



to tear off his peaceful-interaction



make-them-disappear-by-attrition mask



and emerge as the Incredible Two-Headed Hybrid



of Darryl Gates and Ed Davis



crying havoc



and unleashing the tasers and batons



get along little protesters



business must do whatever it wants



we're not going to listen to you Occupy people



since our city is not a city of "the people"



but a city of, by and for



the Very Important People



of AEG



WE NEED A NEW FOOTBALL STADIUM!



get along little protesters



go play with the other weird fuzzy-haired,



fuzzy-brained hippie kids



in Occupy Orange County



or Occupy Long Beach



or wherever you can be more easily ignored



by the state, nation and world



go away little protesters



go home and eat low-fat granola



drink your soy lattes



watch your Noam Chomsky videos



and let us govern,



while the silent majority occupies sidewalks



outside theaters and big-box stores



we love the silent majority



they know to SHUT UP AND CONSUME



and take what they're given



no matter how bad it is now



or how much worse it will be



we'll be glad when



everyone forgets all about



this trouble-stirring business-unfriendly



nonsense of Occupying public space



that we'll always find reasons



to throw you out of



once we're tired of your madness



.

Remember the Bonus Army of 1932 in wake of Occupy crackdowns.

Below is a history lesson that, ideally, should be read by people like NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and L.A. OBSERVED business columnist Mark Lacter (both of which fulminated on the Occupy movement last week, throwing out the usual "dirty, intellectually incoherent, unrealistic hippies" stereotypes).

Wikipedia entry on the Bonus Army of World War One veterans who occupied Washington D.C. in 1932:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

From the Wikipedia article:
Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.
A second, smaller Bonus March in 1933 at the start of the Roosevelt Administration was defused with promises instead of military action. In 1936, Congress overrode President Franklin D. Roosevelt's veto to pay the veterans their bonus years early.

Observations for this Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving originally was a holiday celebrating diverse cultures being able to sit together and share a meal, marinating in good will towards people other than themselves.  In 2011, Thanksgiving is a holiday where employees of megastores get to curtail their family time to go to work very late/very early to service
consumers on what is now known as "Black Friday."

"Black Friday" was once an inside-business term for the Friday-after-Thanksgiving sales.  In recent years, the store-opening times were switched to ungodly hours like 5:00 a.m.  This year, because megastores expect the economy to improve enough to strip $20 billion from consumer wallets, Black Friday has turned into Black Thursday-and-Friday.

In 2011, families will sacrifice their family togetherness/good will to stand in front of megastores most of Thanksgiving Day to enter stores as early as 10:00 p.m to buy high-tech items at low low prices.  Or, if they're interested in shopping at Best Buy, they're already sleeping outside or in tents--a method of occupying public space that's more acceptable to government/corporate cultures than the Occupy movement that's being beaten/pepper-sprayed in a city near you.

Speaking of Occupy Los Angeles as it celebrates Thanksgiving before its inevitable forced retreat from L.A.'s City Hall: it's rather pitiful that the city of Los Angeles is unwilling to heed the economic inequity message of the movement instead of making half-assed offers of dollar-a-year store space in the L.A. Mall underneath the Fletcher Bowron Plaza.

[Sidebar: I'm imagining how quickly Occupy Los Angeles would have been crushed by the LAPD/L.A. City Council if the tents/protestors had appeared in, say, Beverly Hills or Century City rather than around City Hall--a part of Downtown that hasn't yet become completely gentrified.]

And, closing this post, here's a Hall of Shame re naysayers towards the Occupy movement:
1. CHUCK HENRY--everybody's favorite blowdried ex-travel host (EYE ON L.A.) turned inexplicably long-running KNBC-TV anchorman made a sort of yucky smiley-face the other night when introducing a story about Occupy L.A.; it was the most contemptuous "they're a bunch of dirty hippies" grin/grimace worthy of the next person on this list.
2. MICHAEL BLOOMBERG--curious if anyone caught MSNBC Tuesday morning to see the grotesque farce of the New York City mayor defending his recent misbehavior to Andrea Mitchell; Ms. Mitchell is married to one-time economic majordomo Alan Greenspan, who helped create the masters-and-serfs feudalism that's the United States in 2011.
3. BERNARD PARKS/THE LOS ANGELES TIMES--the ex-LAPD chief trotted out a whopper of an unlikely scenario--that "neo-Nazis" could one day occupy the space around City Hall ; the city's Newspaper of Record thought Parks' overstatement was so nice, it repeated it twice (both in a "news" article and an editorial).

SLATE's Dahlia Lithwick makes it perfectly clear what the people protesting with OWS want.

Highlighting by me:

For the past several years, while the mainstream media was dutifully reporting on all things Kardashian or (more recently) a wholly manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, ordinary people were losing their health care, their homes, their jobs, and their savings. Those people have taken that narrative to Facebook and Twitter—just as citizens took to those alternative forms of media throughout the Middle East as part of the Arab Spring. And just to be clear: They aren’t holding up signs that say “I want Bill O’Reilly’s stuff.” They aren’t holding up signs that say “I am animated by toxic levels of envy and entitlement.” They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear: They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children. They want—wait, no, we want—to be heard by a media that has devoted four mind-numbing years to channeling and interpreting every word uttered by a member of the Palin family while ignoring the voices of everyone else.


And there’s this. The mainstream media thrives on simple solutions. It has no idea whatsoever of how to report on a story that isn’t about easy fixes so much as it is about anguished human frustration and fear. The media prides itself on its ability to tell you how to clear your clutter, regrout your shower, or purge your closet of anything that makes you look fat—in 24 minutes or less. It is bound to be flummoxed by a protest that offers up no happy endings. Luckily for us, #OWS doesn’t seem to care.
 
The entirety of Ms. Lithwick's article can be found here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/10/how_ows_confuses_and_ignores_fox_news_and_the_pundit_class_.html

Latest mainstream media response to Occupy protests.

It's safe to say that there are three essential responses by the mainstream media to demonstrations organized by progressives/liberals/The Left :

1. They're unseemly!


2. They're full of all sorts of groups with different agendas!


3. Not THAT many people are out there demonstrating!

And now here's Number 4--
They're costing cities lots of money!

From today's LOS ANGELES TIMES:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-occupy-lawn-web-20111020,0,6466227.story