The FBI Wants You to Identify These Participatory Democracy Enthusiasts

Posted on January 9, 2021 by Eric Verlo

Speaking as a street activist, I can assure you that any protester who has traveled to a demonstration in Washington DC would have stormed the Capital Building if the opportunity arose instead of being ignored outside it. Especially if the customary paramilitary posts were unattended and police undercover provocateurs were breaking the windows and doors to ease your access to an edifice that belongs to the people more than any other. Obviously the game plan was to let Trump supporters have their brief moment of unsuppressed anger, then let a “riot” discredit the outgoing party.

What a sham to accuse Trump’s would be rescuers of trespass! How dare law enforcement charge nonviolent demonstrators for the damage which their MAGA-clad plainclothes officers coordinated if not perpetrated?! An unarmed female Air Force veteran was shot dead trying to climb through a window – and who are we calling terrorists?!

Now the FBI is circulating photos of their top 37 persons of interests, wanted for violating a curfew and treading on the sanctity of our congressional den of thieves. The curfew was a blatant breach of the First Amendment and Congress is the People’s House. The demonstrators wanted to confront their pretend representatives and they did it. Trump expressed his gratitude and they earned it.

Whatever their politics, they are heroes and genuine patriots. They look funny because the FBI and the media shitshowrunners selected for cross-eyes and cro-magnon brows, but such alleged freaks showed initiative, restraint, a sense of humor, and an audacious love of their country. They braved COVID to save Democracy, they accused Congress of betraying the people and they’re not wrong. Their critics don’t have a clue, and the smarter among those let Bernie and Elizabeth Warren deliver them hook line and sinker into the fold of the Democratic Party, where status quo reigns at its ugliest. As a Biden presidency sinks in, their skin will crawl once more, and the cycle of impotent “resistance” will begin again at square one.

Sovereign constitutional oath activist Stephen Nalty sentenced to 36 years!

Posted on December 6, 2017 by Eric Verlo

DENVER, COLORADO- Judge Michael Spear came down hard on judicial reform activists Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield, who prosecutor Robert Shapiro insisted “can’t be rehabilitated.” The quiet Byfield received 22 YEARS, and this afternoon, so-called ringleader Nalty was given a sentence of 36 YEARS. For insisting that holders of public office file oaths secured by bonds as required by the US and Colorado constitutions. Their victims, judges and officials who were exposed for having sworn no oaths, testified about now having nightmares about the public coming to get them with torches and pitchforks. Which is of course what ought to happen, now that the bastards have retaliated against critics who were only trying to bring them into compliance.

The most severe remedy proposed by WE THE PEOPLE, the sovereign citizens organized to confront fraudulent office holders, was in fact resignation, or if necessary, banishment. Even so, the reformers were targeted by the FBI and its Colorado affiliates. A join anti-terrorism task force was deployed to infiltrate and entrap the “paper terrorists” who were then charged with criminal enterprise and racketeering, then held on quarter million dollar bonds. Now the two were given prison terms to exceed their lifetimes, ensuring both will die in jail. Because our system will not abide free men.

Why should you attend the Denver Nalty-Byfield ENTERPRISE TRIAL?

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Eric Verlo

Why support the “We The People” public-oath sticklers who the state is prosecuting like a criminal enterprise? A few reasons: Solidarity. Because as hardheaded as they might be, defendants Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield are still JUDICIAL REFORM ACTIVISTS. Sense of fair play. Half the courtroom gallery is filled with Colorado Attorney General staffers and FBI special agents chumming it up with jurors and briefing their THREE FBI UNDERCOVER WITNESSES while the defendant pariah side of the audience is warned by the judge that even a whisper will result in ejection. Thrills. Where else are you going to see this many federal agents pushing their weight around, barking at you in the hallways, swaggering gleefully about how much smarter they are than the defendants? Pathos. Come watch the Assistant Fucking Colorado Attorney General, Robert Shapiro himself, lead a team of prosecutors against the unrepresented defendants, watch Shapiro belittle them, lecture them, trivialize their difficulties defending themselves in jail, and pretend they can review “tens of thousands” of pages of evidence and “hours and hours” of undercover surveillance tapes in a single day. Because you can make a difference. Come push the FBI-guys’ buttons. Come witness and document the abuses of the overbearing prosecution team. Come lend public pressure on the judge, whose conscience is already bothering him about how unfair this sham trial has become.

Liens
You don’t have to agree with how Nalty and Byfield went about trying to reform the judicial system, but aren’t they mostly right? Judges ARE corrupt. Local officials ARE NOT accountable to the people. Law enforcement WON’T pursue charges of their own corruption and the media certainly won’t side with the reformers. When Nalty, Byfield and Co, served commercial liens valued at billions and trillions of dollar against officials who hadn’t filed oaths of office, it was an effort of last resort to get someone’s attention. No one was thinking, hey, maybe this eleven-figure dollar demand will slip through the cracks and the billions will be ours!

Each lien was calculated to represent the sum defrauded from and owed to the American People. Prosecutors can tap these defendants for conspiring and racketeering and extorting and attempting to influence public officials, but they can’t say the defendants aimed to obscond with one single penny. Throwing three undercover infiltrators at a twenty member judicial reform group, putting thousands of manpower hours into locking these defendants away, is gross abuse of authority and it’s hubris.

Authentic transgressions
As the sham trial goes on, the pieces are coming together on the cases of Nalty and crew. It turns out federal investigators labeled them “sovereigns” because they’ve held themselves not responsible for paying traffic tickets, property taxes, and the like. In the end I’ll grant you Nalty’s group may be guilty of those. I say “may” because such citations may have been retaliatory for their political beliefs.

As to the punishment, I believe adjudicators should take into account that the defendants acted not to enrich themselves, nor to flaunt the law per se, but to assert political rights about which they may have been misguided. Again I say may because the defendants are being tried, after all, according to a set of laws, which enforce a social contract, the terms of which the parties do not agree.

I use the word misguided as a nod to those who think the Nalty gang have acted like idiots. That’s easy to say, and easy to laugh, but no one’s yet figured out how to emancipate labor from the yoke of capital. You may regard interest and rent as your inherent debts. These sovereigns don’t and they’re trying to say so.

Economic slavery
Ours is a system of peonage to which this crew feels they never indentured themselves. The ersatz writs and liens they spammed to every official they encountered were the legal loopholes they thought could break the bank and liberate everyone from financial tyranny. While Nalty’s scheme intended insurrection, it wasn’t against democracy or the republic, it was against taxation without representation, the same beast Americans pretend to have overthrown with the Declaration of Independance.

Instead of tea into Boston Harbor, this crew dumped a bunch of junk paper unto the reception counters of Colorado public offices. Charge Nalty’s crew with littering maybe, at most, vandalism, though it’s hard to say these vandals caused even a scratch. Every public official who testified as a victim said they didn’t take the ersatz documents seriously.

The writs and liens looked officious, but weren’t attributed to known government or banking institutions. Likewise signatures were signed in red. Red was chosen to represent the signer’s blood, even though red is a color which automated banking systems reject as unreadable, therefore invalid.

Not one witness expressed confusion about the validity of the papers. They mentioned too the rambling diatribes in the text block.

To call the defendants “paper terrorists” wildly overstates the effect they achieved. They didn’t terrorize anyone. Governments like to accuse rebellious insurgents of “terrorism”, but that’s another paralegal threshold with which most common citizens, and certainly these “sovereigns”, disagree.

Real funny money
These guys did the equivalent of feed Monopoly Money into ATMs. No bank balances were changed and no real money came out. Counterfeit currency is one thing, but denominations of your own handywork pretending to be only that does not qualify as funny money in the illegal sense. I’m guessing forms submitted in a language foreign to bank clerks would be rejected out of hand. How are these any different? Irregular submissions, as one witness called them, need not generate calls to the FBI or the Colorado Joint Terrorism Task Force. I’ll bet that ATMs know to reject Monopoly Money. If they don’t, whose problem is that?

The trial of defendants Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield is due to wrap up Friday. The prosecution will have taken seven days to present its case and Assistant Attorney General Robert Shapiro intends to object if the defense rebuttal takes more than a half day, maybe a whole. This trial is meant to intimidate the other defendants to convince them to take pleas.

Next in the pipeline is Bruce Doucette whose trial starts October 16. Defendants Harlan Smith and Dave Coffelt have hearings on October 18. If they do not take deals, Shapiro intends to enjoin their cases, to save time and money. He’s already convinced defendant Brian Baylog to take a deal and turn state’s evidence. Baylog is scheduled to testify against Nalty and Byfield shortly.

