Why was this woman from Occupy Our Homes Atlanta tased? Because they can.

It's the second day of the action that brought the Home Defenders League and allies in the Occupy movement to rally at the “Bring Justice to Justice” event at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. Dozens of underwater or foreclosed homeowners were arrested in non-violent civil disobedience.

They're still holding a vigil at the Department of Justice. This OOHA resident fighter was tazed and violently arrested this morning while peacefully protesting at the Department of Justice. She was there with others demanding that Eric Holder and the DOJ prosecute and jail bankers for their economy-crashing crimes.

Paul Krugman is doing the rounds on his book tour (I saw him here in Philadelphia Tuesday night—yeah, I'm a dork, I got him to autograph my copy) and here he is on Democracy Now! to pound the drum for government spending. Oddly enough, Krugman's been accused of supporting austerity cuts, which just isn't true. For an hour, all he did was talk about how the government needed to spend our way out of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for the remainder of the hour, we’re joined now by one of the world’s leading economists, Paul Krugman. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, also professor of economics at Princeton University and centenary professor at the London School of Economics. His latest book is End This Depression Now!

Paul Krugman, welcome back to Democracy Now!

PAUL KRUGMAN: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: How do we end this depression now?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Spend. I mean, it’s really—it’s actually—the economics is really easy. If we were to spend more money at the government level, and actually, at this point, largely, just rehire the schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks at the state and local level, we would be a long way back towards full employment. Other things to do, we could talk about monetary policy, debt relief for homeowners and students. But the core of it is, right now, there just is not enough spending, and we need the government, which can do it, to step in and provide the demand we need.

AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, you’re going against the accepted dogma on all television among the so-called leaders of our country. Spend? In a time when the government has the debt the size it has?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Right. So you can always say, "Oh, you know, $14 trillion." Everything about the U.S. economy is huge. Investors don’t think it’s a problem. Investors are willing to lend the U.S. government money at 1.8 percent interest. This is not the time. I’ll be all for worrying about the budget deficit once the—once the economy is off the bottom. But it is not off the bottom. We are in a depression. This is the time to spend.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you get the money?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Borrow it, and then repay it later in better times, which is not at all—that may sound funny, but that’s exactly what we’ve done in the past. That’s exactly—how did we get out of the Great Depression? We got out of it by—actually, we got out of it before World War II, but thanks to the spending that preceded World War II, thanks to the military buildup. A little factoid people may not know, just this morning: Which of the major economies in the advanced world grew fastest in the first quarter of 2012? The surprise answer is Japan. Why is that happening? It’s because Japan is now spending a lot of money reconstructing after the tsunami. And that spending is driving rapid growth in Japan right now. We could all be doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Mitt Romney for a moment, the presidential candidate’s economic plans and his critique of the Obama White House. This is what he said Wednesday at a campaign stop in Iowa.

MITT ROMNEY: President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, to tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt to this country as all the prior presidents combined. The consequence is that we are now enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to Mitt Romney, Paul Krugman?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Boy, you know, don’t even know where to start. I mean, Romney’s technique is that—since basically every word he says is a lie, including "a," "and" and "the," you never know where to start. But this is—the idea that the—first of all, that Obama is responsible for the large deficits is just not true. It’s overwhelmingly the result of the Bush tax cuts, unfunded wars and a terrible economic crisis that began, of course, under Bush. The idea that the deficits are what’s holding us back is all wrong. The deficits are in fact what’s keeping us afloat. If we had tried to balance the budget, we would now be in a full, full-on replay of the Great Depression. So it’s all nonsense. It’s—and, by the way, the idea of Obama as somebody who governs from the left, I mean, Obama is—Obama’s positions are those of a moderate Republican circa 1992. It’s not—he’s not a leftist. What’s happening now is you have a radical-right Republic Party.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about the Republicans, to House Speaker John Boehner, recently addressed the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2012 Fiscal Summit.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: The failure of stimulus, a word people in Washington refuse to say anymore, has sparked a rebellion against overspending, overtaxation and overregulation. Americans who take pride in living on a budget recognize that we can’t go on spending money that we don’t have. And our economy is stuck in large part because it is stuck with debt.

