by Aaron Colter

At the time of writing this, protesters in lower Manhattan have been occupying public spaces for five days now. Over the weekend, the ranks of marchers swelled to over 5,000, but only around 200 seem to be holding down the area on a regular basis, with a handful arrested each day in Zuccotti Park, formerly known as Liberty Plaza until a real estate company and architecture firm donated $8 million to renovate the area and rename the public space. Fitting, is it not?

First proposed by Adbusters, I covered #OccupyWallStreet and reasons why the movement was valid earlier this month. Although AdBusters gained a huge boost in notoriety when members of Anonymous decided to throw support behind the protest, the magazine fell short of the 20,000 strong army it called for to take to the streets.

It’s pretty easy to understand why there aren’t more people in the parks in New York City right now – we’re broke and busy. Whether keeping workers in America right on the edge of poverty to quell uprisings is a reality or a radical conspiracy doesn’t matter, the fact is that, socially, there is huge online support for the protests, but very few bodies taking action.

Why? Probably because getting to one of the most expensive cities in the world and taking two months off of work to write on cardboard signs and chant slogans would be financially devastating to millions who may otherwise come out for an afternoon rally. Lupe Fiasco and Roseanne Barr, who restated her run for President to protestors, might be some of the only people talking about the #OccupyWallStreet protest on a regular basis who can afford to take time off from grinding out a living each day.

Just as law enforcement officials enacted an obscure law from long ago to arrest protestors in Toronto for the G20 demonstrations, the NYPD has been arresting individuals covering their faces, specifically with V for Vendetta masks, under an ordinance that originally sought to stop a peasant farmer revolt.

You can watch a live steam of the protests on the AnonOps Blog. I just watched another protestor be arrested as people chanted “The whole world is watching!” But as reporter Will Bunch pointed out, many mainstream news sources have been rather quiet about the events happening in New York.

Tensions are running high as the police and protestors continue a dangerous game, walking a tightrope between out-of-control riots and peaceful demonstrations. The impending execution of Troy Davis in Georgia this week, as well as Yahoo flagging outgoing emails which referenced ‘occupywallst.org’ as spam, have caused further anger among protesters who see, real or imaginary, forces working against their efforts to be heard.

In some ways #OccupyWallStreet is a failure. I suspect more and more people will be arrested, and if the police are smart, they will do it in the most peaceful way possible, slowly, day by day, until the core of the group is hollowed out and the remaining protestors give up and go home. Because the numbers of demonstrators is so low, and fluctuates so wildly depending on the time of day, this tactic could very well work. If, however, police become more violent, or if protestors can find a catalyst for broad public appeal, more and more people could start to flood into Manhattan from Brooklyn and outlying areas – those who are right on the cusp of heading down to Liberty Plaza.

However, in other ways #OccupyWallStreet is already a win. It’s shown that the youth are no longer afraid to take to the streets, and while we may be more likely to post on Twitter than we are to dress up as a comic book character and mock cops, there are some of us who are not afraid. But if this movement is to be successful, we must have a long view. Look at what the Pirate Party just accomplished in Berlin.

No matter what happens this week, at least some people in America and around the world know there are still some bold enough to go to jail for what they believe (and others who are willing to order pizza for them while they await arrest), and that spark, that idea, can be used to mold the next generation to become freer and fairer than the last.

To watch what is happening in New York, follow the search trend #OccupyWallStreet on Twitter and visit OccupyWallSt.org.

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By Theodore O. Lawrence

A federal class action lawsuit was filed on Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union charging Linn State Technical College with violating their students’ right to privacy by forcing them to submit to drug tests. At this publicly funded university, even attendees with clean academic and criminal backgrounds are made to undergo urinalysis at their own expense, which could potentially reveal other private medical conditions such as pregnancies and current prescriptions. This is information that students have a right to protect according to the ACLU. Though the policy was halted by order of a Federal District Court Judge just a few hours after the suit was filed, the case is yet to be decided and could represent a wider change in thinking about the way universities can treat their students.

“This case goes beyond Linn State. We filed our complaint in federal court not to just stop Linn State, but to stop any other college that thinks they can drug test their student body,” writes Will Matthews on the ACLU blog.

This new policy requires all first-year students as well as those returning after a semester or more of absence to pay $50 for the test. Those testing positive after their first go around will be required to re-submit in 45 days. If the results are positive again, students will be dismissed without even the benefit of a refund on their tuition fees.

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by Darrah de jour

When I was in eighth grade, after two years of scratching, clawing, whining and whimpering outside the door of the popular girls, I was finally let in. I scored a cute boyfriend, who, without coincidence, was my BFF Paula’s* boyfriend’s best friend. Paula (a Queen Bee) was a transplant from a nearby school and was part Filipino with gorgeous thick black hair, thick black eyebrows, tan skin and a smattering of freckles on her nose. She wasn’t particularly thin and this made me happy. I was happy because I was 13 and absolutely obsessed with my weight. Plus, if she was super-popular and not super-skinny, then maybe I could be too!

