The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
Musicians David Crosby and Graham Nash discuss their impressions of the Occupy Wall Street movement with Keith. The duo also performs an original song a cappella.
Occupy Wall Street got its confiscated generators back on Tuesday after its legal team pressed the Fire Department of New York to release them.
The machines were picked up from the New York City Fire Academy at Randall’s Island by the Wikileaks truck, which has been stationed next to Zuccotti Park since the protest’s inception. The vehicle with the generator on board made its way back to Zuccotti Park hours before a planned concert by Graham Nash and David Crosby.
Yetta Kurland, a lawyer representing the protesters, said the generators did not violate any FDNY code.
NEW YORK-The Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City are preparing for the possibility of a punishing winter by erecting tents designed to withstand frigid temperatures.
Some of the military grade tents are as big as tiny cottages. They began popping up Monday, with the first planned for medics and another designated as a safe space for women.
Salon.com’s Justin Eliot and film maker David Savage share their thoughts
on a new 30 second Occupy Wall Street commercial, which began airing Saturday on several major networks describing what the movement desires to accomplish.
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
Scott Campbell, a participant in the Occupy Oakland movement, describes the unprovoked police attack that left him severely wounded. “There was absolutely no warning whatsoever,” says Campbell.
On November 23rd, the Congressional Deficit Reduction Super-Committee will meet to decide on whether or not to keep Obama’s extension to the Bush tax-cuts – which only benefit the richest 1% of Americans in any kind of significant way. Luckily, a group of OWS’ers are embarking on a two-week march from Liberty Plaza to the Whitehouse to let the committee know what the 99% think about these cuts. Join the march to make sure these tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans are allowed to die!
More information:
The 20 mile a day/2 week march from Liberty Square to DC is set to leave this Wednesday, November 9 at noon. On Wednesday we’ll be leaving Liberty Square and marching to the New York Waterway/Hudson River Ferry and onward to Elizabeth, NJ. This is our ο¬rst stop. Everyone is welcome to join this two week march. If you’d like to participate, but can’t commit for two weeks you’re welcome to join us for the day or help send us off!
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
The march will assemble at 181 St. and St. Nicholas Av in upper Manhattan at 10:30 AM. Protesters will march down Broadway back to Liberty Park. Organizers say the aim of the 11 mile march is to connect Black and Latino residents of Northern Manhattan who support Occupy Wall Street with residents from Harlem, the West Side and Greenwich Village.
Among 1,005 adults surveyed, 35 percent had a favorable impression of the protest movement that began in New York City and gained support worldwide. Only 16 percent could say the same for Wall Street and large corporations.
Twenty-nine percent had a favorable impression of the tea party movement and 21 percent of government in Washington. [..]
Wall Street and large corporations tied with Washington government in unpopularity, with 71 percent of those polled saying they had an unfavorable impression of big business and Washington. The tea party got a 50 percent unfavorable response and Occupy Wall Street 40 percent.
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
On the morning of October 29, a woman participating in OWS was sexually assaulted at Liberty Square. The person who she identified as having assaulted her was arrested on November 1 for a previous assault and is currently incarcerated. [..]
We have been saddened and angered to observe some members of the media and the public blame the survivor for the assault. A survivor is never at fault. It is unacceptable to criticize a survivor for the course of action they chose to take or their community for supporting them in that choice. Additionally, we were troubled at the time of her report that responding police officers appeared to be more concerned by her political involvement in OWS than her need for support after a traumatic incident of sexual violence. A survivor is not at fault for being assaulted while peacefully participating in a public protest to express their political opinions. We are aware that this is one of several known cases of sexual assault that have occurred at OWS. We are dismayed by these appalling acts and distressed by the fear among many Occupiers that they have caused, as well as their negative impact on our ability to safely participate in public protests. We have the right to participate in peaceful protests without fear of violence. [..]