By now the condemnation of Nalty’s commercial lien scheme will have cost Colorado millions in man hours and legal expenses. You can fine a graffiti artist for having to restore an edifice to its original lustre, but you can’t expect him to bear the full cost if you chose a cleanup crew that wears Gucci loafers, most of whose jobs is to pat the other on the back.

Colorado’s overkill with federal agents and counter-terrorism experts is a problem of its own making.

The Nalty-Byfield trial continues through this week 8:30am – 5pm, at Denver’s Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse, in Division 2H, ironically, “Juvenile Court”.

The next time someone tells me they’re a federal agent

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Eric Verlo

The next time someone gets in my face and presumes to shout orders at me, and when I ask by whose authority, they tell say “I’m a federal agent”, I’m going to ask them: “Would that be with President Trump’s federal government?” That should take some wind out of their sails.

FBI undercover rats on sovereign pals, says they planned to seize small county jails, except he was their lone soldier.

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Eric Verlo

DENVER, COLORADO- Very interesting testimony Friday at the trial of sovereigns Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield. The prosecution’s latest witness was FBI INFORMER Marshall Ringer. Not a sovereign citizen type turned by government agents, Ringer is a disgraced police officer hired by the FBI and inserted into the so-called “enterprise” to report its activities and propose courses of action conducive to arrests. Ringer calls himself a “self-employed security expert.” His handler FBI Special Agent Ryan English calls him an “embedded confidencial human source”. His targets gave him the title “Continental U.S. Marshall”. They hoped he would recruit like-minded sovereigns to the cause of correcting what they saw as a corrupt judicial system. Ringer’s FBI codename was “Earp”.

The accusations corruption hinged on the understanding that according to Article VI of the US Constitution, positions of public authority must take an oath secured by a bond. The “enterprise” had discovered that many Colorado judges and prosecutors and sheriffs and other elected officials didn’t have oaths or bonds on file. If this expectation was indeed a misconception, and Article VI is inapplicable, you’d think the remedy might be to tell the would-be reformers, “no, that is not a requirement, here’s why, etc.” Strangely that was never done. Neither to their person, in a handout, or to reporters looking into this sad case. An undercover would present an excellent opportunity to huddle with the enterprise and say “hey guys, I was looking into this oath stuff and discovered that according to such and such law, or ruling or whatnot, oaths and bonds are no longer mandatory, end of story!”

But “Earp” didn’t. Nobody did. Nobody has yet to spell it out, even in this courtroom. When the defendants have tried to put Article VI into the trial record, they’ve been refused. So the issue is certainly a curious one.

Instead of using an undercover to diffuse the oath-seekers by presenting the incontrovertible truth of their error, the FBI and the state prosecutors instead gathered evidence to ridicule their character. We’re told they met in trailerhomes, they struggled to cobble enough money together to give their marshall a pair of handcuffs. They dreamed of putting together a network of De Jure judges to replace the corrupt ones currently alas De Facto.

Tapes
You might think the taped conversations of the sovereigns would be damning. The defendants certainly seem to be embarassed by them, but they’re less incriminating than disarming. When “Earp” asked what was he to do with the officials he arrested, he was told, nothing, for now. Do not take any action on your own. Wait for instructions from the People’s Grand Jury. Every time “Earp” goaded his colleagues about what he could do, they’d tell him to wait until matters could be addressed democratically and judicially.

The most interesting information to come from the undercover testimony was about how the FBI wires up its informants. Colorado law requires that at least on person in a conversation consents to being recorded. As a result, every recording presented to the court begins with the person wearing the wire dictating this preamble: “This is confidential human source X, on such and such date, etc” before that informant gets out of his car or enters a meeting area.

This offers potential targets a remedy for how to avoid intrusive surveillance by authoritarian law enforcement agencies IN COLORADO. Before every meeting, have everyone say out loud: “I do not consent to being recorded.” In unison is fine. Then a leader can then ask: “Was that everyone?” To which everyone can answer in unison: “Yes.” Provided that everyone said it, that meeting cannot be recorded. Such a method not only invalidates a recording being used as evidence later, it makes the recording a crime and the agency undertaking it and in possession of it, cupabe. If an undercover continues with the recording, he’s committing a crime.

In the case of te sovereigns, and likely your scenario as well, the government’s criminal act will far exceed in severity what they thought they were recording you doing.

We’ve yet to learn how, but apparently this undercover was discovered by the defendants early in 2017. They outed him by accusing him of making recordings and giving them to the FBI. That’s when he extracted himself and the indictments and arrests happened immediately thereafter.

The Enterprise
However you may feel about these perhaps misguided judicial reformers, their adversaries are behaving every bit the corrupt villains they pretend not to be.

The accused called themselves the People’s Grand Jury, the Indestructible People’s Trust, The Colorado Supreme Court, the Continental US Marshalls, the De Jure whatnot, or simply We The People. There seems to be no end to the permutations but they never called themselves “The Enterprise”. Yet that is what their accusers call them. In fact, for the duration of the prosecution’s case, a posterboard has been left in the center of the courtroom, beneath the judge’s dias, from which the jury cannot look away, it’s titled The Enterprise, with photos of ten member now-defendants, like employees of the month, except with mugshots, ranked in order of their title or prominence. Another ten members didn’t warrant photos or arrest, yet are listed as culpable parties, guilty by association and without the chance to . You wonder if that is legal. It certainly is prejudicial. Never mind if the witness testimonies don’t add up, there is The Enterprise, like it’s a thing instead of a characterization fashioned by frame-up artists.

MONDAY UPDATE:
On Monday defendants were given one day’s recess to review the evidence for their defense, which being incarcerated has impeded. So FBI informer Marshall Springs will resume his testimony tomorrow. But the courtroom also heard that the prosecution plans to bring TWO MORE UNDERCOVERS to testify, plus two cooperative witnesses, one of whom is a co-defendant who’s taken a plea to turn STATE’S EVIDENCE.

So that makes THREE undercover officers infiltrating “the enterprise” of not much more than a dozen conspirators, two of whom have become so intimidated they’ve changed their minds about what they were trying to achieve.

The next few days should prove enlightening and heartbreaking because although prosecutors have been documenting what the defendants did, they haven’t demonstrated the acts were crimes,. As much as defendants conspired, organized and racketeered, they didn’t aim to make one cent profit, illicit or otherwise. To what offenses did the cooperative witnesses plead guilty and what accusations do they make toward their friends?

So Nalty and Byfield have the rest of the day to study the evidence against them. The jail has not provided the paper and pencils ordered by the judge. The jail hasn’t afforded the defendants access to the case evidence either. Nalty indicated today that he’d spent a sum total of 45 minutes with the electronic files. He asked for a break of four days to prepare for the rest of the trial.

Both are in Denver jail, though their legal papers were not transferred with them when the defendants are on loan from Adams and Arapahoe Counties respectively. All the defendants being charged with conspiracy are being detained in different jails to prevent them talking to each other. But the problem is they don’t have their case papers or filings, and are in Denver’s customary 22 hour lockdown in their cells, which inhibits using the jail computers which are confined to the jail law library.

Prosecutor Shapiro responded to the defendant’s complaints of the jail not providing paper and pencils by cavalierly handing them writing pads, which they grasped with handcuffed hands, with polite thankyous. Though Shapiro no doubt know they won’t be allowed to take these into the jail. Then he condescendingly bragged that he’d resolved that complaint by providing “brand new” pads to each defendant. Defendant Byfield’s pad had a couple sheets missing, so he immediately pointed out that his pad wasn’t new. I couldn’t help but burst out with a laugh.

The judge thought there was merit to Nalty’s complaint Both defendants have scant access to the jail computers necessary to see the evidence. By the prosecutor’s own admission, the “tens of thousands of pages” would have been prohibitive to provide on paper, and the “hours and hours of taped testimony” likewise can only be provided electronically.

Prosecutor Shapiro acquiesced to allowing the defendants one day to catch up, though it sounds like he is well aware that analyzing tens of thousands of pages and hours and hours of evidence would take longer than that. Shapiro told the judge he calculated the state had wiggle room to allow a one day delay and still finish with the case by Friday. Here’s what he calculated: The state figures to rest its case by Thursday afternoon. That should leave a day and a half, less closing arguments and jury instructions and jury deliberations, to finish the trial on Friday. The prosecutors’s case will have taken six and a half days, but Shapiro thought the extra day needed to look over the evidence could come out of the defense’s day planned for defense.

To help the defendants prepare, Shapiro volunteered a preview of the witnesses to expect to testify to close out their case. Coming up we have four Gilpin County administrators, but we have also two more government undercovers, and the two cooperating witnesses. One of them co-defendant Bryan Baylog.

