Anonymous goes after UC Davis pepper-spray cop — RT

It’s been a hectic week for Lt. John Pike. First he was suspended for his now notorious pepper-spray assault on protesters at UC Davis. Next he became an online sensation.

Now the campus police officer has his phone ringing off the hook — and it doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon.

The online retaliation against the University of California Davis cop has only gotten stronger in recent days, and after a series of edited images portraying the police officer firing at everything from Mount Rushmore and Revolution War soldiers to classic works of art have made their rounds on the Web, hacking collective Anonymous has fired back with an assault of their own.

In a video clip uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, a digitized voice claiming to be an operative with the shadowy hacktivist group Anonymous released the cell phone number, email and home address of Pike — and according to the Daily News, his voicemail box has been full ever since.

While YouTube raced to erase the video — citing a breach in its clause prohibiting hate speech — the contents of the clip have since circulated the Web. As the voice in the video puts it, "Dear Officer John Pike, we are Anonymous. Your information is now public domain.”

"We have no problem targeting police and releasing their information even if it puts them at risk," Anonymous claims, "because we want them to experience just a taste of the brutality and misery they serve us on an everyday basis."

The group adds, however, that more damage is on the way, so although no specifics are made, Lt. Pike and other overzealous officers that have gone after Occupy protesters should be ready.

"Expect our full wrath," the video adds. "Anonymous seeks to avenge all protesters. We are going to make you squeal like a pig,” they say, noting that police brutality “will no longer be tolerated.”

It looks as though the Internet meme that the now iconic image of Pike firing pepper spray at protesters was just the tip of the iceberg.

Nearly two months earlier, Anonymous operatives posted similar private information pertaining to NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, calling for an all-out attack on him as well.

“As we watched your officers kettle innocent women, we observed you barberically [sic] pepper spray wildly into the group of kettled women,” an alleged Anonymous member wrote on the Web back in September. “We were shocked and disgusted by your behavior. You know who the innocent women were, now they will have the chance to know who you are. Before you commit atrocities against innocent people, think twice. WE ARE WATCHING!!! Expect Us!”

The chancellor of UC Davis has since apologized for Pike’s actions, though community members — protesters, students and faculty alike — continue to call for her resignation.

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UC Davis' pepper spray fuels national debate, growing protests

Call it the douse of pepper spray seen 'round the world.

The UC Davis police officer caught on camera shooting a bright red stream of highly concentrated, gaseous chili pepper onto a docile group of student protesters has inflamed a fiery national debate over just how harmful pepper spray can be.

Instead of dispersing the tension at the usually placid Northern California campus near Sacramento, Lt. John Pike's pepper spray canister has fueled the controversy into a growing encampment and spurred plans for a general strike Monday with sympathizers streaming in from across the state. There is now a geodesic dome and nearly 100 tents, donated from as far away as Egypt -- with more on the way.

"We've doubled in size, and we can double in size again," said Geoffrey Wildanger, 23, of Los Altos, who was one of the students sprayed Friday in what has become a touchstone moment for the Occupy movement.

And, suddenly, pepper spray is the focus of a national conversation, fomented by Fox News, MSNBC and Photoshopped images of Pike dousing the Declaration of Independence.

To one side it's a chemical weapon, but to the other it's as harmless as the sauce poured on chicken wings.

Wildanger said he still felt the burning four days later when he stepped into a hot shower.

"My eyes burned. The steam seemed to activate it," he said.

Another protester vomited blood, he said. Others felt burning on their hands for a day, and two

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Latest developments in the Occupy protests

File - In this file photo from Monday, Nov. 21, 2011, University of California, Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi is escorted from the stage after she spoke during a rally on campus in Davis, Calif. Katehi, the first woman chancellor... of the University of California, Davis, has found herself in the middle of national debate over use of pepper spray and has issued two apologies to the student body over the force campus police used on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Resisting calls for her resignation, she initiated inquiries into the episode and now is bracing for a protests at a UC Regents meeting on her campus Monday.

During the first two months of the nationwide Occupy protests, the movement that is demanding more out of the wealthiest Americans cost local taxpayers at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services, according to a survey by The Associated Press.

