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We are the 99 percent

Veterans Peace Team Calls on Police to Cease Aggression Against Peaceful Protesters

Posted 11 years ago on July 24, 2012, 3:48 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

In June, U.N. envoys called on the U.S. government to protect the rights of peaceful protesters. However, the rights to free speech and freedom of assembly to demand redress of grievances by the government continue to be met instead with police violence and efforts to intimidate and deter protesters. From Seattle to Los Angeles to Minneapolis to New York, police are increasing their aggression towards peaceful Occupy protesters by their presence in large numbers dressed in riot gear, the use of weapons such as rubber bullets and pepper spray and escalating charges against those who are arrested.

  • On the morning of July 10, a SWAT police team in Seattle, WA, raided an apartment where organizers of the Occupy Movement were staying. The organizers were working on the “Everything 4 Everyone Festival.” There were no arrests but the apartment was ransacked.
  • In Los Angeles, police are escalating their attack on Occupiers and others who are using chalk messaging to increase awareness about a dispute between a development corporation and small businesses, people of color and homeless people who are being forced out of the area near Skid Row in downtown. There have been more than a dozen arrests, outrageous bails set and aggression, including rubber bullets and bean bags that have caused serious injuries to peaceful protesters. In Anaheim, police opened fire with rubber bullets on a crowd and turned an attack dog loose on a woman holding a baby.
  • Occupy Our Homes protesters in Minneapolis are now being charged with serious crimes in an effort to prevent more protesters from defending people being forced out of their homes.
  • Recently in New York, Occupiers who walked 99 miles from the Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia to New York City as part of the Guitarmy March were greeted with police aggression. [See below]

These recent events come on the heels of possible high profile entrapments of Occupiers in alleged incidents in Chicago and Cleveland. All of this seems to be a co-ordinated law enforcement clampdown against Occupy.

Tarak Kauff, a U.S. Army veteran, a member of Veterans For Peace and one of the founders of the Veterans Peace Team, says, “We are now and always have been a country led by wealthy politicians and business interests addicted to war and violence as a source of wealth and power. They instigated and waged war on indigenous peoples living relatively peacefully on this continent and the wars have continued unabated from there. Violence now permeates practically every aspect of our culture but we are seeing it manifested most by those who carry weapons and badges, those very people and institutions we depend upon to 'keep the peace.'"

Veterans For Peace and the Veterans Peace Team call on law enforcement officers to use restraint, common sense and negotiation when encountering peaceful protesters and to cease using violence upon them. We recognize that individual law enforcement personnel are working people, and we urge them not to protect the vested corporate interests exploiting people and poisoning the planet, but to honor their commitment to serve and protect the people.

The Veterans Peace Team (VPT) was created earlier this year "to nonviolently confront, document, and thereby expose the inherent or actual violence of those institutions that would use violence to impose their will on others." The Veterans Peace Team is a national project of Veterans For Peace in response to increasing police and other law enforcement crackdowns on peaceful Occupy encampments and marches.

Video: The Occupy Guitarmy 99 Mile March peacefully returns to Wall Street from the National Gathering in Philadelphia and is attacked by the NYPD. Trigger warning!

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4 Comments


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[-] 1 points by freewriterguy (882) 11 years ago

I think we should keep a long and public list of these public offenders for the day of restitution. In that day, the "Im just doing my job isn't going to cut it."

