THIS IS WHAT A POLICE STATE LOOKS LIKE!

While we slept – or (obsessively watched the stream) Oakland erupted! Watch the video for more click here
 Occupy Oakland JAN 28 2012

Occupy celebrates Montana rejection of Citizens United

Occupy celebrates Montana rejection of Citizens United
OfftheBus contributor Debra Bullington writes from Helena, Montana.
On January 21, representatives from Occupations all over the Montana – Bozeman, Great Falls, Livingston, Missoula, Boulder and Helena – came together to celebrate the Montana Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a state law banning corporate spending in state and local political campaigns. read full article on Huffington Post click here

Can’t Unring the Bell

Can’t Unring the Bell. How Eager Corporate Media Are To Write Our Epitaph!

From the Helena Independent Record’s inaccurate (by an order of magnitude) and dismissive “reporting” of our January 21 event celebrating the Montana Supreme Court’s upholding of Montana’s 1912 Corrupt Practices Act in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, to this AP article:

“The national Occupy Wall Street movement, which denounces corporate excess and economic inequality, began in New York City in the fall but has been largely dormant lately.

Oakland, New York and Los Angeles were among the cities with the largest and most vocal Occupy protests early on. The demonstrations ebbed after those cities used force to move out hundreds of demonstrators who had set up tent cities.”

What they don’t get:

This movement is here to stay. Its form will surely continue to evolve. Its visibility to the corporate media may wax and wane.

But it has already utterly changed the national conversation. Before Occupy Wall Street’s initial action on September 17, 2011, the clueless, easily bamboozled corporate media were obsessed with a phony, right-wing-manufactured “debt crisis”. This misguided obsession helped enable tea-party zealots to do what had never before been done:  to hold the “full faith and credit” of the United States Treasury hostage to extremist partisan demands, resulting in a first-ever downgrading of U.S. government credit-worthiness to create a manufactured “crisis” that wasn’t. Occupy forced into the national consciousness the awareness of the real unemployment and widening-economic-injustice crises that we actually face. If that ended up being Occupy’s only accomplishment, it would remain huge, indeed.

But of course, it isn’t. Do you suppose Senators Baucus and Tester’s recent endorsement of a Constitutional Amendment to negate Citizens United occurred in a vacuum? Did you imagine President Obama’s highlighting of the issue and adoption of populist language in his State of the Union address were in the works before Occupy turned these things into a national grassroots movement?

Just how naïve are you?

How to get involved

Next General  Assembly:  Saturday, February 18, Staggering Ox 3 PM in the back at the shades of Ox
Our current work groups are: Community Connections,  HCTV the OH-show, Media, Technology, Direct Action ,  Financial, Newsletter (Helena Occupied) If you would like to help in any of these efforts come to a GA or email: occupyhelena@gmail.com. We have a twitter account twitter.com/occupyhelena @occupyhelena to follow. We have a lively free speech Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/OccupyHelena

Mind Control – Weapon of Mass Persuasion

Remembering Howard Zinn

The historian and activist dedicated his life to “the countless small actions of unknown people”.
 Editor’s note: Today, January 27, is the second anniversary of the death of Howard Zinn. An active participant in the Civil Rights movement, he was dismissed in 1963 from his position as a tenured professor at Spelman College in Atlanta after siding with black women students in the struggle against segregation. In 1967, he wrote one of the first, and most influential, books calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. A veteran of the US Army Air Force, he edited The Pentagon Papers, leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and was later designated a “high security risk” by the FBI.

His best-selling A People’s History of the United States spawned a new field of historical study: People’s Histories. This approach countered the traditional triumphalist examination of “history as written by the victors”, instead concentrating on the poor and seemingly powerless; those who resisted imperial, cultural and corporate hegemony. Zinn was an award-winning social activist, writer and historian – and so who better to share his memory than his close friend and fellow intellectual giant, Noam Chomsky?  click to read article on ALJAZEERA