LISTEN ONLINE TO THIS SHOW– SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST
Occupy LA: 1,400 LAPD cops cleared the encampment at City Hall park in the middle of the night last night, arresting almost 300 people. ALAN MINSKY was there, reporting for KPFK — we’ll talk with him about the night, the Occupy movement, and of course the future.
Also: the Democratic Promise of Occupy Wall Street — William Greider of The Nation says that, while politics in Washington “now resembles an ecological dead zone,” the Occupy Wall Street movement is — “exhilerating. ” We are “witnessing a rare event—the birth of a social movement.”
plus: Live from Cairo: MARK LeVINE reports on the elections, and election violence, in the Middle East’s most important city. Mark teaches Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and is a columnist for Al Jazeera English
The Berkeley Academic Senate voted 336 to 34 on Monday afternoon to “condemn” Chancellor Robert Birgeneau for his administration’s “authorization of violent responses to nonviolent protests over the past two years,” culminating in the police attack on nonviolent Occupy Cal demonstrators on November 9. . . .
On Monday, the Berkeley Academic Senate will vote on a resolution expressing “no confidence” in their chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, because of police violence against Occupy Cal campus activists there on November 9. The chancellor’s defense of police conduct was particularly outrageous: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms,” he 
Plus: Newt Gingrich’s cruelest campaign: replace school janitors with child labor. 
Two unforgettable videos flew around the world wide web on Saturday, one horrifying, the other inspiring. Everybody knows the first: black-clad cops at UC Davis shooting pepper-spray into the faces of Occupy Wall Street student demonstrators who are sitting passively on the ground with linked arms. More than two million people have watched 
And FRANCES FOX PIVEN says Occupy Wall Street “has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.” Piven, “the professor Glenn Beck loves to hate,” wrote about it for 
Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
The cancer danger from the new airport security scanners–which look under a traveler’s clothing–is greater than we had feared. “Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 Americans could get cancer each year from the machines,” ProPublica’s Michael Grabell says. “Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as ‘safe.'”. . .
Only in LA: On one side of Pico Blvd., the Rancho Park golf course, with joggers, dog walkers and of course, golfers; on the other, a hundred “Occupy Fox News” demonstrators outside Fox Studios, chanting “We – are – the 99 per cent!”; in between, a hundred LA cops, many with riot gear at the ready, and an entire city block of TV news trucks, bristling with giant satellite dishes, power cables up and down the street, and news reporters under lights talking earnestly into the cameras. . . .