AMY GOODMAN: House Speaker Boehner also advocated making long-term changes to programs such as Social Security.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: We can eliminate all the unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid tomorrow, and the effect on the congressional budget 10-year window could be minimal. That’s because changes to these programs take time and need to be phased in slowly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s House Speaker Boehner, who has also just revived the debt ceiling—the debt ceiling threat.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, so—boy, again, let’s leave aside the long-run budget stuff for the moment, and let’s just talk about—the idea that stimulus failed, it was never tried. Take a look at the actual track of government spending in the United States, and take into account the state and local governments as well as the federal, and what you see is, far from actually having a big increase in spending, we’ve actually had much lower. We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession, in a way that we have never had before since the 1930s. So it’s actually been the reverse.

And look, we’ve just done an experiment with what happens if you cut government spending sharply in the face of a depressed economy. That’s what’s been going on in Europe. It’s been going on in an extreme form. I’ve been saying, actually, we’ve basically had a large-scale human experiment, the kind that is banned under Princeton University rules, going on on the people of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. And the results are clear: it’s disastrous. It leads to very, very sharp economic contractions. Here, we’re having a minor version, though still terrible, of the Great Depression; there, they’re having a full-on replay of the Great Depression.

AMY GOODMAN: Contrast it with Argentina.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Ah, Argentina is an interesting story, because they broke all the rules. There are two countries that we talk about now, actually, people like me. One is Argentina. Argentina had something that was a little bit like the euro. They had a supposedly permanent commitment: one peso, one dollar. Became impossible, fell apart. There was a period of about six months of economic chaos, following, to be honest, then a rapid recovery. Argentina bounced back strongly because they were competitive again. The weaker peso made them able to export. You know, and they defied all the predictions of ruin.

The other story, which is more contemporary, is Iceland, which, in effect, did the same thing. Iceland, because of—the funny thing is, Iceland, the sheer scale of the financial disaster meant that they could not be orthodox. It was not possible. So they were forced to allow a devaluation, have some temporary controls on capital, repudiate some of the debt their bankers ran up. Iceland has a lower unemployment rate than we do right now. So, those are the stories that we should be looking to as examples that say this does not have to be happening.

AMY GOODMAN: So, right now, President Krugman—and that’s not making a mistake—what do you do starting today?

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The Partnership for Civil Justice has just released the results of their Freedom of Information Act request about the Department of Homeland Security coordinating activities against the Occupy movement. No actual smoking gun about the apparent coordination that marked the police operations, but it's not too difficult to figure from the documents they released that there are some things they're not saying:

A trove of documents released today by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a FOIA request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee reveal that federal law enforcement agencies began their coordinated intelligence gathering and operations on the Occupy movement even before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011.

On September 17, 2011, a Secret Service intelligence entry in its Prism Demonstrations Abstract file records the opening of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The demonstration location that the Secret Service was protecting? The “Wall Street Bull.” The name of the Protectee? The “U.S. Government.”

American taxpayers might find it odd to learn that the Secret Service was on duty to protect the Wall Street Bull in the name of protecting the U.S. Government. But there it is.

These documents, many of which are redacted, show that the highest officials in the Department of Homeland Security were preoccupied with the Occupy movement and have gone out of their way to project the appearance of an absence of federal involvement in the monitoring of and crackdown on Occupy.

On the street it would be called “Three Card Monte,” a swindler’s game to hide the ball -- a game of misdirection. The House always wins.

The DHS, as revealed in the newly released documents, has engaged in what appears to be a effort to avoid looking for Occupy related materials where it is likely to be found, including in Fusion Centers and DHS sub-divisions such as the Operations Coordination & Planning sub-division which is responsible for DHS coordination with local and federal law enforcement partners.

