Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Pam Martens: "Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll" @ Counterpunch

A Plague of White Shirted Pigs Moonlighting in New York
The local conservative "news & entertainment" echo chambers and their national drill instructors like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are daily denigrating occupiers as "lunatics", "losers", who engage in "parades of human debris." It is hearing their painfully confusing zingers as dead leaves fall in the Autumn of the American Empire that requires a discerning ear.

Beneath the political fog and the rustling of coming decay, as these pimps, prostitutes and prize fighters for ruling class agitation twist and turn in their descent more truths come to light. Take Pam Martens, a former Wall Street insider turned whistleblower and writer.

Current Counterpuncher Pam Martens exposes the class alliances among the elite cops and the wealthy who hire them:

Read this excerpt:
" ... Other Wall Street firms that are known to have used the Paid Detail include Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center complex which houses financial firms, and the New York Stock Exchange.

The New York Stock Exchange is the building in front of which the Occupy Wall Street protesters have unsuccessfully tried to protest, being herded behind metal barricades, clubbed with night sticks, kicked in the face and carted off to jail rather than permit the last plantation in America to be defiled with citizen chants and posters. (A sample of those politically inconvenient posters and chants: “The corrupt are afraid of us; the honest support us; the heroic join us”; “Tell me what democracy looks like, this is what democracy looks like”; “I’ll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.” The last sign refers to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, giving corporations First Amendment personhood, which allows them to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections.) ..."

And then this, further down the scroll:

In April 2001, I was arrested and incarcerated by the NYPD while peacefully handing out flyers on a public sidewalk outside of the Citigroup shareholders meeting – flyers that warned of growing corruption inside the company. (The unlawful merger of Travelers Group and Citibank created Citigroup and resulted in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression era investor protection legislation that barred depositor banks from merging with high-risk Wall Street firms. Many of us from social justice groups in New York City had protested against the repeal but were out maneuvered by Wall Street’s political pawns in Washington.)

Out of a group of about two dozen protestors from the National Organization for Women in New York City, Rain Forest Action Network, and Inner City Press, I was the only person arrested. There was no civil disobedience occurring. Rain Forest Action Network was handing out fortune cookies with prescient warnings about Citigroup and urging pedestrians to cut up their Citibank credit cards. The rest of us were peacefully handing out flyers.

Chained to a metal bar inside the police precinct, I was grilled on any crimes I might know about. I responded that the only crimes I knew about were listed on the flyer and apparently, in New York City, one gets arrested for disclosing crimes by Wall Street firms.

A mysterious, mature, white shirted inspector who ordered my arrest on the sidewalk, and refused to give his first name, disappeared from the police report when it was filed, blaming the arrest instead on a young police officer. Citigroup is only alive today because the Federal government inserted a feeding tube into Citigroup and infused over $2 trillion in loans, direct investment and guarantees as the company veered toward collapse.

The NYPD at the time of my arrest was run by Bernard Kerik – the man President George W. Bush later sent to Iraq to be the interim Interior Minister and train Iraqi police. The President subsequently nominated Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security for the entire nation. The nation was spared of that eventuality only because of an illegal nanny popping up. Today, Kerik is serving a four year sentence in Federal prison for a variety of criminal acts.

Read more of Marten's exposure at Counterpunch.


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