Not The People v. Stephen Nalty and Steven Byfield. Right to an Unfair Trial.

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Eric Verlo

DENVER, COLORADO– The trial of accused “Paper Terrorists” Stephen Nalty and Steve Byfield began Monday in courtroom 2H of Denver district court. The two face 28 odd charges, from conspiracy, criminal enterprise, to racketeering, brought by the Colorado Attorney General and the FBI.

And they’re defending themselves. In handcuffs.

Don’t worry, they’re holding their own. But already it’s day one and authorities are piling on every disadvantage. On Monday the defendants were cheated of being able to prevent the state from stacking the jury (and the defendants don’t even know it because they weren’t in the courtroom to see it done).

Watching the court clerks and lawyers prepare for the trial, you cannot but admire their civil spirit. In every hearing Nalty and Byfield have declined advisements and refused to recognize the authority of their adjudicators. The two sound like broken records about “oaths” and sovereign stuff, yet the judicial mechanism inches forward. It should of course, because the defendants have been jailed since MARCH.

For six months Nalty and Byfield have been held on $350,000 bonds. Neither of them can afford even the interest on those sums. Of course their indictment and prosecution is a travesty and a misappropriation of public resources, but how else could the state stop their criminal enterprise except to admit wrongdoing itself?

Nalty and Byfield are being railroaded and they’re sure a jury will conclude the same.

The People’s Grand Jury
For the last few years, among a team of eight “sovereign citizen” types, Nalty and Byfield have been serving judges and other public officials with legal papers and liens which achieved no response. Until Colorado’s attorney general enlisted the FBI to squash the “criminal enterprise.” The sovereigns face 28 charges of all the racketeering and conspiracy lingo, essentially for questioning why their local magistrates and officials had no oaths or bonds on file. When the sovereigns got no response, they formed a “People’s Grand Jury” to indict the violators with their ad hoc public courts. Then they’d file commercial liens against those accused for defrauding the public in violation of Article 6 of the US constitution.

When confronted from podiums, judges and lawmen dismiss the oath requirement out of hand, but it’s interesting that none spell out exactly what law supersedes the US Constitution. News articles about the Paper Terrorists list the litany of criminal charges the defendants face, but have yet to mention the asserted law-breaking which is the Paper Terrorists’ only complaint.

It is hard to get a handle on what the “People’s Grand Jury” really wants. In their dreams, they assert that the lack of filing of oaths should mean that all affected legal judgements should be overturned, and that all salaries drawn by government employees who did not file oaths or bonds should be returned to taxpayers, with interest. They calculate the total sum owed to the American people is in the multi trillions. So there’s that.

Some of the public officials targeted by the People’s Grand Jury began to suffer strikes against their credit records when they didn’t contest liens filed against them. You’d think the credit monitoring algorythms would flag multi billion dollar liens. You’d think someone could suggest a method to filter such paralegal filings.

Instead the state chose to hit back hard. Last March, the eight troublemakers were indicted for two dozen paper crimes. The state imposed bonds averaging a quarter million each. It hasn’t stopped the crew, as their wives and friends keep serving more notices and liens. So now the state intends to make them examples and imprison them for life.

Jury Selection, Only For the Prosecution
Here’s what happened Monday during jury selection, when both sides are meant to parse a jury pool to pick an impartial jury. You know, a defendant’s right to a jury of their peers?

Nalty and Byfield still don’t know what hit them. The prosecution was given the jurors’ details, the defendants learned none. They blindly accepted jurors whom the prosecutors had already carefully weeded. The defendants never knew it and the court was not “on the record” when this happened because it was before the judge entered the courtroom. But audience members saw the whole thing.

Actually, once he was presiding over the entrance of the jury pool, the judge was in a position to observe the prosecution desk already progressing well through the jury questionnaires while the defendants sat idle. Perhaps the judge didn’t know his court clerk had provided no instruction to the defendants. Ultimately whose responsibility would that be?

Monday for jury selection, the court decided it needed a jury pool of SIXTY from which to choose twelve jurors plus two alternates. To save time, the court had prospective jurors fill out 4-page questionnaires instead of having them deliver the customary recitation of their biographical details. The court assigned four digit non-sequential numbers to each candidate. Copies of these forms were made for all parties, stacked according to the seating order of the jury pool. They were put on the desks before sheriffs had brought in the defendants. The team of four prosecutors began pouring over the questionnaires and were warned by the court clerk not to get them out of order as it corresponded to how the jury pool would be admitted.

Team leader, Assistant AG Shapiro noticed that the forms bore the jurors’ signatures, which he instructed should be blacked out from the copies provided to the defendants. Two clerks set themselves to redacting the stacks for defendants Nalty and Byfield. Meanwhile the prosecution studied the forms, made their notes, and drew each other’s attention to details. This information included the applicants’ names and signatures. Trial lawyers do not discount surnames and autographs as irrelevant to evaluating a juror.

When the clerks finished their redactions there were still other courtroom delays and by the time the defendants were finally brought back from their holding cell, the prosecution had a full half hour head start studying the questionnaires, and of course twice the pairs of eyes.

The defendants were not told what the stacks were, nor that they were in any order. The defendants had barely been seated before the judge made his entrance and the jury pool was paraded into the courtroom. The defendants thus got no time to examine the questionnaires. They looked at the stacks dumbly, not knowing what they were supposed to do with them, or how, with their wrists in handcuffs. Defendant Byfield tried to shuffle through some of forms while the judge advised the jury pool. With shackles on he couldn’t manage the stack, much less keep it in order, even if he knew that would matter. Forget managing pen and paper, in addition to taking notes.

You’d hope that jurors will wonder why these “paper terrorists” are kept shackled. Who has ever asserted they pose a threat of violence to anyone?

On the other hand, if you doubt that the failure to file a public oath should earn a prosecutor the accusation of fraud, if you doubt it means they’re untrustworthy, the unfairness they eagerly exploited on the first day of trial would give you pause. They behaved every bit as corrupt and mendatious as Nalty and Byfield have been saying. How unfortunate the jury didn’t see it.

Trump shows us that sarcasm doesn’t translate over hostile media either.

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Eric Verlo

Sarcasm does’t work on the internet because the general comprehension level there doesn’t rise above dense. Owing to the same common denominator, Poe’s Law applies to the corporate media too, except the adage doesn’t come up when content isn’t crowdsourced. When the public has no hand in the content creation it has no reason to scrutinize a usage manual. Presidential election troll Donald Trump makes utterances everyday that pundits seize upon to discredit which are obviously sarcastic. But to recognize sarcasm as intended would mean conceding to the implicit truth at which he is digging. The US regime did birth ISIS. If both the justice department or the FBI are uninterested in investigating illegal official emails, the Russians may as well be called upon to check into them. If nuclear weapons are too big to detonate, we ought to stop producing them.

FBI says Hillary Clinton was “careless” with classified secrets, not treasonous for evading public record.

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Eric Verlo

Pundits are decrying the unfair scrutiny on the presumptive successor-in-chief, pointing out that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell were never called out for using private servers. Other miscreants too, who should have been hauled before the justice department, tarred and feathered and pilloried. Carl Rove and Dubya Bush purged email records. Are they the new role models for what behavior is acceptable?!

And all that is missing the point. Hillary’s use of a private server for state department emails was more than a security breach, it was an avoidance of keeping a public record. It was evasion of accountability. It was treasonable. Richard Nixon was in touble for erasing 18 minutes of taped conversation in the White House. Hillary has deleted millions of records in flagrant violation of rules of transparency meant to check government corruption. Fortunately Wikileaks snagged a bunch of them, and presumedly the NSA has archived them all, with the entirety of everyone’s public and private record. Funny no one is reopening that can of worms.

Don’t miss the big fight: Bernie “Birdie” Sanders versus Hillary the War Hawk!

Posted on April 25, 2016 by NMT

democratic-convention-bellini-fight-poster
A Damn clever poster for the 2016 DNC. Forgot to list fight venue. SHOWDOWN IN PHILLY.

Biggest U.S. national political showdown of the century.

Democratic Convention. July 25-28, 2016 at 8:00 AM.

Mainstreet vs. Wall Street.

Bernie ‘Birdie’ Sanders, aka Lefty Sanders, aka The Bern, aka The Sandman, aka El Sabio (the wise) vs.

Hillary ‘War Hawk’ Clinton, aka Goldman Girl, aka Monsanto Mama, aka The Fracker, aka Not My Abuela.

Spouses discuss: internships at the White House, favorability polls vs GOP, FBI investigation, independent voters of the USA, Bernie or Bust reality check, election fraud, political revolution or status quo, public interest or corporate interest.

