Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly Inside the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center
The reality of what is happening in New York City has eclipsed the human capacity to absorb it. Four years after crippling the U.S. economy, Wall Street is still settling new cases of fraud each week by paying a fine and moving along to the next fraud and the next fine. Citigroup settled three cases just last week. This is the culture that landed the U.S. within a hairsbreadth of the second Great Depression and yet, incomprehensively, the coddling of the crime denizens continues while the media who attempt to cover protests against that culture are battered and jailed along with the protesters.
Exhibit A on the list of New York City insanity is the spy center created by the NYPD to cohabitate with Wall Street using $150 million of taxpayer funds – the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. Firms like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan sit alongside the NYPD and spy on law abiding journalists and protesters while $800 an hour lawyers settle the firms’ misdeeds for pennies on the dollar a few blocks away in the Court complex.
Now lawsuits are stacking up in those same courts showing a practice and pattern of physical assault on the media as well as illegally withholding documents from reporters who file Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests.
Attacks on the First Amendment’s freedom of the press guarantees have been going on for years in New York City but reached critical mass on the night of November 15, 2011 when Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly was personally on hand to supervise the 1 a.m. raid and eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park.
Kalle Lasn and Micah White, editor in chief and senior editor, respectively, of Adbusters magazine, credited with providing the original spark for the Occupy movement, described the raid in an oped for the Washington Post a few days later:
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