After last night's disgusting "police visits" to activists' homes (and the FBI went door-knocking too!) you can pretty much be sure today's May Day demonstrations are going to be a doozy of police overreaction and unfortunate choices. Above, a screenshot from lower Manhattan. (JK, that's the new Dark Knight trailer from last night. But don't watch it, because you'll be buying something with your eyes on Buy Nothing Day if you do!)

Around New York City, expect Union Square to be full of bicyclists right about now, busy all day and then filled with Das Racist circa 5 p.m.; Williamsburg Bridge will be closed late morning; [...]

The task force gathered to assess the UC Davis pepper-spraying-in-the-mouth incident has reached a verdict, and that verdict is… "objectively unreasonable." Wow, stinging. Also: "should and could have been prevented." (PDF here.) So harsh. Will anyone recover from this blistering report? Just the students who are suing the living daylights out of the officers and the school, I guess. To be fair to the report, it's actually a pretty good account, and really does hang the thing on the Chancellor's office too, which seems right. In 17 or 18 years there'll be a big fat settlement.

"The Occupy movement was smart in not formulating an explicit program, as I’ve said in other interviews. Once you issue a list of demands in the dominant media-political discourse you then get pigeonholed as an interest group. Then it becomes a question of 'what do the Occupy people want?' And 'will they be satisfied by x?' You saw that even in the media headlines of the Obama birther movement — which was insane — but after the White House released Obama’s long form birth certificate, which in evidentiary ways should close all arguments, the media came back and said, 'Will this satisfy the birthers?' That’s not the question. Who the [...]

With 5,478 documented arrests in fewer than three months, with New York City voters, in essence, actually liking Occupy Wall Street protestors better than the mayor, with dingbat Time declaring this the year of the protester, it's safe to say the battle for hearts and minds is won. Okay, yay, we won! So… what now?

Well, one good thing to know is that the Tea Party routine is a failure. Getting big money to back candidates to go to D.C. either results in morons being moronic or results in just putting more greedy cats on the greedy gravy train. It doesn't create change; it [...]

To anyone paying attention, it wasn’t really a surprise when blacks didn’t come out in droves to support Occupy Wall Street. Despite the fact that blacks suffer from poverty and the ills accompanying it at wildly disproportionate rates, African-Americans have for a number of uncertain reasons been avoiding most of the liberal demonstrations of the moment. Blacks don't occupy Wall Street (or Denver or San Francisco) just as blacks don’t SlutWalk, or rally at the World Bank.

What was surprising was when the rappers started showing up.

At first it was just Russell Simmons—not technically a rapper, but a rap icon—his proselytizing becoming a daily fixture [...]

Views from above, on Broad Street, at Beaver Street.

Dear Occupy Wall Street,

Please invent your own 他妈的 iconography.

Thanks!

China

Those who cannot something history are doomed to something something! A confab of private security agencies, banks and police officials are ready for your May 1 protests against income equality in New York and beyond. Great news: Pinkerton Government Services, Inc. is on hand, just as they have been since 1850, to preserve the edifices of capital. Fortunately, total information awareness is afoot: "Banks have a history of coordinating security with city authorities. At a 2009 U.S. Senate hearing, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly described a partnership with financial district firms that gives his department 'access to hundreds of private security cameras.'" This is going to be so [...]

Oh, the constant see-sawing of Michael Bloomberg from hero to villain! Remember how we were loving him again just last month when he made that big old matching donation to Planned Parenthood? Well, a lot has changed in a month.

• The hand-holding visit to Goldman Sachs, followed by the trip to Shake Shack with Goldman co-CEO Lloyd Blankfein, in the wake of the resignation-by-op-ed of Greg Smith? That went over quite poorly. Dude: you already held their hand, in the form of tens of millions of dollars in concessions. Also, the City even gave them the address of 200 West Street, which should have been 201 [...]

Tonight, Occupy Wall Street will be offering a response to the State of the Union address, following any Republican/Tea Party response. (They'll be doing it live from D.C.) Occupy's publicist has embargoed the response speech until after the State of the Union, but it's not really worth printing anyway. (Also: yup, publicist, and yes, embargoed press releases. Hoo boy.) The language of the speech is bombastic yet vague, unspecific and sort of… narcissistic? Lots of rambling about how politics is bought and paid for, yadda yadda. (I mean, yes, that's true! But it's just atmospherics; why not name some names then?) About half of its claims are reminiscent of [...]