Tickets are $27 bucks for general admission or $250,000 VIP seating.

At the WELLS FARGO CENTER in PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA.

Occupy Denver’s new one finger salute

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Eric Verlo

HILARIOUS! Thanks to “What Happened in Bailey”, as FBI agents have put it, Occupy Denver has a new gesture with which to salute police when their cruisers make frequent passes during OD actions. Instead of raising the middle finger, high and defiant, to flip off the cops –NOW what’s done is to POINT your index finger, thumb upward, and PUMP, tracking the officers as they pass! DPD had become nonchalant about being disrespected, responding to the bird with “have a nice day”. They don’t know what to do when protesters mock their deaths under the gunsight of home defender Martin Wirth. As they say: Live by the disproportionate use of force, die by disproportionate use of force.

Who okayed Chicago’s $5 million hush payment for killing Laquan McDonald? Did buck stop with Rahm Emanuel?

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Eric Verlo

Laquan McDonald’s murder was covered up for over a year, five million was paid to his family to keep the killing under wraps. The Chicago police officer who shot McDonald was only charged after the video came to light. Laquan McDonald was killed on October 20, 2014, two months after Michael Brown. Ferguson protests were in full swing. Imagine if the communities of South Chicago had seen the video when Black Lives Matter was in ascendance. It’s hard to say from how high heads should roll over this scandal. Were the Ferguson and Baltimore riots countered from above? Was riot police strategy coordinated by agencies above municipal hierarchies like Chicago’s? We know the Baltimore protests were monitored by FBI surveillance flights. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel most certainly should be forced to resign, but the authority which quashed the Laquan video is no doubt sitting on others, and this abuse extends beyond racism. Laquan McDonald’s killing and coverup didn’t just happen 400-odd days ago. It happened in the thick of Black Lives coming to Matter. Chicago cops were deleting Burger King security camera video while Ferguson solidarity protests were happening in Chicago.

Office of Colorado Springs N.A.A.C.P. bombed for some reason but whose?

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO- Someone tried to firebomb the Springs office of the NAACP yesterday. A pipebomb failed to ignite a can of gasoline left leaning behind the building located in Hillside, the city’s traditionally African American community. The FBI claims to be interested in a white male with a beat up pickup truck. Across the state activists are alarmed at the subdued media response and lack of outrage. I’d like to explain why this bomb, a typical racist MO, has yet to resonate here.

Colorado Springs is a cesspool of racism and institutionalized Jim Crow, but as usual the drama is complicated and local minority leaders are hesitant to point the finger. As befits the Springs’ conservative nature, the local NAACP is headed by a card-carrying member of the TEA PARTY! You heard that right! For a decade this NAACP chapter has been estranged from its black community, mostly poor and neither elitist nor libertarian. Dr. James Tucker, publisher of the African American Voice, accuses this NAACP of complacency, malfeasance and worse. He claims they are under investigation so it’s hard to predict whose interests might be served by torching the office.

I’m certainly not suggesting that Colorado Springs bigots are not also too stupid to attack an ineffectual organization, but taking the high road means profiting from no accusation until the facts are in.

Outsiders may want to protest, but locals also don’t want to be mistaken for supporting this chapter, which has actively de-escalated calls for solidarity with Ferguson. Actually the national NAACP too deployed counter-insurgency tactics to calm the Ferguson rebellion.

Whether yesterday’s bombing was authentic or not, we don’t need to get to the bottom of it before repudiating the usual pattern of racist acts of domestic terrorism against colored institutions. Of course we must also protest that the corporate media looks the other way. But let’s not get distracted from figuring out that today’s N.A.A.C.P. has no Association with the Advancement of Colored People unless they’re bourgeois.

Is this FBI-speak? Ima throw you off this balcony and break you in half boy

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Eric Verlo

Wherever did NY congressman Michael Grimm learn such language? I’m guessing the FBI edition of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Grimm being former FBI. If ex-officer Grimm isn’t prosecuted for MENACING, threatening to throw a DC news reporter off a balcony, it would seem only fair that the representative’s constituents be free to tease him with the same bullying words, and who knows, even mean them. I doubt Grimm himself is “man enough” to weather bluster coming his way, especially if spoken with intent. “HEY CONGRESSMAN! LET ME BE CLEAR TO YOU! If you disrespect us again, we’re going to throw you off this fucking platform! We’re going to break you in half, boy!” That heckle should be perfunctory at every next Grimm public appearance. Would it be illegal? It is. As it should be, in particular from the mouth of an offensive politician who appears to act with impunity. For example, I not only believe Grimm, I believe he’d get away with it. Does Grimm have to throw journalists from balconies before he is arrested? Would he be more than upbraided even then? It shouldn’t be up to reporter Michael Scotto to decline to press charges, the real victims are everyone who’ve now witnessed and felt this threat. And let’s press the FBI to apologize for their former agent, and promise to wipe “throw you from a fucking balcony” from their interrogation script.

FBI focus on Assata Shakur reveals pernicious discretion of Terrorist label

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Eric Verlo

MS. SHAKUR (né Joanne Chesimard) insists she did not kill the New Jersey trooper in 1973, that she couldn’t have, she’d been disabled by a police bullet to the back while her hands were raised. Shakur contends she was the victim of a legal lynching and before that a target of the USG’s COINTELPRO. Understanding now that many black activists of that era were deliberately assassinated by law enforcement, might the 17-yr old Shakur have been justified in defending herself? She was certainly justified in escaping her torturers in prison and then gaining political asylum in Cuba. She hasn’t killed a trooper since, so it’s odd then, isn’t it, that Assata Shakur is being added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List? She’s the “first woman” because it’s a terrorist-only list. Looking back, some of the best revolutionaries have been women. Retroactively designating enemies of the people is a strange development for President Obama who won’t even revisit the last administration to look for war crimes.

Certainly Assata Shakur speaks against US Capitalism but does she fit the profile of drone-strike eligibility? Apparently so and that’s telling. The intelligence community doesn’t want to stop acts of terror, it’s the ideology that terrorizes them.

Julian Assange and Bradley Manning put lie to Western pretense of freedom and rule of law

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Eric Verlo

The UK wouldn’t extradite Pinochet, but they’re threatening to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London to see that Wikileaks impresario Julian Assange is extradited to Sweden where a prosecutor wants to decide whether to charge him for sexual violations, more likely so that the Australian can then be rendered to the US to be imprisoned like Bradley Manning and face the death penalty for espionage. The US denies this intention, though it voted against Ecuador’s allies to hold a meeting about the continuing US-UK assault on journalism and whistleblowers. Can the Western empire let Assange and Manning escape severe reprimand? The two are only the mastermind and the alleged-source who’ve ignited the global uprising behind the anti- austerity movements, Arab Spring, and Occupy. President Obama cannot leave either off the hook without encouraging a deluge of more insider defections. Bradley Manning is already under torture in military custody, but Assange continues to evade US clutches. Should he escape to asylum in Ecuador where Obama’s exterminator drones can deal “American Justice”? The US has yet to condemn a white man to targeted assassination, but in the Global South, in darker-skinned populations, who will know? I favor Ecuador expanding its embassy to more than the first floor office, to offer Wikileaks an entire center of operations for as long as Julian Assange is confined under virtual house arrest. In Assange’s speech from the embassy balcony he repeated three times: “Bradley Manning must be released.” Journalists must be free to expose the crimes of the rich. Citing prison sentences for a Bahrain dissident and Russia’s Pussy Riot, Assange concluded: “There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”

Here’s the full text of Assange’s statement:

“I am here today because I cannot be there with you today. But thank you for coming. Thank you for your resolve and your generosity of spirit.

“On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and the police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it and you brought the world’s eyes with you.

“Inside this embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I knew there would be witnesses. And that is because of you.

“If the UK did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.

“So, the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the Embassy of Ecuador.

“Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world and a courageous Latin America nation took a stand for justice.

And so, to those brave people. I thank President Correa for the courage he has shown in considering and in granting me political asylum.

“And I also thank the government, and in particular Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, who upheld the Ecuadorian constitution and its notion of universal rights in their consideration of my asylum. And to the Ecuadorian people for supporting and defending this constitution.

“And I also have a debt of gratitude to the staff of this embassy, whose families live in London and who have shown me the hospitality and kindness despite the threats we all received.

“This Friday, there will be an emergency meeting of the foreign ministers of Latin America in Washington DC to address this very situation.

“And so, I am grateful to those people and governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and to all other Latin American countries who have come out to defend the right to asylum.