We are creating and sharing strategies that educate and transform our community into a culture of consent, safety, and well-being. At OWS, these strategies currently include support circles, counseling, consent trainings, safer sleeping spaces, self-defense trainings, community watch, awareness campaigns, and other evolving community-based processes to address harm. We encourage survivors to connect with support and advocates, and to access medical, legal, and social services, as well as available community-based options, many of which are listed below. We stand together as a community to work towards the prevention of sexual violence and harassment, and to provide unwavering support for anyone who has been assaulted. We commit to creating a culture of visibility, support, and advocacy for survivors, and of accountability for people who have committed harm.
With hope and solidarity,
Members of the survivor’s support team at Occupy Wall Street
In the wake of an alleged rape and a sexual assault in Zuccotti Park that resulted in the arrest of an Occupy Wall Street protester earlier this week, the movement has erected a women-only safe-space sleeping tent. According to the Post the 16-square-foot metal-framed tent will be watched by female members of the de-escalation team, and can sleep 18 people. “This is all about safety in numbers,” 24-year-old protester Becky Wartell says.
One 23-year-old woman tells the paper that she’ll be sleeping in the safe space “partially because of the recent attacks that have been happening.” She adds, “I think that this will help bring more women to the movement as well. I think a lot of women have been hesitant and especially for those that are new and don’t know a lot of people it’s hard to find a safe place to stay.”
For seven weeks, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park — a block from Wall Street — were mostly relying on fast-food restaurants and the kindness of other establishments to do their personal business. But neighbors complained to public officials, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, that demonstrators were also urinating and defecating outdoors.
The group’s website announced Friday afternoon that Occupy Wall Street “is providing access to porta-potties in a private, well-lit space with 24-hour security, only 2 blocks away from the square.” The announcement said the portable toilets would be “maintained by a professional service” and that volunteers would be blanketing the park with fliers directing people to the facilities.
Provide vaccinations and deworming treatments for dogs, cats and even rats
Dogged supporters of Occupy Wall Street are getting some free medical care – thanks to volunteer veterinarians at Zuccotti Park.
Protesters’ pets – including pooches, cats and rats – can receive check-ups once a week from a ragtag band of animal caretakers doling out shots and deworming and flea treatments.
“It’s reassuring to know you can take your pets here,” said Chris Brown, who, with his mutt, Genevieve, camps at the park. “As things get worse in the economy, we have access to less and less health care, and the same goes for our pets.”
Dr. Konstantine Barsky of Hope Veterinary Clinic in Brooklyn told Brown his dog was chubby, but otherwise healthy.
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
To help expose the looming cash-for-immunity deal between the Obama administration and big banks, there will be a march from Liberty Square to the U.S. Court House Building at Foley Square on November 5th.
The march will gather at 2:00pm on the east side steps at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), and will arrive at Foley Square at 3:00pm. Join the Facebook event page
President Obama is on the brink of cutting a backroom deal that would give bankers broad immunity for illegally throwing tens of thousands of Americans out of their homes. The Administration is pressuring state attorneys general to abandon an ongoing investigation into the massive “robo-signing” fraud, in exchange for a relatively small payoff by the banks.
Numerous investigations by state and federal authorities have demonstrated that banks used illegal procedures to make tens of thousands of foreclosures over the past decade. Rushing to a settlement before the full extent of the fraud is known would be a grave injustice to those who were illegally foreclosed upon and those still struggling to stay in their homes.
“We will not stand for a system that gives campaign contributors a right to immunity, while serving foreclosure papers to the 99%,” said Beth Bogart, a volunteer with Occupy Wall Street. “We will not stand for a country where bankers that issued deadly mortgage-backed securities are bailed out, but homeowners with mortgages are illegally thrown out on the street.”
If we shift our funds from the for-profit banking institutions in favor of not-for-profit credit unions before this date, we will send a clear message that conscious consumers won’t support companies with unethical business practices. It’s time to invest in local community growth!
The masks are from the 2006 film V for Vendetta where one is worn by an enigmatic lone anarchist who, in the graphic novel on which it is based, uses Fawkes as a role model in his quest to end the rule of a fictional fascist party in the UK.
Early in the book V destroys the Houses of Parliament by blowing it up, something Fawkes had planned and failed to do in 1605.