New York City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez had arrived on short notice to observe the sudden raid of Zuccotti Park on November 14th. But witnessing the removal of Occupy Wall Street’s original encampment proved impossible. Instead, officers forced Rodriguez to the ground, cutting his face; “a senior NYPD official with whom he has worked in the past was nearby," the Village Voice reported.

At least ten journalists trying to cover that day’s events were arrested. Freelancers and people attempting to shoot video were threatened. Officers in riot gear hit demonstrators with batons, barring anyone from even approaching the park. Later, the New York Times general counsel wrote [...]

I have had an NYPD-issued press pass twice. In New York City, the press is "credentialed" by the police department, independently of the City, at its discretion. The process is slow and you have to go downtown for quite a while. Both times I have been very careful to play their game. You have to bring published clips, among their required materials, that prove you need to deal with things like "robbery scenes, fires, homicides, train wrecks, bombings, plane crashes, where there are established police or fire lines at the scene." Now I'm by no means a real reporter's reporter, but I succeeded both times by bringing past stories that [...]

In case you east coasters missed last night's occupation of Bank of America in San Francisco, it's truly wonderful. And this picture is something I hope our great-grandchildren see. (If The Machines that run the banks that will be running the government by then let them see any pictures, of course.) Sounds like Bank of America doesn't really even need our help in running the business into the ground though—and trying to take America with it as it prepares to cut 30,000 jobs. Meanwhile, right now in New York….

What’s next for the Occupy Wall Street movement as it regroups after its eviction from Zuccotti Park? A small but energetic group of New York City education activists hope the Occupiers will channel their rage toward Mayor Mike Bloomberg by taking a closer look at his local school reform record.

Last Friday at noon, some two-dozen of these protestors, many of them black and Latino parents with kids in the public schools, crowded the sidewalk on the east side of Zuccotti Park. Pack the book bags of our kids! Not the pockets of the rich!, they chanted. They mostly failed to attract the attention of the hard-core Occupiers—the tent-dwellers—who were [...]

Judge ruled against me on standing, on intervention, and on the subpoena. So uh Twitter is compelled to hand over @destructuremal's tweets

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) April 23, 2012

In the strange case of the Manhattan D.A. subpoenaing Occupy Wall Street arrestees' Twitters, so far we've come to a place where the state can request copies of three months of the things that people have published on the Internet. That seems… reasonable! Not very chilling! (The Internet being the Internet and all!) What is bizarre is to see the D.A. prepare such a labor-intensive assault in the matter of a violation—these charges [...]

I would very much enjoy this book of photography by always-working photographer Stephanie Keith; it's organized as a chronology of Occupy Wall Street. (To date. Obviously.) It is definitely… art-book priced. (Not cheap!) But that seems reasonable, also, for great documentation of a serious six-month project. Something for Valentine's for the armchair radical in your life?

The story of the Occupy Wall Street Archive starts with Jeremy Bold, so we might as well too. When Hollywood decides to cash in and make its OWS movie, central casting could do worse than work off a picture of Bold—he has a dark goatee and black plastic-rimmed glasses. He has a “protest name”—Jez. He's in dark, long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans whenever I see him, hair askew, a well-worn nylon backpack slung over one shoulder and a scarf not infrequently tied around his neck. In other words, he looks like any number of people you might have seen at Zuccotti Park. Jez is 27 and originally from North Dakota. [...]

After weeks of what Shon Kay at one point described to me as "march, cops, march, cops," this was going to be something new. Occupy Oakland was going shopping.

Shon has been an integral member of the Occupy Oakland media committee since its inception. When I hear critics say OO doesn't understand media relations, I think of people like Shon—and I think of plans like this one, and their role in the days since all the encampments were cleared.

Over the course of the week prior, Shon organized a group of participants who planned strategy. Last Friday, on the busiest shopping day of the year, about 25 gathered [...]

Put together by Josh Stearns, this document has been a great resource to track journalists working on Occupy Wall Street stories around the country who've been arrested. So who are they? Only seven of the 25 arrested are full-time employed traditional news-gathering employees. A number were student reporters; a few were interns; a larger number were freelancers. Some work for traditional "objective" news organizations; others work for "non-objective" news organizations, like Alternet and Indypendent Reader. This means something—mostly about the media and what it is now, possibly also who the police perceive as media and relation of reporter to demonstration. But with the exception of a Journal-Sentinel photographer, [...]

So Mike Bloomberg's eviction of Occupy Wall Street has actually resulted in a large protest this morning that is actually occupying Wall Street. You just know there's a team of mayoral advisors, familiar with the First Amendment, who are sitting in an office right now with their arms crossed, being all "la la la, told you so." More good pics here. Arrests are already taking place.

Photo by CBC superfox David Common.