Name: Address: ATTENTION: "PUBLIC SERVANT(S)", On the night of December 23, 1913 the United States Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act and thereby committed the greatest act of TREASON in history. It surrendered this nation's sovereignty and sold the American people into slavery to a cabal of arch-charlatan international bankers who proceeded to plunder, bankrupt, and conquer this nation with a money swindle. The "money" the banks issue is merely bookkeeping entries. It cost them nothing and is not backed by their wealth, efforts, property, or risk. It is not redeemable except in more debt paper. The Federal Reserve Act forced us to pay compound interest on thin air. We now use worthless "notes" backed by our own credit that we cannot own and are made subject to compelled performance for the "privilege." From 1913 until 1933, the United States paid the "interest" with more and more gold. The structured inevitability soon transpired: the Treasury was empty, the debt was greater than ever, and the United States declared bankruptcy. In exchange for using notes belonging to bankers who create them out of nothing on our own credit, we are forced to repay in substance (labor, property, land, businesses, resources - life) in ever-increasing amounts. This may be the greatest heist and fraud of all time. When a government goes bankrupt, it loses its sovereignty. In 1933 the United States declared bankruptcy, as expressed in Roosevelt's Executive Orders 6073, 6102, 6111, and 6260, House Joint Resolution 192 of June 5, 1933, confirmed in Perry v. United States, (1935) 294 U.S. 330-381, 79 L.ed 912, as well as 31 USC 5112, 5119, and 12 USC 95A. The bankrupt United States went into receivership, reorganized in favor of 115 creditors and new owners. In 1913, Congress turned over America... lock, stock and barrel to a handful of criminals whose avowed intent from the beginning was to plunder, bankrupt, conquer, and enslave the people of the United States of America and eliminate this nation from the face of the earth. The goal was, and is, to absorb America into a one-world private commercial government, a "New World Order." With the Erie R.R. v Tompkins case of 1938, the Supreme Court confirmed their success. We are now in an international private commercial jurisdiction in colorable admiralty-maritime under the Law Merchant. We have been conned and betrayed out of our sovereignty, rights, property, freedom, common law, Article III Courts, and... our Republic. The Bill of Rights has been statutized into "civil rights" in commerce. America has been stolen. We have been made slaves, i.e. permanent debtors, bankrupt, in legal incapacity, rendered commercial "persons," "residents," and corporate franchisees known as "citizens of the United States" under the so-called "14th Amendment." Said "Amendment," which was never ratified - see Congressional Record, June 13, 1967; Dyett v. Turner, (1968) 439 P2d 266, 267; State v. Phillips, 1975 (affirmed) - created a citizenship for corporations, abstract statutory entities which are the products and definitions of the legislature and are fully taxable and regulatable thereby. Thomas Jefferson's prophecy has come to pass: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency... the banks... will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." Since 1933 what is called the "United States Government" is a privately owned corporation of the Federal Reserve/IMF. It is merely an instrument whereby the banksters administer their ongoing subjugation and plunder of what was once considered "the last great hope of human freedom." All "public servants," officials, Congressmen, politicians, judges, attorneys, law enforcement officers, States and their various agencies, etc., are the express agents of these foreign principals - see Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938; 22 USC 286 et seq, 263A, 185G, 267J, 611(C) (ii) & (iii); Treasury Delegation Order #91 - who have stolen the country by clever, intentional, and unrelenting fraud, trickery, treachery, non-disclosure, mis-representation, intrigue, coercion, conspiracy, murder (example: the murder of President John F. Kennedy and the continuing cover-up), etc. If there is a greater tragedy in human history it is hard to know what it is. An insidious aspect of this is that "officials" like you may think you are "public servants," or upholding the "law," or other hoaxes. In truth you are conscientiously and assiduously serving the arch-enemies of yourselves, your own rights, your fellow citizens, continued... human rights, life, and freedom in general. YOU are seditiously administering the plunder, bankruptcy, conquest, destruction, dismantling, and elimination of your country. YOU are systematically defrauding, extorting, impoverishing, and injuring human life on the basis of crimes and lies of such magnitude, depth, and proportions as to be beyond human comprehension. By so doing, you are committing TREASON and PERFIDY so immense as "to make the angels weep." If you and your fellow "officials" do not understand the real situation, you are ignorant, naive, deceived, and conned. You are sheer dupes. If you do know and are parties to it, you are guilty of evil and heinous BETRAYAL. You are in such case TRAITORS and CRIMINALS. All of you "in power" are therefore, either fools or knaves, either of which eminently invalidates your "authority" and renders null and void absolutely all moral obligation to pay allegiance or to obey the TREASONOUS SYSTEM you enforce with such mechanical viciousness. If, you, "public servants" had any shred left of humanity, awe, heart, clarity, sanity, access to your true being and conscience, you would instantly resign and do everything possible to inform the American people of their plight and help us retrieve our rights and our country. Only by such means can you even begin to atone for your endless crimes against humanity, the lives you so arrogantly and mindlessly butcher with the "meat-grinder of the law." You DID NOT CREATE the lives you "legally" assault; they DO NOT belong to you. Ignorance of the law - moral and natural law - is no excuse. You cannot engage in bringing harm to life and, like the Nazi's defense at Nuernberg, presume that because you do so under the "authority" of an imaginary, abstract, unreal legal fiction called "government" you are freed of the consequences of your acts. Moral and natural law are not obviated by ignorance, hubris and self-righteous militancy. Your entire system - from the ground up - is deceit and fraud. It is illicit in essence and ab initio. As Broom's Maxims 297, 729 put it: "A right of action cannot arise out of fraud." Honor is earned by honesty and integrity, not under false and fraudulent pretenses. The color of the cloth one wears cannot cover up the usurpations, lies, and treachery. "When black is fraudulently declared to be white, not all will live in darkness." More and more people are awakening to the truth. What do you think the American people will do as they discover that they have no more country, that they are slaves to mortal enemies, that they have been tricked and betrayed by their "leaders" who sold them out? what do you think they will do when they realize that all their alleged "public servants" are willing or stupidly compliant parties to the plunder, bankruptcy, subjugation, and ruin of their lives and country? Thomas Jefferson wrote: "An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens." Lincoln said: "Just as I would not be a slave, neither would I be a master." I will not participate in your corrupt, arrogant, and cruel fraud, either as perpetrator or victim. The great Indian poet Tagore wrote: "Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims." I will no longer sit here and writhe. The TYRANNY over this nation MUST END! If you continue with this course, you will have natural and moral law and higher powers to answer to, not to mention all those you have wronged under phony color of law. You will also have your own laws turned against you, as you have turned the law against us. To transform the shield of protection into a sword of exploitation, subjugation, and plunder is perfidy. You have now been placed on notice. All further actions on your part will be willful! Signed: All Rights Reserved Without Prejudice. _, Sui Juris. Resolutely, an American who demands his country back.

[-] 1 points by DKAtoday (33802) from Coon Rapids, MN 11 years ago

Tweeted.

I was talking with someone the other day and we were saying how as the Russians "appear" to be moving in the direction of democracy ( kinda-sorta anyway ) the USA seems to be moving towards a puppet government dictatorship of the corpoRATions. We were wondering if some other country would start beaming in support by way of satellite a radio free USA program to encourage us to hold on for the day when democracy can be implemented in this country.

[-] 1 points by frogmanofborneo (602) from New York, NY 11 years ago

This is what they do. It's not gonna change. The people have to respond.

[-] 1 points by Bighead1883 (285) 11 years ago

Americans are outraged at the societal breakdown caused by kleptocratic corporatocray yet are obviously not as outraged as Canadians.It can be seen in the size of of the protest march.Europe is ready to really show it`s further dissent to the austerity measures with other Western economies contracted enough now for their populations to grumble about world fiscal criminality.The crocked financial systems tsunami rolls on in the new blockbuster from Hollywood 'GFC Forever' coming to a suburban street near you,probably sooner than you think.