British graphic novel artist David Lloyd is the man who created the original image of the mask for a comic strip written by Alan Moore. Lloyd compares its use by protesters to the way Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara became a fashionable symbol for young people across the world.
“The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny – and I’m happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way,” he says.
A curious Lloyd visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, New York, to have a look at some of the people wearing his mask.
“My feeling is the Anonymous group needed an all-purpose image to hide their identity and also symbolise that they stand for individualism – V for Vendetta is a story about one person against the system.”
The film of V for Vendetta ends with an image of a crowd of Londoners all wearing Guy Fawkes masks, unarmed and marching on parliament.
It is that image of collective identification and simultaneous anonymity that is appealing to Anonymous and other groups, says Rich Johnston, a commentator on the world of comics.
I don’t have to tell you about how Social Security never contributed one penny to the deficit. It holds a surplus of $2.6 trillion, and the elites just don’t want to pay off the trust fund because that might mean higher taxes on rich people. A bargain was made 30 years ago to build up the trust fund and pay for the baby boomers’ retirement, and now they want to renege on that deal and take the money out of the hides of old pensioners.
I assume that the effort here is to move to chained CPI, which will lead to a reduction in benefits. It’s also a regressive tax increase. If the leaders in Washington think that a public already out in the streets over inequality, Wall Street greed and corporate control of government will meekly accept that, they’re just wrong.
Of course, members of Congress won’t really have to worry about their benefits getting cut. That’s because they’re mostly fabulously wealthy and won’t be burdened as much as the other 99% by a more meager Social Security check every month.
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
Send a text to the number 23559, with the the message @occupyalert
This will be used for emergency alerts and announcements.
Three weeks ago NYPD delivered what was effectively a notice of eviction, telling residents of Liberty Square that Brookfield, with the help of the city, was going to clean the park. Instead, #OWS mobilized, organizing a mass clean up, mobilizing thousands of supporters, and flooding the mayors office with phone calls. An amazing pre-dawn defence packed the square with thousands of people. Brookfield stood down and the eviction was averted.
Today rumors are rampant that the city is again considering action to end the occupation. Labor leaders, local elected officials, and news outlets are hearing the rumblings of eviction. We know that when the next eviction attempt comes, we will not get advanced warning. NYPD could move in as early as tonight, or it could be next week. We know that our adversaries are trying to build political cover for eviction by demonizing us in the press.
We need to be ready to defend the occupation. Be prepared!
Yesterday New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg alleged that Occupy Wall Street participants at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) are chasing criminals out of the park instead of reporting them to police. In reality, Occupy Wall Street has its own well-trained internal security force, but this team does not substitute for the police when it comes to criminal activity that threatens our community or local residents. Occupy Wall Street participants have called upon police on occasions when people with predatory intentions have come into the park and engaged in illegal and destructive behavior, and have in fact turned over criminals to the NYPD.
“Bloomberg lied yesterday when he claimed tha a sexual assault suspect was merely kicked out of the park, when in fact OWS security personnel forcibly removed the individual and handed him directly to the NYPD,” said Andrew Smith, a member of OWS’s overnight Community Watch. “The Mayor should get his facts straight before he calls responsible citizens protecting our community ‘despicable.'”
Bloomberg will say and do just about anything to protect his fellow 1%ers.
WASHINGTON — Roughly 30 jobless protesters from D.C. neighborhoods occupied Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office in the Russell Senate Office Building Thursday, saying they wanted to talk to him about jobs.
But McConnell was busy at the Capitol Building, where he led Republicans in blocking a $60 billion infrastructure bill. The protesters said they supported the measure.
McConnell’s legislative director offered to sit down with the group, but they declined, saying they’d rather wait for the senator himself. So they sat in his office, taking up every chair and lots of floor space while McConnell’s staff went about its business. A Capitol Police officer scoped the situation and said her heart went out to them for losing their jobs.