On November 16, DHS Press Secretary Matthew Chandler transmitted an e-mail to top ranking DHS officials, including the Chief of Staff to Janet Napolitano, the Chief of Staff to the DHS General Counsel, among others, in which he reports:

“We’re getting inquiries from CBS, AP, Daily Caller and others on an un-sourced Examiner.com piece that says that DHS and FBI are collaborating with cities by providing tactics and information on removing Occupy protestors. A check of I & A [Intelligence and Analysis] and FPS [Federal Protective Services] shows that this type of outreach is not occurring in any wholesale manner.”

The Press Secretary is careful to couch the official statement, that such is not occurring in any “wholesale” manner, leaving the door open to possible future revelations of such conduct.

But this official statement was based solely on a mid-November inquiry to two DHS sub-sections: Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) and Federal Protective Services (FPS). And by the date of that statement, Federal Protective Services and apparently also the I&A Directorate had already purged, “restricted and/or rescinded,” any Occupy related intelligence products, as discussed further here.

it is not surprising that Press Secretary Chandler’s statement that no “wholesale’ coordination of Occupy related actions is based on incomplete information.

The Press Secretary, following the script, conveniently avoided other likely DHS repositories and departmental components, including the personnel deployed to Fusion Centers or to the DHS Operations Coordination; Planning sub-division, which according to the DHS web site is “responsible for monitoring the security of the United States on a daily basis and coordinating activities within the Department and with governors, Homeland Security Advisors, law enforcement partners, and critical infrastructure operators in all 50 states and more than 50 major urban areas nationwide.”

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As many of you know I've been covering the Occupy Movement since Day 1. I've been to eight Occupy camps in two countries: One raid. One near-arrest. One march on the U.S. Consulate. A couple of barricaded streets. I was at the largest GA the movement has had thus far (Cal Berkeley) and at the first ever national one (in DC). I'm on various text message alert lists with all the news...many of it at 2am. In short: I've been following this movement closely. And for a handful of publications.

Today I wrote a piece for Alternet about how the movement is on the brink of being marginalized:

The Occupy Movement, “the 99 percent,” has, ironically, been hijacked by a small minority within its ranks. I speak of a small percentage of Occupiers who are okay with property destruction. As we saw in Oakland over the weekend: They’re okay with breaking windows, trashing city buildings and throwing bottles at the police. In short: They are not nonviolent. They are willing to commit petty criminal acts masked as a political statement.

These are Black Bloc tactics and they're historically ineffective at spurring change. The now Gingrich-vilified Saul Alinsky in 1970 said the Weather Underground (the terrorist wing of the anti-war movement) should be on the Establishment’s payroll. “Because they are strengthening the Establishment,” said the “professional radical” Alinsky. Nothing kneecapped the call for the war to end quicker than buildings being bombed in solidarity with pacifist sentiments.

Here’s the key point: Occupy is not an armed conflict – it’s a PR war. Nonviolent struggle is a PR war. Gandhi had embedded journalists on his Salt March. He wasn’t a saint. That was a consciously cultivated media image. He used the press and its power to gain sympathy for his cause. What he didn’t do is say he was nonviolent “unless the cops are d*cks,” a sentiment voiced at Occupy. Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with how the cops react. In actual nonviolent movements they welcome police overreaction because it helps the cause they’re fighting for.

The whole piece is here.

It's a question I've often asked myself: Where are the feds when police overstep the bounds in peaceful protests?

WASHINGTON -- The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities.

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. "special rapporteur" for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.

"I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order," he said Thursday. "But on the other hand I also believe that the state -- in this case the federal state -- has an obligation to protect and promote human rights."

"If I were going to pit a city ordinance against human rights, I would always take human rights," he continued.

La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it's clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces "as long as that doesn't severely affect the rights of others."

In moments of crisis, governments often default to a forceful response instead of a dialogue, he said -- but that's a mistake.

"Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension," he said.

"One of the principles is proportionality," La Rue said. "The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order -- but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger."

Yes, but... hippies!

Max Blumenthal has an explosive story about the influence of Israel counter-terrorism tactics on American police training -- and the way they handled the Occupy movement. Very disturbing stuff:

New York – In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured.