“And to the people of the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia who have supported me in strength, even when their governments have not. And to those wiser heads in government who are still fighting for justice. Your day will come.

“To the staff, supporters and sources of Wikileaks, whose courage and commitment and loyalty has seen no equal.

“To my family and to my children who have been denied their father. Forgive me, we will be reunited soon.

“As Wikileaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies. We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America.

“Will it return to and reaffirm the values, the revolutionary values it was founded on, or will it lurch off the precipice dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world, in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark?

“I say it must turn back. I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch-hunts against Wikileaks. The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation.

“The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters. The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.

“There must be no more foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisation; be it Wikileaks, or be it the New York Times.

“The US administration’s war on whistleblowers must end.

“Thomas Drake, William Binney and John Kirakou and the other heroic whistleblowers must – they must – be pardoned or compensated for the hardships they have endured as servants of the public record.

“And to the Army Private who remains in a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, who was found by the United Nations to have endured months of torturous detention in Quantico, Virginia and who has yet – after two years in prison – to see a trial: he must be released.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“And if Bradley Manning did as he is accused, he is a hero and an example to us all and one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.

“Bradley Manning must be released.

“On Wednesday, Bradley Manning spent his 815th day of detention without trial. The legal maximum is 120 days.

“On Thursday, my friend Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Human Rights Centre, was sentenced to three years in prison for a tweet. On Friday, a Russian band were sentenced to two years in jail for a political performance.

“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.

“Thank you.”

How to testify at a grand jury: David House “invokes” on Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, & taking illegal notes

Posted on July 14, 2012 by NMT

Bradley Manning supporter David House was called last year before the grand jury preparing charges against Julian Assange, in the event Assange is successfully remanded to Sweden. Despite being told a transcript was forbidden, House took notes which have now found themselves (A)nonymously online, reproduced here with David House’s refrain in bold. Here’s Grand Jury, a comedy:

1. Record of proceedings
2. As recorded by David House
3. Grand Jury, Alexandria VA
4. 15 June 2011, 4:10pm to 5pm
5.
6. Inside the Grand Jury:
7. DOJ Counterespionage Section: Attorney Patrick Murphy *
8. DOJ Counterespionage Section: Attorney Deborah Curtis *
9. Eastern District of Virginia: AUSA Bob Wiechering
10. Eastern District of Virginia: AUSA Tracy McCormick
11. Eastern District of Virginia: AUSA Karen Dunn
12. Unspecified number of Grand Jurors
13. Court Steganographer
14. David House
15.
16. Directly outside the Grand Jury:
17. Mike Condon, FBI Agent from Washington, D.C. field office
18. James Farmer, Chief of Anti-Terrorism and National Security Unit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D. Mass
19. Peter Krupp, David House’s attorney
20.
21.
22. Record begins: 4:10pm
23. [David House is sworn in and informed of his rights]
24. Patrick Murphy: Would you please state your full name for the record?
25. David House: My name is David House.
26. PM: Did you meet Bradley Manning in January 2010?
27. DH: On the advice of counsel, I invoke my right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. I am concerned that this grand jury is seeking information designed to infringe or chill my associational privacy, and that of others, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and that it is using information obtained without a search warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. I define the preceding statement as “invoke”, and when I say “I invoke” in the future I am referring to this statement.
28. Deborah Curtis: Exhibit 1-A?
29. PM: Mr. House, please direct your attention to the screen behind you, exhibit 1-A.
30. DC: I can’t make it bigger.
31. PM: Try… here, remove that bar on the side.
32. DC: That didn’t work.
33. DH: Do you guys need help?
34. DC: We just need to make it bigger. Can everyone see this okay?
35. PM: Ok… we’re going to continue.
36.
37. [A still image from the Frontline PBS special is displayed on the screen. Four figures are standing in front of the BUILDS logo, one figure has her back turned.]
38.
39. PM: Mr. House, can you identify the man on the right?
40. DH: I invoke.
41. PM: Can you identify the man standing second from right?
42. DH: I invoke.
43. PM: Ok, can you identify the person with bright-colored hair, standing here?
44. DH: I invoke.
45. PM: Are we to believe that identifying that individual would somehow incriminate you?
46. DH: On the advice of counsel, I invoke my right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. I am concerned that this grand jury is seeking information designed to infringe or chill my associational privacy, and that of others, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and that it is using information obtained without a search warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
47. PM: Ok, can you identify the man on the left?
48. PM: I would like to observe for the record that Mr. House is taking notes.
49. DH: As to the previous question, I invoke.
50. PM: Why are you taking notes?
51. DH: Invoke.
52. Bob Wiechering: I’d like to recommend, at this point, that we take a break and talk to your counsel.
53.
54. [AUSAs and House leave the grand jury]
55. [Peter Krupp, House’s attorney, asserts House’s right to invoke]
56. [AUSAs and House return to the grand jury]
57.
58. PM: What is your birthdate?
59. DH: March 14, 1987
60. PM: Where do you live?
61. DH: Can you restate the question?
62. PM: What is your address?
63. DH: I invoke.
64. PM: What is your current occupation?
65. DH: I invoke.
66. PM: Were you a senior in computer science at Boston University in January 2010?
67. DH: I invoke.
68. PM: Isn’t it true that you told PBS Frontline that you were a senior at Boston University in January 2010?
69. DH: I invoke.
70. PM: Do you know what a hackerspace is?
71. DH: I invoke.
72. PM: Do you know what BUILDS is, the acronym?
73. DH: I invoke.
74. Bob Wiechering: Mr. House, I notice you are taking notes. Attempting to create your own transcript is a violation of rule 6(e) of this grand jury. We have brought this to the attention of your counsel, and although he feels differently on the matter, we assert that you must stop taking notes at this time.
75. DH: Let me consult with my attorney.
76. [House leaves the grand jury room and returns one minute later]
77. DH: My lawyer asks that you refer all questions about notes to him.
78. BW: Let’s continue.
79. PM: Mr. House, are you involved with the Bradley Manning Support Network?
80. DH: I invoke.
81. PM: Did you respond in the affirmative when asked by the FBI if you had heard of known WikiLeaks associate Jacob Appelbaum?
82. PM: I would like to state for the record that Mr. House is not answering the question and is instead taking notes.
83. DH: I invoke.
84. PM: Do you intend to answer any of my questions, aside from your date of birth and your name?
85. DH: I invoke.
86. PM: Is that because of the phalanx of attorneys present here today?
87. Court Stenographer: I’m sorry, the what of attorneys?
88. PM: Phalanx… the phalanx of attorneys.
89. DH: As to the phalanx of attorneys, I invoke.
90. PM: At this time, I will let Deborah Curtis ask a few questions.
91. DC: Mr. House, have you ever been to the Oxford Spa restaurant in Cambridge, MA?
92. DH: Allow me to consult with my attorney.
93. [House leaves the grand jury and returns one minute later.]
94. DH: As to the previous question, I invoke.
95. DC: You admitted to federal agents in Boston that you had met Bradley Manning in January 2010, is that correct?
96. DH: I invoke.
97. DC: Isn’t it true that you spent the night of January 27 2010 with Daniel Clark and Bradley Manning?
98. DH: Can you repeat the question?
99. DC: Isn’t it true that you spent the night of January 27 2010 with Daniel Clark and Bradley Manning?
100. DH: One more time.
101. DC: Isn’t it true that you spent the night of January 27 2010 with Daniel Clark and Bradley Manning?
102. PM: He’s writing it down.
103. DC: Are you getting this, are you writing it all down?
104. DH: Was the last question a question to be answered?
105. DC: Yes.
106. DH: I invoke.
107. DC: And the question before?
108. DH: I also invoke.
109. DC: Where did Danny Clark have breakfast on the morning of January 28, 2010?
110. DH: Allow me to consult with my attorney.
111. [House leaves the grand jury and returns one minute later.]
112. DH: As to the previous question, I invoke.
113. DC: Do you intend to answer any questions about Daniel Clark?
114. DH: Invoke.
115. DC: Do you intend to answer any questions about Bradley Manning?
116. DH: [Writing] Could you please repeat the question?
117. DC: Do you intend to answer any questions about Jacob Appelbaum?
118. DH: I invoke.
119. DC: At this time, we’d like to stop the proceedings. You are free to leave.

Colorado Springs Occupy saved from the haters, Occudrama: the Final Act

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Eric Verlo

He bragged at GA about how he’d personally mobilized tonight’s contingent to descend upon Occupy Colorado Springs to depose its leadership, but did Agent Dumb really think someone who’d sworn to destroy OCS, another who’d stolen the first Facebook group, another who’d tried to sabotage OCS actions, another who’s snitched to both the press and FBI, and another who’d betrayed each and every occupier, would be entrusted to decide the fate of OCS? Agent’s sidekick Wolf, who’d swiped the FB group, kept hissing “make everyone admin, make everyone admin.” But when Agent Dumb pushed forward with a proposal it was this: “Dissolve every element of Occupy, its website, Facebook group, and all its infrastructure.” Seriously?