I was dreadfully insecure, and covered this up by being overly-nice, pleasing everybody within a four mile radius, not doing things my popular friends told me not to, and doing pretty much anything they approved of. This included wearing overalls with one suspender hanging down, walking during P.E. instead of running, even though I was a great runner (thus, getting a B instead of an A), ditching class and going to the mall to occasionally shoplift nail polish and other assorted sundries, and talking back to my parents about curfew.

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By Nicole Powers

Harry Markopolos has a way with numbers. It’s this innate ability that led him to uncover Bernie Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme almost a decade before market forces ultimately leveraged a confession out of the spectacularly crooked investment fund manager.

In 1999, while working as a portfolio manager at Rampart, a Boston based investment management company, Markopolos had been asked to reverse engineer a fund offered by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC so his firm could compete by offering a similar product. After studying Madoff’s marketing material for a mere 5 minutes, Markopolos realized that the results the fund claimed to achieve were highly improbable, a further 4 hours of mathematical modeling proved the stated returns were categorically impossible by legal means.

Smelling a rat, Markopolos assembled an informal investigative team to probe Madoff’s operation further. In May 2000, when Madoff’s scheme was only a $3 to $7 billion fraud, they submitted their first whistleblowing report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It was summarily ignored. Frustrated but undeterred, Markopolos’ tenacious group, dubbed The Foxhounds, submitted numerous subsequent memos (in 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008) offering even more evidence, to no avail. A 2005 missive had what one might consider to be an attention-grabbing title -“The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is A Fraud” – but even this failed to get an appropriate response from those charged with policing Wall Street.

It was only following the crash of 2008, when Madoff’s investors were clamoring to liquidate their assets and he was unable to meet their demands, that the man responsible for the largest act of financial fraud in world history was forced to fess up. By then, Madoff’s “fund” had grown on paper to a value of $65 billion. In the following days, the complete and utter failure of the SEC came to light, as press outlets – who had also been alerted by Markopolos, but by and large had declined to report his findings before Madoff’s arrest – competed to interview the “Madoff whistleblower.” With egg on their faces, the government also sought out Markopolos’ knowledge and expertise, and on February 4, 2009 he delivered some riveting televised testimony in front of the House of Representatives’ Financial Services Subcommittee.

In March 2010, Markopolos published a book chronicling his investigations into Madoff and the utter incompetence he bore witness to during his dealings with the SEC. Called No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, it became a New York Times bestseller. A new film, Chasing Madoff, based on the book is currently in cinemas. SuicideGirls caught up with Markopolos, who now works as a freelance investigative accountant exposing Fortune 500 wrongdoing, to talk about Madoff and the current state of play in our financial markets. We also asked him to focus his considerable financial acumen our nation’s balance sheet and assess the future prospects of our economy. Given Markopolos’ track record, his conclusions about America’s should-be junk status are indeed cause for concern, if not outright alarm.

Read our exclusive interview with Harry Markopolos on SuicideGirls.com.

by Aaron Colter

Alright. It’s back to the grind of shouting about changing our government to better suit the lives of the modern many.

I’ve posted a few times about Anonymous and LulzSec (even got a chance to write about how Alan Moore and David Llyod feel about their V for Vendetta mask being used as a symbol), as well as other groups that have taken actions against organizations that have restricted the freedom of speech or information in the world. In my opinion, the reaction of authorities in the United States and around the world to the actions of whistleblowers, data-leakers, online protestors, and those merely offering public support such as journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently noted that President Obama’s handling of CIA operations are basically the same as George W. Bush) have been far too harsh (eg. threats of unreasonably long jail sentences for first-time and/or young offenders who dare to take a stand against authority, even if they’re within their rights), and worse, dangerous to the basic rights of individuals.

It’s already come out that the Justice Department helped Bank of America try to destroy Wikileaks, that the FBI targets non-threatening Americans for political beliefs, that the government gave $1.2 trillion in tax-payer money to major banks who continue foreclose on people (often illegally), which has horrible consequences on health beyond financial devastation, that the poor have a huge tax burden while social programs continue to be cut, and that the Obama administration is trying to push for a settlement against those that gambled us into a recession and the SEC is playing cover-up, all of this while military actions are literally wasting millions each day to perpetuate a system of violence in a region we are largely ignorant about, which results in billions being wasted at home on projects that do nothing to secure our freedoms or safety.

So, what’s to do be done? The U.S. government is clearly not operating in the best interests of the majority of its citizens, some of this due to incompetence and mismanagement, some due to corruption, some due to bigoted religious beliefs, and some because the two-party system doesn’t encourage actual representation. An armed revolt against our own country in the vein of Egypt will hurt millions and it’d take years to rebuild in the aftermath. Non-violent means of persuasion are therefore the best tactics available.

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