According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.

”Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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Greg Mitchell is one of the unofficial historians of the Occupy movement. He'll be here at 2pm EST tomorrow to talk about his new e-book, and I hope you'll join us.

Greg currently writes on media and politics—and OccupyUSA in the popular live-blog —on a daily basis for The Nation site. His new e-book on Occupy is titled "40 Days That Shook the World."

Mitchell served as senior editor of the legendary Crawdaddy for most of the 1970s, as editor of Nuclear Times magazine from 1982 to 1986, and he was the editor of Editor & Publisher, "the bible of the newspaper industry," from 2002 to 2009.

His articles have appeared in dozens of leading publications, from New York Times to Mother Jones. He served as chief adviser to the award-winning documentaries Original Child Bomb and The Great Depression.

You can follow his timely updates on Twitter at @GregMitch or on his website here.

UPDATE: Due to a unforeseen circumstances we've had to postpone this event until a later date. Soon. Very soon.

So the public sentiment is converging in support of the Occupy movement, just as mayors across America are kicking them out of their occupied sites. But it looks like it may make a difference in next year's election. Of course, if the Dems win, we'll have to fight them just as hard - maybe harder:

As Zuccotti Park’s protesters prepare for winter, determined to carry the Occupy Wall Street movement’s message through the cold season and beyond, a perfect political storm is forming that might help Democrats keep the White House in 2012 – despite stubbornly high unemployment and a frustratingly slow economic recovery.

The storm stems from the OWS movement’s growing popular appeal, as a new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans (over three quarters) think the country's current economic structure “favors a very small portion of the rich over the rest of the country” – echoing the protesters’ calls to reduce the power of major banks and end tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

The finding comes after a new census measure found that a new record number of Americans (49.1 million) now live in poverty, after accounting for rising medical costs and other expenses. In addition, a Congressional Budget Office study recently corroborated the historic exacerbation of the country’s income inequality (or widening gap between the so-called 1% and 99%). Both developments are likely to stir new debate over changes to Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that assist the poor as a congressional Super Committee approaches the November 23 deadline to make cuts of over $1 trillion to the federal budget.

I've now been to five Occupations. My plans were made months ahead of time and the Occupy movement lasted long enough to meet me in a couple of east coast cities. It was there I kept on running into Iraq vets sleeping in public parks. So for Veterans Day, I wrote about these guys who signed up to serve overseas and are now fighting at home for The Atlantic:

At Occupy DC, a painting of Scott Olsen in uniform is draped on the side of a tent. He's become a symbol of the Occupation Movement -- he fought overseas only to be injured when exercising his "freedom" of peaceful assembly at home. His name has become a shorthand to talk about why so many vets are at Occupy Wall Street.

"There's a reason Scott Olsen got shot in the head," says Patterson, looking down at his chain-restaurant hot cocoa. "Because he was out front."

Patterson still sports a military haircut and a bit of the Army swagger. He also has a touch of that telling hyper-awareness war vets sometimes display; he's a little twitchy, a little intense. He tells me he has PTSD and has been self-medicating with weed. He says it helps. What's also helped is being a part of this protest movement. "This is the only peaceful solution," he says. "If this movement doesn't work, our country is not going to make it ... We're just not going to make it." Patterson became an interrogator in Iraq straight out of high school. His mother had to sign his enlistment papers. He turned 18 in Basic. "We're an industrialized nation who's a third world country. The super wealthy elite pretty much control our democratic process and everyone here is pretty much fighting for scraps and that's not right," he says.

Read the whole piece here.

Will Bunch will be here today at 2pm to talk about his new Kindle book, "October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge."

Will is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, a Media Matters fellow, Pulitzer Prize winner and blogs at Attytood (which is famous among bloggers for what are quite possibly the nastiest commenters in the known universe).

He's also inspired and energized by the Occupy movement, and is happy to talk with C&L readers today about his own experience writing this book.

Be sure to drop by!