The protesters, most of whom said they lived in the poorest part of Southeast D.C., had no affiliation with the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’d been organized by a community group called OurDC, which has been hectoring Congress about jobs since it launched with SEIU seed money earlier this year. The protesters remained in the office as of Thursday afternoon as of 3 p.m. and said they wouldn’t leave before meeting the senator.
Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.
We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits – period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.
Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty – provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back – and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that – we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.
Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest “punishment” the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.
The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history’s more notorious police states and communist countries.
But the bankers on Wall Street don’t live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.
These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don’t want handouts. It’s not a class uprising and they don’t want civil war — they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It’s amazing that some people think that that’s asking a lot.
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
On November 3rd, the People, the 99 percent, will hold A People’s Hearing of Goldman Sachs in Liberty Square Park and march on Goldman Sachs! The people will bring to justice perhaps the single most egregious perpetrator of economic fraud and corruption in the United States. The Hearing will include testimonials from individuals directly affected by Goldman’s fraudulent manipulation of financial markets, including victims of housing foreclosures, pension losses, public lay-offs and untenable student debt.
The proceedings will also include expert analysis from Ralph Nader, Cornel West and Chris Hedges. Following the 99-minute hearing the people will decide on a fair and deliverable verdict via our own process of consensus-based direct democracy – and we intend to deliver it ourselves – to the headquarters of Goldman Sachs at 200 West Street, eight blocks from Liberty Square. We will ask for something our judicial and legislative systems have so far failed to deliver – the return of billions of taxpayer dollars to the 99 percent and criminal sentences for those Goldman Sachs executives who carried out the fraud. The event will be broadcast live via the Occupy Wall Street Livestream, among other public media outlets.
Thousands of people have attended a general strike organised by Occupy Oakland, closing streets, squares, banks and the port.
About 300 people gathered at Frank H Ogawa Plaza at 9am, the first of three rallies called by Occupy protesters during the day of action. Others soon joined, closing the main thoroughfares in central Oakland and marching on banks in the city.
Occupy Oakland protesters voted for the action on Wednesday, the day after police cleared Occupy campers from the plaza, seriously injuring former marine Scott Olsen in the process.
“Today is about saying no to the 1% and yes to the 99%,” said Cat Brooks, a long-time Oakland activist and campaigner against police violence. “This is a warning, a test, to the 1%. We don’t need them, they need us.”
A potentially powerful new element joins Occupy Wall Street as military veterans in uniform took to the streets in New York, marching from Vietnam Veterans Plaza to Zuccotti Park Wednesday, enlisting the campaign to spotlight issues of social and economic injustice.
Veterans have “a unique opportunity to continue serving here at home through our participation in this civic movement for change,” said Andrew Johnson, president of the New York City chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, which organized Wednesday’s march.
snip
Their grievances tend to be deep and personal as they face the challenges of coming home from war. The unemployment rate for veterans, at 12.4 percent, is due to climb as thousands of military personnel flood out of the ranks into an extremely competitive job market, with the Defense Department cutting back on manpower this year and in the years ahead.
On of the biggest frauds that has been perpetrated in the housing collapse that has precipitated the foreclosure crisis has been robosigning especially done by MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, a privately held company that operates an electronic registry designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans in the United States. The current negotiations by the state attorney generals in conjunction with the Obama Justice Department will in all likelihood exonerate the banks of any criminal liability and allow them to continue using the fraudulent MERS to foreclose on homes that the banks may not legally own. Gretchen Morgensen wrote in the New York Times that “The deal being discussed now may also release the big banks that are members of MERS, the electronic mortgage registry, from the threat of some future legal liability for actions involving that organization.” Matt Stoller and Mike Lux point to an even bigger issue, robosigning has not stopped:
What makes these discussions so utterly absurd, so ridiculous, and farcical, is that robo-signing, an abuse the banks have admitted to and clam they’ve ceased, is still going on. The AP reported this in July; mortgage servicers in Nevada have stopped foreclosing because of a law explicitly criminalizing robo-signing. Yes, the banks are asking for a release of claims on acts, or perhaps crimes, that are ongoing. And these abuses are extensive: lying to investors about the quality of the mortgages; violating their own contracts by failing to convey mortgages properly to securitization trusts; charging fees that are impermissible under Federal law and the contracts; making a mess of property records and engaging in deceptive consumer practices through the use of MERS; and engaging in document forgeries and fabrications in foreclosures. All these people trying to give the banks “a settlement” are in fact immunizing banks against acts they are committing and will commit going forward. Only in the future, when a voter complains to his or her state AG, that official will have to explain to that voter that his/her rights have been given away.
