http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/441-occupy/8561-how-to-get-the-cops-to-protect-you
Author Naomi Wolf and her partner Avram Ludwig were arrested in New York at an Occupy Wall Street protest, 10/18/11. (photo: Mike Shane/Guardian UK)
ow is the time to get cops on board with the OWS movement — especially now that Alternet has broken the story that municipal police are being pushed around by a shadowy private policing consultancy affiliated with DHS. If you study any closing society decent people get handed monstrous orders and are forced to comply, and right now municipal police are being forced to comply with brutal orders from this corporate police consultancy, by economic pressure.
When I was in Zuccotti Park last week I thanked the cops each personally for standing peacefully by while citizens exercised first amendment rights and thought they could not say anything many faces softened, smiled and seemed relieved not to be demonized…it is hard for cops to be put in positions that dehumanize them too and psychologically traumatizing to be forced to act against their morals. This is a war and they are forced into front lines they did not choose. So Occupy, and everyone, be kind to the cops whenever you can please, thank them when they are non-violent, reach out to them.
Most importantly: I would say it would be VERY powerful for an OWS representative (NOT A LEADER! JUST A ROLE!) to reach out to the policemens' benevolent associations in each city and try to find common ground. Even if you can't get decent ground rules it will have a softening effect. Also the OWS rep should ask: " how can we help you…?" There are thing cops need too that Occupy could help deliver.
What most citizens don't fully understand is that hardball politics behind the scenes is not about confrontation — it is about waging favors. Most effective it is veiled confrontation (what can that group conceivably do to me if I make them angry?) combined with overt offers of favors (what can they get for me?) Occupy is in a very powerful position if they only begin to understand this. If If you REALLY want to know how the game is played — a game that is being played right now AGAINST you — you would have the OWS reps in every city go to a meeting with police benevolent association with your LOCAL REGISTERED VOTER LISTS in hand and say, "we want to put better pay and retirement for cops and other first responders on the ballot and are willing to get out the vote for this."
This will work miracles. THEN THEY ARE BEING COURTED BY TWO PAYMASTERS.. that gives them freedom they don't now have to resist orders to be brutal — .then they have a way to NOT listen to Chase Bloomberg DHS etc because YOU have their back and they have an alternative to beating the sh– out of you — Chase is seeking them out, and offering them 3.6 million in 'help', you seek them out and offer a get out the vote drive that is worth millions more to them — YOU become their constituency and their allies AGAINST the banks, shadowy police consultancy, DHS etc — that is how the big boys play. This will literally save lives, not to mention make OWS or other citizen groups an unstoppable force.
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France's former first lady worked to help the world's vulnerable
PARIS -- Well before the Occupy movement took on Wall Street, the former first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, was leading the charge against capitalist excess.
"Everybody knows that the foundation of the system today is money: Money is the guru, money decides everything. ... That's why we are working to get out of this system," she told RTL radio last month, summing up a lifelong cause in one of her last interviews before her death on Tuesday at 87.
Such resistance defined the life of Mitterrand, the widow of France's first Socialist president, François Mitterrand.
While her family harboured men being hunted by the Gestapo during the Second World War, Danielle joined the French Resistance at the age of 19, along with her elder sister, Christine, and was later awarded the prestigious Resistance Medal.
In 1941, she helped François Mitterrand, a fellow resistance fighter codenamed "Captain Morland," who was also on the run. They married in 1944.
That union eventually gave her a bully pulpit - during François' 14 years as president - that she used to advocate for many left-leaning causes.
She supported Marxist rebels in El Salvador, ethnic minorities such as Kurds and Tibetans and vociferously opposed capitalist excess.
The couple had three sons, one of whom, Pascal, died at a young age.
Danielle Mitterrand died before dawn after being hospitalized at Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris in recent days for fatigue, her foundation France Libertés said.
As first lady, Mitterrand shucked the tradition of her predecessors who largely kept to the background. In a 1986 interview with the Associated Press, her blue eyes flashed at the suggestion she resembled a high-profile American first lady.
"There is no traditional role" for a first lady, Mitterrand said. "Each woman has her own personality and ... acts according to her conscience and her sensibilities."
Yet in contrast to her outspoken approach to politics, she kept quiet for years about one aspect of her personal life: a secret relationship her husband had had with Anne Pingeot, a museum curator 28 years his junior and the mother of his long-secret daughter, Mazarine Pingeot.
He died of cancer less than a year after leaving office in 1995. In an especially poignant moment in French politics, the widowed Danielle stood before the late president's coffin alongside his mistress and daughter, whose out-of-wedlock birth and existence were long kept from the French public.
Her foundation said Danielle Mitterrand found guidance in a phrase of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: "It's not right to want to heal the suffering of people without committing to fight the very causes of this suffering."
She created several charities and crisscrossed the world in defence of human rights. She once kissed Cuba's Fidel Castro at a residence for visiting dignitaries near the presidential Élysée Palace.
Mitterrand urged worldwide unity to "put an end to economic and financial dictatorship, the henchman of political dictators. Finally, they seem to be shaken by the anger of peoples."
"Of course, the world revolves around the Dow Jones, the Nikkei stock index or the CAC 40 (French stock index). ... But all around the world, little voices are being raised to say that man is unhappy even if the stock market is doing well," Mitterrand told Le Figaro newspaper in 1996.
Thirteen years ago, Mitterrand visited in prison Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who has spent nearly 30 years on death row over his 1982 conviction for killing a white police officer in Philadelphia.
And in 2008, Mitterrand denounced American support for foes of Bolivia's leftist president Evo Morales, and accused "fascist gangs" of intimidating native peoples in the South American country.
France Libertés, whose focus has been human rights and had recently made a top priority of getting drinking water to those without it around the world, said Mitterrand left behind "a message of hope."
Praise and appreciation for her poured in from across France's political spectrum Tuesday.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said: "Neither the setback nor the victory caused her to deviate from the road she had laid for herself: giving a hearing to the voice of those that no one wanted to hear."
Her nephew Frederic Mitterrand, who now serves as culture minister in Sarkozy's conservative government, told BFM TV that his aunt "did a lot to humanize the role of first ladies."
Danielle Emilienne Isabelle Gouze was born Oct. 29, 1924, in Verdun, a town in northeastern France known as one of the First World War's biggest killing fields.
Under the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War, her father, a Socialist-leaning school principal, lost his job after refusing a state order to list all Jewish students and teachers for authorities, according to Mitterrand's foundation.
In March, 1944, she took her own stand and joined the Resistance.
She leaves sons Gilbert and Jean-Christophe.
A burial service is planned for Saturday in the eastern town of Cluny.
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