The heaviest financial burden has fallen upon law enforcement agencies tasked with monitoring marches and evicting protesters from outdoor camps. And the steepest costs by far piled up in New York City and Oakland, Calif., where police clashed with protesters on several occasions.

The AP gathered figures from government agencies in 18 cities with active protests and focused on costs through Nov. 15, the day protesters were evicted from New York City's Zuccotti Park, where the protests began Sept. 17 before spreading nationwide. The survey did not attempt to tally the price of all protests but provides a glimpse of costs to cities large and small.

Broken down city by city, the numbers are more or less in line with the cost of policing major public events and emergencies. In Los Angeles, for example, the Michael Jackson memorial concert cost the city $1.4 million. And Atlanta spent several million dollars after a major snow and ice storm this year.

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California Students protest use of pepper spray

Calif. Students Protest Use of Pepper Spray - YouTube Students at the University of California, Davis on Monday protested the use of pepper spray at an Occupy encampment, ...as the school's besieged chancellor scrambled to ease tension on the Northern California campus amid calls for her resignation. (Nov. 21)

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Pizza officially declared a vegetable in the US !

Congress is in the process of figuring next year's agriculture budget, and the food industry is using the occasion as an opportunity to bully the USDA as it rolls out new rules for the National School Lunch Program. According to the New York Times, Big Food has already dropped a cool $5.6 million lobbying to kibosh the new rules.

Why does the industry care about school lunches? Because school cafeterias get less than a dollar a day per student in federal funding to spend on ingredients (about two-thirds of the maximum $2.94 outlay per lunch goes to overhead and labor), and many public schools lack cooking facilities altogether. So cafeterias often outsource cooking to massive entities that know how to squeeze a profit by selling lots of dirt-cheap food—companies like meat giant Tyson and its infamous heat-and-serve "Dinosaur Shaped Chicken Nuggets," and Conagra and its frozen pizzas.

In January, the USDA came out with new guidelines governing what can go on kids' plates. Mandated by a 2004 act of Congress ordering USDA to align school lunches with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the rules (PDF) impose two new criteria that have drawn the ire of the food industry.

First, they rewrote the requirements around vegetable and fruit servings. Before, cafeterias were required to serve at least one vegetable per day, and the definition was expansive: Tater Tots and French fries, for example, counted. Now, they limit the amount of potatoes and other "starchy vegetables" to no more than one cup (two servings) per week—and require schools to serve at least one serving per week of dark green and red/orange vegetables. Second, they no longer allow the two ounces of tomato paste that lacquer a typical frozen pizza to count as a vegetable.

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To Big Food and its friends on the Hill, none of this would do. Back in October, by a unanimous vote, the Senate slapped an amendment on its ag appropriations bill that will rescind the limit on potatoes. This, despite a major recent Harvard study finding that regular consumption of potatoes in all their forms, fried and not, contributes heavily to unhealthy weight gain.

And now, reports Politico's David Rogers, Conagra and fellow frozen-pizza behemoth Schwan are arraying their lobbying might against the new tomato-paste rule. Rogers writes:

A June letter from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, for example, celebrates the virtues of tomato paste in language that closely mirrors the arguments made by Schwan, a privately owned giant based in Marshall, Minn. And both Schwan and ConAgra have quietly helped to finance the "Coalition for Sustainable School Meals Programs" which maintains a red-white-blue—and yes green—website with the heading "Fix the Reg."

According to Rogers, the House version of the ag-spending bill will likely contain a provision nixing the rule change, and preserving frozen pepperoni pizza's status as a fruit/vegetable serving, so long as it harbors a bit of tomato paste. Between the Senate's amendemnt and this coming move from the House, school cafeterias will remain profitable places to move cheap corporate French fries and pizza, and train a new generation to regard such dubious fare as every-day food.

In my recent post on food and Occupy Wall Street, I showed how the food system, like the financial system, is both in desperate need of reform and utterly trapped under the heel of industry influence. The gutting of the USDA's new lunch guidelines provides yet another example.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before the House came out with its spending bill late Monday afternoon. It turns out, it's even worse than I thought. Associated Press:

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year, which included limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line and delaying limits on sodium and delaying a requirement to boost whole grains.

The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to prevent that.

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