We’re talking about an ongoing case of criminal theft of private property by mortgage servicers charging illegal fees and then using fraudulent documents to foreclose. Now, a settlement implies that this practice is over, and that the banks are remediating past wrongs. It isn’t over, but the AGs and Federal regulators are treating it as if it is. Think about this incentive – why should a bank change its mortgage servicing once it has immunity for robo-signing, origination, pyramiding of fees, etc? The last consent decrees weren’t enforced, why would this one be enforced?
A dozen banks would contribute a grand total of $3.5 to 5 billion toward the settlement, pocket change for massive companies that apparently approved their foreclosure mill law firms likely committing over 1,000,000 counts of perjury in the robo-signing process. The rest of the money, about $20 billion, would come in the form of “credits” banks essentially give themselves if they agree to reduce a certain amount of the principal owed on mortgages. We don’t know the details yet, but given that all banks in the home lending industry write down some mortgages, unless the details are tough on the banks (a phrase not generally heard of among regulators in this era), this will be giving banks credit for mortgages they would be writing down anyway. And if they don’t end up writing down as much as they project, they probably won’t end up being penalized for it given the history of programs like HAMP […]
If the administration rams through this ultimate in Wall Street sweetheart deals – a laughably pocket change fine combined with “credit” for what they would have done anyway, at the expense for a get out of jail free card for 1 million counts of perjury and a wide range of other potential fraud – they will have zero credibility to run as the tough on Wall Street candidate. ZERO.
This makes no sense. For example, for the Obama administration to be leaning so hard on California Attorney General Kamala Harris to sign off on this is truly politically suicidal, both for them and for her after she so strongly announced she was pulling out a couple of weeks ago. Yet they continue to push her. Why are they pushing so hard for this? It all boils down to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. It is apparent that Geithner believes the only thing that matters in terms of fixing the economy is to keep the big banks in good financial shape, which is ironic given that in public he claims that everything is fine with the banking sector now.
It’s important to keep the pressure up, particularly on state AGs who might walk from a too bank friendly deal. States whose AGs might decamp include Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and Colorado. It’s also key to let the AGs in states who have left the talks and are under pressure to return that voters are watching and will be unhappy if they reverse themselves. Those states are New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Nevada, Minnesota, and of course, California. You can find their phone numbers here.
The Obama administration, congress and the state attorney generals who refuse to hold the banks to the letter of the law hold this country’s economic future. If this passes it will destroy the housing market and this economy for decades.
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
On November 2nd, Oakland will join the month of global uprising with a city-wide general strike during which the people will converge on downtown Oakland to shut down the city and its port.
While these assemblies are calling for general strikes, they are also calling for much more. Schools, community organizations, affinity groups, workplaces and families are encouraged to self-organize to shut down their cities and rebuild their communities in whatever manner they are comfortable with and capable of.
Following Israel and Oakland’s example, we join this month of global uprising. We stand in solidarity with those who are organizing the actions that are creating the fabric of our new movement.
It is time for us to come together and build a new world through the power of the individual and the community. We are not here to make requests of a corrupt political system – we are here to take our lives back into our own hands. We are not acknowledging subservience. There is no higher power than the power of the people. We are not asking for assistance. We are declaring independence. Our demand is not to those in power, it is to those individuals still silenced. Join us.
We are the 99%. We are not afraid. We are not waiting. We are working to make a better world.
We represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police during the day and evening hours.
The Occupy movement has a new goal – shut down the Iowa caucuses.
The state’s protesters are inviting fellow Occupiers from across the country to “occupy” the campaign offices of the Republican presidential candidates and President Barack Obama in the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus state, The Des Moines Register reports.