He felt disenfranchised by the probationary terms to which he was being held, but basically Agent Dumbass’s renewed interest in Occupy was only because he wanted to kill it. The hater tag-team could not have, of course, because OCS actions go on, headless. At least now the insurgent chatter should lessen, now we can recruit real occupiers, free of those who wanted to wrestle control so they could call the shots from online, never having to attend a thing, and making sure to prevent OCS from scheduling meaningful actions. Been there, done that. Occupy Colorado Springs LIVES!

Was it heavy handed to rain probation slips on their anti-occupy parade? It came as quite a shock that mob rule wasn’t the rule with Occupy. I think the most important message sent is that you can’t overwhelm a meeting with greater numbers and declare yourself in charge. That’s war, not democracy. Occupy Colorado Springs is much greater than the members who attend its meetings. There’s nothing undemocratic about telling would-be usurpers to bugger off. Occupy Pueblo fell to a similar attack. They let some newbies in and lights out.
The most important message

Four Occupy tormentors unmasked

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Occupy Colo. Springs held a NO WAR ON IRAN demo today, counter- protested by some soldiers who think any antiwar criticism of their mission fails to Support The Troops. (Horrifyingly curious don’t you think, that US soldiers would already consider war with Iran as their mission?!) Joining them it turned out, were four of OCS’s sneakiest saboteurs. I got them with one camera click! From right to ultra-right: Raven Martinez aka Briaunna Webbing aka Occupy Csprings, Michael Clifton aka Agent of Doubt, Ian Carman aka “Father” Ian, and Ryan Butler aka Ry King aka Lone Wolf.

My policy until now was not to dignify any of these Facebook twits with attention, but their rumor campaign against OCS has become so virulent and untrue, and their misdeeds are now tipping the balance. Today the entire intersection had to bear personal megaphone taunts, but I’ll say that the final straw was yesterday when I learned of misinformation they attempted to spread to the local news. Occupy CS’s hand was forced in issuing a public statement about accused-arsonist Kyle Lawrence, because someone asserted Kyle had joined a violent group that had sprung up in OCS. Uh, let’s get to the bottom of that one, shall we?

WARNING: OCCUDRAMA AHEAD. All of it boring, but these creeps need to crawl back under their mouse pads. Ignoring them hasn’t worked, and even though they crave attention, I’ll give that a try.

Exhibit A

At far right is RYAN BUTLER aka Lucky Dog, aka Lone Wolf. When he disrupted OCS GAs he went by “Ry King”.

The secretive Ryan Butler is half of the Clifton/Butler nerd team that hijacked the “Occupy Colorado Springs” Facebook Open Group. It’s got about 400 members, doesn’t represent Occupy at all, and is maintained as a launchpad for Tea Party occu-haters under the pretext of “free speech” as decided by its unlisted admins Ryan & Michael. The open group was originally created by authentic occupier Amber Hagen, who in her idealism let all participant have admin privileges. When Amber discovered that haters among the admins kept wrecking the page, she began to delete them. Michael Clifton once recounted at a meeting how he and Ryan scrambled over Skype to keep Amber from shutting them out. They hurriedly deleted Amber’s admin access, thus exiling her from her own group. This was the act that inspired Raven Martinez to do the same with the OCS Facebook community page, in all fairness I should say, to prevent others from doing it to her.

Ryan’s claim to fame in OCS came from a failed coup to share the spokesmanship monopoly held by occupothead Jason Warf, but I digress.

Ryan had to step away from OCS after legal trouble from a drunken poker game gone awry, which he tried to blame on authentic occupy vet RTG. Ryan has a criminal record of domestic violence and wears a gun in his home in violation of having lost his permit to carry. That much is not disputed. But Ryan refutes RTG’s version of the event: that Ryan pistol-whipped his ex-girlfriend, which enraged RTG and the two fought, trashing the house. Both face assault charges and Ryan’s ex has filed her usual plea to the court to dismiss any notion that Ryan abused her. Instead we are to believe Ryan tried to defend himself with a vice-grips laying about (leaves a strike pattern similar to a gun maybe), accidentally striking his ex.

I’ll add that my perspective doesn’t come from hearing RTG’s testimony, but rather from eavesdropping on private IMs sent by Ryan as he deliberated what to say by way of damage control. Anyway.

Entirely relevant here however is Ryan Butler’s favorite bragging right, his secret Fight Club-inspired “PLAN-B” CLUB (First rule of Plan-B, you don’t talk about Plan B, snore). Apparently “Plan B” is for Amendment Two fans who want an alternate plan “when the revolution fails.” Was this the pro-violence group to which Michael Clifton alluded in TV interviews? It had nothing to do with Occupy, didn’t come from Occupy, and if its membership is limited to Ryan’s friends, I’m guessing that pares it down to two: he and Clifton. Thus Clifton’s statement about his disassociation from proponents of violence was also facetious, because the above photo was taken upon their arrival at the counter-protest, they came together.

But how absolutely scurrilous to attempt to tarnish OCS with the suggestion that occupy was the breeding ground of their pro-gun Amendment Two fantasy life?!

Exhibit B

Occupying more than the center of this photo is Michael Clifton, self-appointed videographer of the local occupy, known on Youtube and DIY newsites as “Agent of Doubt”.

Michael Clifton was a very early supporter of OCS, donating water and food as he documented its progress on Youtube, each segment introduced in his best impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock, minus the wit, or substance. Let’s say Clifton’s motives started out good, what would lead him last week to step forward and break the story about arsonist Kyle having a history with OCS, packaging his videos for best consumption by the local media?

Of course the answer is simple, and we’ve seen it before. Apparently 15-minutes of personal soundbite, TV attention converted to Youtube views, trumps any consideration for possible negative blowback for the movement. Clifton actually keeps distancing himself from OCS every time he alleges to speak authoritatively as an insider. It’s laughable if it wasn’t damnable, because this time the oaf said he quit when OCS members began to plan illegal strategies. Whaaat? –leaving listeners to infer that arson was among the strategies. What kind of tomfoolery insinuation is that?

Not surprisingly, once more Clifton is defending himself against accusations of being an informer or provocateur. I make no such charge. He’s an idiot. What can you do, Colorado Springs is full of them. Am I being too harsh? Read on.

In an earlier episode in front of City Council, Clifton famously declared himself an outsider to OCS so that he could take all the credit for a –he-thought– brilliant bit of investigative deduction regarding CSPD’s billing of man hours charged for policing OCS. Our friend had videotaped an OCS march you see, and noticed there weren’t any police officers in sight, ergo, the billings must have been fraudulent, yes, ignoring the possibility the cops were plain-clothed, or observing from a perimeter, or on call, etc. So like a flat-earther who draws conclusions based on only what he can see, our intrepid Sherlock declares the CSPD guilty of fraud, and… marches straight into the local office of the FBI to make the charge! The FBI, he reports, were only too happy to accept all his video footage into evidence!

This might point to Clifton’s real reason to declare he was not part of Occupy, because a GA consensus would have vetoed his FBI idea. OCS had recently endorsed a no-snitch policy, not on anyone, not even the city, and let’s face it, not least of all I’m guessing, TO the FBI.

Thus, however unwittingly, let’s call it witlessly, Clifton is an FBI informant in the very technical sense, isn’t he?

To put a fine point on it: everyone who’s participated in OCS activities recorded by Agent of Doubt Clifton, is now on record at the FBI, in not just the lossy Youtube segments available online, but the original hi-def digital sequences, in their entirety.

And while Agent Dork has been a stalwart companion to Occupy, if only for the videos which he converts into ad-views whose revenue he “contributes” to the Occupy movement by funding his own efforts to “promote” it, so far the sum of his efforts has been to give law enforcement and the local media evidence to build a case against Occupy. Thanks a ton Agent Dork. From here onward, your camera aught to record everyone giving you the finger!

Exhibit C

I was tempted because of his sign to give Father Ian Carman a pass. Who’s to say a Department of Homeland Security employee shouldn’t consider himself part of the 99%? But after successive absences from GAs, then hiding among the haters, it might be time to take a close look at this very disruptive occupier.

