NEW YORK -- A Department of Homeland Security division produced daily briefings on "peaceful activist demonstrations" during the height of the Occupy ...

As cities around the country have swept Occupy Wall Street camps from their plazas and parks in recent weeks, a number of mayors and city officials ha...

Is the Occupy Wall Street movement fetishizing the spaces that they occupy? Are they defining the movement based on place rather than the many, many other powerful elements and symbols the movement has developed?

The occupy movement was always simultaneously a virtual movement and a physical movement built by bodies in real-time and space.

This week, Herman Cain failed his foreign policy pop quiz on Libya ("I got all this stuff twirling around in my head" is the campaign trail equivalent of "the dog ate my homework"). Congress failed basic nutrition when it voted to dismiss new guidelines that would have upped the amount of fresh veggies and fruit in school lunches and instead declared that frozen pizza qualified as a vegetable (which, I'm sure, had nothing to do with the $5.6 million the food industry has spent lobbying against the healthier regulations). And New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg didn't pass the sniff test when he claimed that he ordered the surprise NYPD raid on Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment because it had become a "fire safety hazard." The Occupy movement is in large part a response to the diminished credibility of governments everywhere. And the way governments are dealing with the movement only further diminishes their credibility. An epic fail.

The large and growing protests are having a positive effect and will continue to as long as protesters avoid aggression and violence that turns the public against their populist message.

According to the SCOTUS, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they're treated as public nuisances and evicted.

The one thing we know from history is that once a movement that is rooted in a demand for justice has taken root, attempts to destroy it with brute force almost always make it stronger.