News Release

10 Years on — How Occupy Wall Street Ended: Clampdown by Obama that Trump Emulated

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DAVE LINDORFF, dlindorff@gmail.com
    In September 2011, the nonviolent Occupy Wall Street movement swept the nation, deploring policies that benefit the richest “one percent” and framed a public dialogue about priorities along the lines of “Wall Street vs. Main Street.”

    Lindorff has examined the reasons for the movement’s collapse. In 2012 in “Did the White House Direct the Police Crackdown on Occupy?” he reported on a trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security which “reveal ‘intense involvement’ by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as ‘the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.’

    “The DHS says that the NOC is ‘the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room’ and that it also ‘facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.'”

    Charged Lindorff: “A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written. …”

    “The documents among other things expose the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which … have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the ‘We are the 99%’-chanting Occupiers, while actually acting in the interest of Bank of America and its fellow financial sector mega-firms in trying to crush the movement itself.”

    In 2020, Lindorff reported in “Tear Gas and Clubs in Lafayette Square Were Just the Beginning,” that Trump and Barr turned to the “Occupy model” to crush the protests against police brutality.

    Lindorff quoted Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), who recalled of Occupy Wall Street: “The government wanted to suppress it, to shut it down. … That’s why you saw encampments wiped out by police with over 7,000 arrests.”

    Lindorff reported on a leaked transcript of a conversation with both Trump and Attorney General William Barr talking to governors referring in glowing terms to the way the Obama administration had crushed the Occupy movement.

    Reported Lindorff: “Trump told the governors, many of whose states were experiencing massive protests against police brutality in the wake of the brutal videotaped police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, ‘This is like Occupy Wall Street. It was a disaster until one day somebody said, “That’s enough.” And they just went in and wiped them out. And it’s the last time I heard the name Occupy Wall Street. …’

    “Trump was followed at that point in the call by Attorney General Barr, who told the assembled governors that the Trump administration planned to use the same Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) the Obama administration had relied on to spy on and then crush the Occupy Movement to shut down the current wave of urban uprisings and protests over police brutality.

    “As Barr put it, ‘The structure we’re going to use is the Joint Terrorist Task Force, which I know most of you are familiar with. Tried and true system. It’s worked for domestic and homegrown terrorists, and we’re going to employ that model.’”