Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen “Nuch” Trutanich has offered those arrested in raids a deal. They can attend a class on the First Amendment for $355 to resolve the charges against them. (The company that would make a tidy bundle on this offer, American Justice Associates, was founded by a former prosecutor who also happens to be an ex-cop).
The question that arises is why any of the protesters would agree to any deal that admits guilt. The City Attorney knows that prosecuting each of those arrested would be cost-prohibitive, but more importantly, there is little chance of Trutanich finding 12 jurors who would convict any of them. Remember that well over 50% of Americans support the movement to some degree, many of them “very supportive” of the cause. How then can Trutanich or any other prosecutor expect to get a single conviction, especially in Los Angeles, when the charges are obviously part of an orchestrated effort to suppress the message of the protesters.
If all of those arrested were to demand full trials, the outcome would be a huge bill for the city caused by misdirecting resources to cases that are flimsy at best, and in the opinion of this writer, completely bogus and politically motivated. Why, therefore, would anyone accept such an offer or even consider it? The movement has much to gain from a trial.
First, the evidence which includes a lot of video, would become part of those trials which would favor the defendants and the movement in general. Second, the prosecution would be forced to incur a huge cost to the city while ignoring other cases that actually involve criminal activity, not an attractive scenario for prosecutors who have seen their budget cut 25% in the last year. Third, when it became apparent that convictions would be hard to come by, probably immeditately after the first trial, the effort would likely collapse, because repeating the process 300 times would obviously be an exercise in futility and a waste of the taxpayers money. Trutanich would have to justify the cost of those prosecutions, knowing that they were unlikely to result in convictions.
Prediction: Charges against the remaining protesters would be quickly dropped.
Meanwhile, the lapdog members of the media have mounted another attack, and as we have noted in the past, following the money usually leads you back to the same sources of money. In the case below, we find another organization that includes William Kristol who seems prone to executing media scams directed at the Occupation Movement:
by Joe Hicks
"Antonio Villaraigosa and the Los Angeles City Council have much to answer for."
“City officials should be held accountable for their role in this debacle. Occupy L.A.’s final cost to city taxpayers is still being tabulated, but the toll is expected to top $1 million. And for what?”
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/cjc1219jh.html
Joe R. Hicks works for PJ Media which is basically a subsidiary of the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Hicks and others who share his political views, appear to be satisfied to continue underreporting, misreporting, obfuscating, misrepresenting, and generally ignoring the salient facts and data that led to the Occupation Movement in the first place. He just provided another example.
So the real question, the only one that interests those of use who have watched this sort of crap spewing from the usual suspects, is how much you were paid for it and by whom? Our own cursory search provided this data thanks to unbiased sources like Wikipedia:
"PJ Media is a media company that uses the Internet to present and comment on the news."
"Founded in 2004 by a network primarily, but not exclusively, made up of conservatives and libertarians led by mystery writer, screenwriter, and blogger Roger L. Simon . . . The official name of the company is OSM Media, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, qualified to do business in California as OSM Media, LLC and it does business under DBAs of PJ Media and PJTV.”
Is it not significant, part of the story in fact, that the Manhattan Institute is a who's who of the usual suspects, conservative activists (including William Kristol who conceived the anti-semitism campaign that was eventually debunked by ADL and exposed as a media scam here) that have consistently used misinformation and phony storylines to attack the Occupy Wall Street movement. Here is the list of members, and to save time here is the bio on the Chairman of the Board Paul E. Singer founder of Elliot Management Corporation:
"Elliott Management Corporation is the management affiliate of hedge funds. Elliott Associates, L.P. and Elliott International Limited. Elliott was founded by Paul Singer, who also serves as CEO of the management company, which is based in New York City. From inception Elliott has generated for its investors a 14.6% net compound annual return, compared to 10.9% for the S & P stock index, and now has more than U.S. $16 billion in assets under management."
And you can go from there down the list yourself at this link:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/trustees.htm
One question Joey: When you picked up the check for writing your meandering, whining, ignorant article, who issued it? Where did it come from? Why were you engaged to write such dramatic prose, like “City officials should be held accountable” and so on? As a distinguished journalist I'm sure you'll agree that this is relevant information and directly relates to the content, agreed?
You see Joey, we have noted that on many occasions when crappy stories like this one show up that for some reason we also find some organized effort to publish this stuff, unlike the citizen journalists that contribute to this site. These organizations, like the Central City Association that lists the Los Angeles Times among its elite members, have a direct and vested interest in what they try and pass off as journalism. So when a conservative organization like PJMedia comes along and does the same, the natural tendency is to ask the questions listed above.
So any time you'd like to answer those fundamental questions, you are welcome to do so here. Of course, when organizations like the CCA operate behind the scenes, the answers to these questions are conspicuously absent. When Fox News when fishing for a story with the ADL accusations, we quickly found out the entire premise was baseless and orchestrated by no other than William Kristol, a long-time contributor to Fox, as well as a guy known helping to perpetrate these bogus storylines for political reasons.