Divisive behavior can be very subtle, so I’ll cut to the quick on Father Ian. He revealed to us that he worked for DHS because he wanted to explain that he had access to confidential files on certain occupiers, one of whom, supposedly a veteran, still had a very high security clearance, indicating he was likely still active duty, or perhaps in the intelligence service. Father Ian was asserting this about our high profile occupy star JWS, effectively trying to snitchjacket JWS. Come down on that whichever way you like.

Exhibit D

Raven Martinez writes on Facebook under the identity of her daughter, or the occunonymous Facebook user “Occupy Csprings”. Once a formidable OCS volunteer, Raven suddenly became my own personal raving critic. It’s been suggested that her fury bears the air of a woman scorned — I’ll delve into that further down, if I feel like it.

As reported above, the Tea Party mutiny of Amber’s Facebook OCS open group is what inspired Raven to hijack the OCS Facebook COMMUNITY PAGE. Raven might have done it with the best intentions, but did it utterly undemocratically and to everyone’s chagrin and condemnation. Here’s what happened.

Embattled by internal struggle against the very identity of mothership Occupy Wall Street, the OCS GA had adopted the moderating policy implemented by the New York OWS to thwart vanguards and saboteurs, but the Springs admins at that time were refusing to implement them. Admins were continuing to post political endorsements, conspiracy theories and statements critical of fellow occupiers. Further protocols were adopted by OCS to require admins to use their initials to identify who was responsible. Again this was ignored, and now many of the admins were refusing to attend the GAs.

One day Raven noticed important posts being deleted and snide comments being made about OCS protest actions, all being done by an admin who would not reveal his/her identity, and worst of all, in the name of Occupy Colorado Springs. An admin herself, Raven made the clever move of temporarily deleting all the other admin users on the chance that this one might be stupid enough to reveal himself by complaining about his suddenly lost access. The idiot took the bait, and turned out to be none other than OCS-permit-holder and self-important-leader Hossein Momsforpot. For shit. Well this left Raven with a dilemma. Who was going to believe that Hoss was anti-OWS? More critically, who among the admins she had deleted, could she reinstate without the risk that Hoss would convince them to reinstate his admin status with which he could then delete Raven? This was the lesson Raven had gleaned from the hijack perpetrated by Wolf & Agent Duh.

I neglected to mention that the earlier hijack was accomplished anonymously, with Ryan pretending that sole admin status was held by “his dog”. So with her hijack, Raven added her own innovation, Raven loudly proclaimed that she’d been shut out too! She planned to claim that her eventual “reinstatement” was the result of an omniscient AnonymousTM hacker who’d intervened for the betterment of the movement.

Raven’s problem was that I had just the day before publicly refused an admin appointment, and when she cavalierly let suspicions fall on occupier PJ, he promptly deleted himself. Funny story, no?

Well, although a number of very earnest admins felt slighted, oddly enough things worked out for the better after Raven’s purge because all the internal occuhating stopped, and a number of the admins who felt pushed out ultimately outed themselves as Ron Paul enthusiasts, conspiracy nuts, or single-issue MMJ addicts. In reality, no one was ejected from OCS, but having lost their control over the Facebook page, they chose to make kissoff statements and move on.

So Raven was able to coax PJ and me to share the admin responsibilities with her, and it’s a good thing too, because when Raven eventually turned against the broader OWS mission, she’ll say it was because of my personal agenda, Raven went and DELETED the Facebook page. She thought she’d done it, but Facebook has safeguards fortunately, PJ and I were alerted and able to save the 3,300 member page from oblivion.

And the rest is history in the making. Three of us administrate the community page now, we trust each other and our dedication to the values and goals of the original Wall Street occupiers, and the Facebook likes continue to rise.

Is that enough about Raven? Yes it is. She’s doing her best to vilify and destroy our efforts, but that’s as much as I want to say about her.

What the hell. Each of these four unsavory characters knows that I could say far more than I’ve divulged here. I’m already embarrassed enough to talk about them as I did, good grief. The personal attacks on me are based on nothing that I hadn’t written about on NMT, yet they persist via email and phone calls to everyone they can reach. Well, here’s my shot across the bow.

NY #OccupyWallStreet protest is going to be this generation’s Woodstock. Are you going to miss it?

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Eric Verlo

If you can’t bum a ride to New York City, you are going to miss out, it’s plain as that. But you can make the revolution happen where you are. The Egyptian victory in Tahrir Square wasn’t achieved without simultaneous demos in Alexandria and Suez, etc. The earliest heavy casualties actually happened outside Cairo. In the Colorado capitol, a nascent #OccupyDenver is building steam. President Obama is making a campaign stop in Denver on Tuesday at Lincoln High School at Evans and Federal. That will be an excellent chance to force the media to break its blackout against the anti-capitalist uprising. What’s there to say to President Obama? Nothing right? He’s shown he answers only to Wall Street. But the message to the TV coverage of Obama, and to the people of Denver can be: Why is the bank-owned corporate media not telling you about #OccupyWallStreet? Reclaim our democracy from the bankers.

Colorado Springs is gaga for warmongers, bigots, Zionists and conservative educational campuses. The local Intelligence Quotient doesn’t rise to the level of critical thinking, which is a heartbreaking trait in its youth. But there is an ongoing effort to aid #OccupyWallStreet’s visibility. It’s held on the noon hour, at Tejon and Colorado Ave downtown, at the Booz Allen Hamilton Building, where area war profiteers laugh all the way to the investment banks across the hall, passing by the local FBI office, btw. Our protest doesn’t have the music, mahem & hijinks of NYC Liberty Plaza, but none of the beatings either. Come a few minutes late and you get to pass reserve cops hiding out of our view in the alleys around the critical intersection, in case the bankers want their critics squashed. Possible messaging: DON’T LET BANKERS FORECLOSE ON DEMOCRACY, OCCUPY WALL STREET NOW!

WALL STREET BANKS ARE STEALING YOUR HOME, HEALTH, RETIREMENT, STANDARD OF LIVING, & WORLD RESOURCES. #OCCUPYWALLSTREET –LOOK IT UP.

Even unmasked, alleged Anonymous hactivists sport heroic Guy Fawkes grin

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Eric Verlo

Donald Husband, accused Paypal attacker, alleged member of Anonymous, heroic hacktivist TPM and Gawker are getting lots of mileage from unveiling the mugs behind “Anonymous,” the alleged members accused of the DoS attacks on Paypal, targeted for its financial disruption of Wikileaks. As comment threads are yucking it up with the usual anti-geek jokes, ha ha they’re no longer anonymous, I couldn’t help but think of a chapter from Michael Moore’s upcoming HERE COMES TROUBLE excerpted for the Guardian, in which Moore recounts the ostracism he felt after his Oscar acceptance speech when he denounced the illegal invasion of Iraq. Though so many of us cheered, it turned out the critical derision quickly overwhelmed Moore. I can only hope that those recently arrested by the FBI for computer activism under the collective pseudonym “Anonymous” have the fortitude of spirit to see past their antagonists. Without inferring their guilt or direct responsibility for interrupting the mercenary Paypal, I’d like to recap the obvious, that Wikileaks and Bradley Manning are worthy of support, and we can bicker about Anonymous’ declared strategies, but anyone with guts enough to get off the proverbial fence is fighting the good fight. Theirs was a virtual picketing of an internet business acting politically, their protest was protected free speech. The penalties they face, up to 15 years it’s threatened, reflect the only rights the USG holds inviolate: financial transactions. The faces of Anonymous are heroes.

Chicago G8 protest planners offer city guarantees of usual ineffectual actions

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Eric Verlo

Organizers meeting today to plan against next year’s G8 summit in Chicago hit the ground running –backward. On Friday a spokesperson for one of the coalition partners offered this assurance to the Chicago Tribune: “Our goal is a legal, permitted, family friendly march where people can come and have their voices heard in a safe environment.” Interesting. The objective of successful past anti-globalization protests has been no less than to shut the undemocratic summits down.

Nine months out, it appears activism’s old guard is determined to blunt all real resistance welling in American youth. The Tribune found another normalizing voice from UNAC which disavowed any recourse but nonviolence. WTF? It’s one thing not to encourage violence, another to promise to “back off from any violence.”

Hello? Activists with broken spirits need to STFD and STFU. Let younger, hotter heads give you a lesson in courage and purpose. If you are over thirty, hold yourselves among the fucks responsible for this mess. Who are you to deny the young their righteous rage?

As elder activists, precisely what wisdom is it you think you can impart? Have you stopped one war? Slowed imperialism? Ended nukes? Saved the whales? Halted global warming? Attended to anything but the erosion of democracy, the social safety net and the environment? Your exalted nonviolence neither delivered India from class exploitation nor ended racism in America. Stick with fundraising, educating, inspiring others, drawing your peers into social networking; lead, but not by edict, and not by a consensus dominated by your peers. Put your dogma aside for the young leaders, let them make their own mistakes. I hope you will at least admit they can’t fail more miserably than you.