“You go inside, or if they won’t let you in, you shut ’em down. You sit in front of their doors,” Frank Cordaro of Des Moines, the man credited for the idea of the “First in the Nation Caucus Occupation,” told the Register. “Who knows? It could be a very big deal.”
The plan, Cordaro told CNN, is “people coming to Iowa, occupying every presidential [candidate’s] office, shutting them down until they start talking real turkey about what’s going on in this country, where the 99 percent of the people who are not benefiting, at the expense of the 1 percent who are getting away with murder.”
The Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral has unanimously agreed to suspend its current legal action against the protest camp outside the church, following meetings with Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, late last night and early this morning.
The resignation of the Dean, the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, has given the opportunity to reassess the situation, involving fresh input from the bishop. Members of Chapter this morning have met with representatives from the protest camp to demonstrate that St Paul’s intends to engage directly and constructively with both the protesters and the moral and ethical issues they wish to address, without the threat of forcible eviction hanging over both the camp and the church.
It is being widely reported that the Corporation of London plans to ask protesters to leave imminently. The Chapter of course recognises the Corporation’s right to take such action on Corporation land.
The bishop has invited investment banker Ken Costa formerly chair of UBS Europe and chairman of Lazard International, to spearhead an initiative reconnecting the financial with the ethical. Mr Costa will be supported by a number of City, Church and public figures, including Giles Fraser, who although no longer a member of Chapter, will help ensure that the diverse voices of the protest are involved in this.
The Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, said: “The alarm bells are ringing all over the world. St Paul’s has now heard that call. Today’s decision means that the doors are most emphatically open to engage with matters concerning not only those encamped around the cathedral but millions of others in this country and around the globe. I am delighted that Ken Costa has agreed to spearhead this new initiative which has the opportunity to make a profound difference.”
The Rt Rev Michael Colclough, Canon Pastor of St Paul’s Cathedral and a member of Chapter, added: “This has been an enormously difficult time for the Cathedral but the Chapter is unanimous in its desire to engage constructively with the protest and the serious issues that have been raised, without the threat of legal action hanging over us. Legal concerns have been at the forefront in recent weeks but now is the time for the moral, the spiritual and the theological to come to the fore.”
The resistance continues at Liberty Square, with free pizza π
“I don’t know how to fix this but I know it’s wrong.” ~ Unknown Author
Occupy Wall Street NYC now has a web site for its General Assembly with up dates and information. Very informative and user friendly. It has information about events, a bulletin board, groups and minutes of the GA meetings.
Having lost their gas-powered generators, the protestors at Occupy Wall Street are turning to a more eco-friendly alternative: pedal power.
Keegan Stephan, a bike mechanic and environmentalist at the Zuccotti Park site of the protest in New York, has been pedaling a stationary bronze Schwinn bicycle to provide energy for the protesters’ encampment….
How does the contraption work? The bike is connected to a flywheel, which in turn connects to a dynamo, the Times explains. That dynamo creates energy, which flows through a motor and a one-way diode to charge a black battery.
When fully charged–after about 6 hours of pedaling–the battery might provide power for around 100 hours, Stephan estimated. It’ll be used to power laptops, cellphones, and other devices being used by the protesters. ….
Then Friday, police confiscated the gas-powered generators that the protesters–some of whom have slept in the park for more than a month–had been using. The Fire Department has said that storing large amounts of fuel in the park violates fire codes [and, pragmatically, they’re not wrong].
That’s when Stephan’s contraption–joined since Saturday by three other bikes attached to motors that Occupy Boston protestors had shipped down to New York–suddenly came in handy.
On November 3rd, the People, the 99 percent, will hold A People’s Hearing of Goldman Sachs in Liberty Square Park and march on Goldman Sachs! The people will bring to justice perhaps the single most egregious perpetrator of economic fraud and corruption in the United States. The Hearing will include testimonials from individuals directly affected by Goldman’s fraudulent manipulation of financial markets, including victims of housing foreclosures, pension losses, public lay-offs and untenable student debt.