It would make a lot of sense if you decided not to answer the obvious questions. After all, the motives and the cash flow are critical to honest reporting, something or adversaries have avoided almost as much as the message, the goals and objectives of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon. You pretty much proved it with another example of a rather useless article which sounds more like an adolescent rant from someone who writes as if he never spoke to anyone that he attacked. This, as we have learned, is typical of alleged journalists like yourself and some at other local news organizations that somehow couldn't find the time to verify their allegations or even bother to stop at the former encampment as most reputable journalists would to find out first-hand whether their reports were accurate.
Of course, it appears that the intent of the piece was to provide a platform for great journalistic moments like “scruffy leftists, drug-addled squatters, and union agitators” to describe the protesters, carefully avoiding any mention of the purpose of what has become social upheaval at the grass roots level. I guess in your limited journalistic universe, you forgot to mention that tens of thousands of people in California are displaced every month due to foreclosures, the process being patently illegal in many cases. But of course, that isn't as important as pointing out that “City officials should be held accountable for their role in this debacle. Occupy L.A.’s final cost to city taxpayers is still being tabulated, but the toll is expected to top $1 million. And for what?”
If you're really interested in the “for what” aspect of this, simply review the blogs under this post going back to October 5, 2011. You'll find that when an alleged journalist writes something like this, we already know they have not interest whatsoever in providing the answer to their own question, or an accurate portrayal of the movement because we never see them and therefore it is impoosible to verify or debunk their assertions. If after several months in the news, usually somewhere at the top of the page, you are still oblivious to the answer to your own question, it would appear that you have made little or no effort to answer your own question.
So I guess we could ask the same question of you Joey. You set out to obfuscate the reason why over 1400 cities have become engaged in a political dialog that only occurred because alleged journalists like yourself never bothered to report on the substantive issues that caused it. People with no voice in their representative government finally decided to make a statement and did so in dramatic fashion. As your organization pointed out, the movement remains newsworthy and so conservative interests have responded by employing tools like yourself to assist them, usually for money that comes from contributors like the Manhattan Institute and the CCA.
It was interesting to note that you incorporated a recent Field Poll:
“A Field Poll released the day before the LAPD’s raid on the Occupy Los Angeles camp found that 58 percent of California voters agree with the sentiment behind the protest movement, but nearly half said they don’t identify with the protesters themselves.”
OK, so is the glass half full or half empty? We could point to the same poll with the same impact; 58% of Californians agree with the sentiment. Not bad really, considering the lack of coverage by the mainstream media except for mindless excursions into the irrelevant aspects of the movement. And yes, nearly half (less than a majority) don't identify with the protesters. What exactly does that mean anyway? It is not surprising to find out that most people don't want to camp out at City Hall. Nor is it a revelation that that among the 58% that share our views, not as many see themselves as street protesters willing to carry signs because it is the only form of media exposure they can get.
I was wondering the same goddam thing!
“I am weary of hearing well-meaning friends question the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon. They ask, 'What do they want? They don't have any clear goals -- how can they hope to bring about change?'
“I want to ask:
"What was the meaning of Gandhi's fasts?
"What was the meaning of the Watts riots?
"What is the meaning of the young Syrian who set himself on fire because he could find no job, and started the Arab Spring?”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marilyn-sewell/occupy-wall-street-a-prop_b...
And this from the same Matt Taibbi who knows a thing or three about that which has been accurately and consistently described here. In fact, Mr. Taibbi was on the banking beat long before the Occupy Wall Street message spread around the world. A lot of people claim credit for the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon. Taibbi should be given an award for setting the table. Recommended reading:
“For those saying that Occupy Wall Street hasn't had a concrete effect, take a look at this. It's not much, but it's a little something. The leaders of the House Financial Services Committee announced yesterday that they will be holding hearings on the SEC's practice of concluding settlements with Wall Street defendants without forcing the accused to admit to wrongdoing.”
This article is what is known as a must-read and Mr. Taibbi has demonstrated on many occsasions that if your really want to know what is going on in the world, check out his work in Rolling Stone instead of tuning in to Fox News, (or anything written by Joe Hicks who along with most of the mainstream media population can miss the point even when it marches up to them with a giant sign spelling it out for them). This sort of hit-piece article proves that an alleged journalist can write all day about nothing and somehow manage to avoid the substance of the story.
Actually Joey, you anwered your own questions and somehow found a way to do it without any mention of the substantial political issues raised by Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Los Angeles and hundreds of others across America. “And for what?” you ask, proving that after all this time, after all the stories, articles, video footage, commentary, poltiical maneuvering, and clearly stated goals, you remain clueless as to the purpose of all of this. You managed to avoid any mention of socio-economic injustice, the criminality or malfeasance of the perpetrators of the various bank scams, the lack of enforeement of laws that were intended to prevent the looting of the Treasury and the destruction of the global economy. How you managed it, I'll never know, but your article proves that there is much more work to do to overcome the mainstream media lack of coverage and some of the inane incoming flak that obfuscates the important issues discussed here.
Now go cash your check and if you are interested in telling us about who commisioned the article and who paid for it, we will actually have a story to report that is relevant because following the money is usually a better story than the unfounded rants of those that receive it.
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