MSM Doesn’t Report That ‘Occupy Rose Parade’ Organizer Is Former Corporate Lawyer Busted For Theft

Posted by Susan Swift
Nov 11th 2011 at 10:30 am

We can put a face behind the Occupy movement — and it appears to be a wanna-be one percenter. Peter Thottam is the creator of Occupy Los Angeles and is also the progressive force behind Occupy the Rose Parade.

Thottam’s been planning this occupation disruption of the Rose Parade for the last six months — at least that’s how long he’s had the “Occupy the Rose Parade” Twitter feed going.

Ironically, Peter Thottam is a Goldman Sachs alum, an ivy-leaguer, and former corporate lawyer from an international mega law firm, and recent MBA grad. Yale, Boalt Hall Berkeley law and UCLA MBA. Does this sound like a community organizer or a one percenter? While Peter Thottam’s CV reeks of Wall Street elitism, his bio depicts someone grabbing for the corporate brass ring, but strangely unwilling or unable to keep a job at such elite corporate employers as Goldman Sachs or O’Melveny and Myers.

To hear the LA Times summarize Thottam’s political apoplexy, you’d think the guy was a true blue Tea Party Activist, blaming Obama for the last three years of economic misery and destruction:

“The America that’s existed during the bulk of Rose Parades has really been torn apart over the last three years by the unemployment problem, wealth polarization and the middle class shrinking,” Thottam told the Pasadena Sun. (emphasis added)

But what the LA Times and others in the Make-Believe Media apparently missed, or overlooked, are the public records: From the California Bar Journal Discipline Summaries we learn that back in 2004, while a lawyer, Peter Thottam pled guilty to the crime of petty theft. Then, in violation of ethics rules, he failed to report his criminal conviction to the state bar. Once discovered, Thottam suffered the disgrace of having his law license suspended by the California State Bar in 2008.


Thottam is a self-described “progressive attorney, and community activist and organizer” and a failed Democrat political candidate in 2010 for state assembly in California’s 53rd district. Now returned as a lawyer “seeking employment” whose “salary is negotiable,“ my guess is Thottam hopes to capitalize on the Occupy fad to deftly segue himself into politics.

Hey, it worked for Obama.