At Sunday’s meeting, the United National Antiwar Committee spokesman acquitted himself when confronted by a young gentleman representing an anarchist entity. Committee member Ashley Smith’s full quote had been: “We will not be the ones to initiate or perpetrate any violence.” And: “We will back off from any violence.” But when pressed at the meeting, he explained that organizers hoped the event would be safe for families, but that younger militants could exercise their freedoms like anybody else. I paraphrase.

I’ll qualify my criticism by pointing out that a number of the organizers were personal victims of recent FBI home invasions, so they are fully justified in having to distance themselves from being interpreted as advocating violence. An additional challenge is presented by an adversarial corporate press determined to squeeze whatever soundbite it wants to discredit or hobble protest.

Of course I’d prefer activists recused themselves from addressing the subject of violence/nonviolence, instead of alienating potential allies by being deliberately exclusionary. And by potential allies, I mean the only allies that will get the movement anywhere, the NEXT GENERATION, because who else are you expecting?

News of the World crimes belong to Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, Fox News, Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Eric Verlo

The issue of Rupert Murdoch’s lawless news empire isn’t about phone hacking to break news, it’s about surveillance used for the same purposes as intelligence agencies, to control political climates, to effect outcomes based on what you have on the players. Does the FBI have to find evidence of malfeasance in the US to make Murdoch any less guilty? The important point to make is that News Of The World, is News Corp, is Rupert Murdoch, is News International, is Fox, is Dow Jones, is the Wall Street Journal. With the WSJ, Murdoch’s sway over the stock market may mean he dictates the editorial voice of all corporate media properties. Anyway, who can pretend the corporate kleptocracy isn’t a shared agenda? Murdoch may be just one rotten apple, but now everyone can see how rotten. Here’s a chance to wash him out.

If the ‘Left’ is serious about doing something credible to counteract the capitalist class, now is the time. Do the work of informing the public on how News Corp has been twisting the truth not just to sell papers and floor wax, but to promote an agenda of limitless greed at the expense of working and poor people. In reality, Rupert Murdoch is just one cog in a very large propaganda machine, but he is a significant dynamic that binds the corporatists and political right-wing together. Telling the plain truth about Murdoch at this time is the best weapon progressives have at their disposal.

— The Angry Indian

Tom Hayden says there’s nothing to a US conspiracy against Julian Assange, and he’s got the nothing to confirm it

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Eric Verlo

What an ugly hit piece against Julian Assange, by Tom Hayden in The Nation. Formerly of the American Left, Hayden used to need no introduction, now he mistakenly cross-posts assignments for the State Department (see A view from Sweden). Hayden dismisses notions of a US-led conspiracy to render the Wikileaks mastermind from the UK to Sweden and thence into the US torture system, along the logic that such accusations only anger the Swedes and make the outcome self-fulfilling. Hayden’s argument is to shoehorn Assange to Sweden now, to take his licks, before you make Dad really angry.

Based on everyone he’s talked to, Hayden says there’s no conspiracy. Seriously, that’s his logic. And he admonishes us against speculating wildly about unknowns. Whenever a writer prefaces their investigation with “some facts will never be known” I can picture them already leaning on the shovel. Even if Hayden intended to dig, it’s like he’s come upon a suspect’s backyard full of holes. Glancing into each one he concludes, yep, no evidence here.

You wonder what Hayden would make of a document completely redacted.

That’s right, what the Swedish prosecutors won’t tell us, what the USG won’t say, the extraordinarily swift synchronicity of legal actions against Assange kept under a veil? Not even question marks. More important to Hayden are questions he can load, like this one:

Why is the United States pursuing Assange as the conspiratorial mastermind of WikiLeaks, when his reputation, credibility and organization have been so damaged?

I think Assange’s reluctance to be sucked into the black hole that Sweden has become, is reinforced by the fact that the Nation Magazine has to get its “view from Sweden” from an American.

My best clue about Hayden’s focus is when he pretends to restore perspective by reflecting that aspersions cast against Assange (each with an assist by Hayden, if you’re keeping score), be weighed against the good which Wikileaks has done. Thereupon Hayden lists revelations we owe to Wikileaks. But they’re body counts from the Iraq and Afghan documents and nothing from the diplomatic cables, about the Middle East, North Africa, etc. I guess that underlies why Hayden can’t find probable cause for US forces to ally against Assange. It’s the “nothing new here” talking point.

Based on everyone I’ve talked to, Hayden’s an idiot. I’d rather give him less credit.

At the Frontline Club forum on Saturday, Assange said what’s needed now are troves of files from the CIA and FBI, and he added temptingly, the New York Times, the pace car of American media. Assange related that he’d just learned from Daniel Ellsberg that the NYT had 1,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers one month before Ellsberg leaked them. We know the corporate press prints “all the news that’s fit” but wouldn’t it be great to get confirmation?

Don’t worry about Hayden’s nothing, he already has all the confirmation he wants.

Protest of police state lures police

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS- Outnumbered! Though we comprised a perfectly respectable half-dozen on the hastily organized protest of FBI tactics meant to intimidate, scouting the city blocks which formed our periphery revealed motorcycle cops poised unseen behind corners. Is that merely obligatory, post-9/11, when activists speak out against intelligence agencies? Except for a building security guard who warned us the elevated planters along the sidewalk were private property, CSPD and state troopers kept an unobtrusive distance — well, enough to mask their number. Our sign-holding was the usual peaceful vigil, but our minders parked a solitary unmarked cruiser smack in our faces to keep up with [menacing] appearances. The proverbial chill on free speech.

Opposing war is not a crime: stop FBI suppression of antiwar activists JAN 25

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS – JANUARY 25 – Protest the recent FBI raids and the DOJ grand jury subpoenas aimed at intimidating members of antiwar and Palestinian rights groups. Join Coloradans For Peace and compatriots beneath the windows of the FBI field office, located in the Plaza of the Rockies downtown, the complex where activists have been prevented from visiting their senator’s office, mostly a mall of investment bankers and brokerage firms. Not without irony, the main facade is named for war profiteer consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton. Come Tuesday Jan 25, from 4pm to 5pm. Meet on the NE corner of Tejon & Colorado.

Some consider the FBI to be the lesser of the US intelligence community’s seventeen known evils. Shall we draw the line at surveillance, infiltration and instigation of peace advocacy groups? Eric Holder’s Department of Justice won’t go after war criminals, torturers, or any facet of President Obama’s accelerated abuses on human rights. But they want to target humanitarian groups in hopes of tying their social causes to “terrorism, ” the traditional authoritarian label for political rival.

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Tag Archives: FBI

The FBI Wants You to Identify These Participatory Democracy Enthusiasts

Sovereign constitutional oath activist Stephen Nalty sentenced to 36 years!

Why should you attend the Denver Nalty-Byfield ENTERPRISE TRIAL?

The next time someone tells me they’re a federal agent

FBI undercover rats on sovereign pals, says they planned to seize small county jails, except he was their lone soldier.

Not The People v. Stephen Nalty and Steven Byfield. Right to an Unfair Trial.

Trump shows us that sarcasm doesn’t translate over hostile media either.

FBI says Hillary Clinton was “careless” with classified secrets, not treasonous for evading public record.

Don’t miss the big fight: Bernie “Birdie” Sanders versus Hillary the War Hawk!

Occupy Denver’s new one finger salute

Who okayed Chicago’s $5 million hush payment for killing Laquan McDonald? Did buck stop with Rahm Emanuel?

Office of Colorado Springs N.A.A.C.P. bombed for some reason but whose?

Is this FBI-speak? Ima throw you off this balcony and break you in half boy

FBI focus on Assata Shakur reveals pernicious discretion of Terrorist label

Julian Assange and Bradley Manning put lie to Western pretense of freedom and rule of law

How to testify at a grand jury: David House “invokes” on Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, & taking illegal notes

Colorado Springs Occupy saved from the haters, Occudrama: the Final Act

Four Occupy tormentors unmasked

NY #OccupyWallStreet protest is going to be this generation’s Woodstock. Are you going to miss it?

Even unmasked, alleged Anonymous hactivists sport heroic Guy Fawkes grin

News of the World crimes belong to Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, Fox News, Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal

Tom Hayden says there’s nothing to a US conspiracy against Julian Assange, and he’s got the nothing to confirm it

Protest of police state lures police

Opposing war is not a crime: stop FBI suppression of antiwar activists JAN 25