Occupy Everywhere
Just hours after a 5 am police raid cleared Dewey’s tent city – Occupiers braved the cold to regroup at the Boston Common bandstand. On Sunday, they met there again to get down to business, planning a new strategy: Occupy Everywhere.
Already, neighborhood Occupy outposts are popping up from Allston to the suburbs. In Boston this week, more than a dozen well-attended working groups met each day. Without the burden of maintaining the campsite, the focus has been on action, and lots of it.
Whatever else Occupy was, it was a home to people who now need new accommodations – but the passion and resolve of Occupiers is intact.
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/n
Occupy Boston camp raided
“While Occupy Boston protesters may be exercising their expressive rights during the protest, they have no privilege under the First Amendment to seize and hold the land on which they sit,” McIntyre declared in her decision. “The act of occupation, this court has determined as a matter of law, is not speech. Nor is it immune from criminal prosecution for trespass or other crimes.”
It should also be noted that on December 8, there were two right-wing bigots who attempted to disrupt our General Assembly by telling us that we should leave. There were only the latest in a line of wreckers and police provocateurs who have attempted to disrupt our General Assemblies over the weeks. Fortunately, our chanting was able to drown them out, and they left early.
http://socialistworker.org/201
Judge rules that Occupy Movement protesters are common trespassers
For interest to our real estate readers, the Judge balanced the City?s property rights vs. the protesters First Amendment speech rights. The judge ultimately concluded that the “occupation” as practiced by the Occupy Boston protesters – physically taking over the public park from the City and to the exclusion of others – was a classic trespass and not a First Amendment right.
http://www.boston.com/realesta
Occupiers seize the day – in court
“We are going to continue taking over public space – with permits – to spread our message,” said Daniel Chavez, 23, of Boston. “There?s even more passion now. We don?t need tents to continue to build momentum for this movement.”
http://www.bostonherald.com/ne
Dec. 15, 2011: Unoccupied Boston
their goals remain unclear, even to many of the so called 99 percent. Members of the movement are advocating new actions: shutting down port operations, setting up tents in the suburbs, even blocking access to the banks and Federal Reserve.
http://www.thebostonchannel.co
OWS raised political awareness in US
A respected activist says that the anti-capitalist Occupy movements are taking direct action to educate Americans about the traits of the next presidential candidates.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Acacia Brewer from the Occupy Boston movement to further discuss the issue.
The following is a transcript of the interview.
http://presstv.com/detail/2157
Boston Occupy protesters face arraignment
Dozens of Occupy Boston protesters arrested over the weekend are facing arraignment. The arrests took place when police swept through Boston’s Dewey Square early Saturday.
http://www.wcsh6.com/news/nati
Editorial: I Was Wrong About Occupy – The movement does need public space
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We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph, hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.
Secondly, they talked about the nearly complete privatization of municipal public space in a way that made a deep and tragic sense. Where can you go if you don’t own something? Does a public even exist if it has no space? The great irony is that they have been called the virtual demonstration, and here they were talking about old-fashioned, in-person, human interaction.
http://www.religiondispatches.
Occupy L.A. Protester is the face of Time’s ‘Person of the Year’
The magazine chose “The Protester” as its annual person of the year — a nod to political revolutionaries in Egypt, in Greece and on Wall Street — and the image is meant to evoke the throngs who took to the streets worldwide to call for change.
But the origins of the image lie much closer to home. The woman pictured is Sarah Mason, a Highland Park resident and an active member of Occupy L.A.
Protester Scott Shuster, a friend of Mason, said she was surprised and a little embarrassed to see her picture on the cover of Time. But he said she had earned the honor for her work at Occupy, where she is known as a consensus builder who once taught police how to participate in the protest’s nightly general assembly meeting. Shuster said Occupy had helped Mason grow politically and personally.
African-American church leaders announce they will join the Occupy movement
A group of African-American church leaders announced Wednesday their intention to join ranks with the Occupy movement in the nation’s capital, bolstering what some consider a mutual message of condemning income inequality and social injustice.
“We are occupying until poverty is eradicated,” pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington, near where a core group of activists remains encamped.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/14/
Houston police use frivolous felony charges to deter would-be Occupy protesters
Seven Occupy Houston protesters arrested during port demonstrations cannot be charged with possessing or using a “criminal instrument” – a felony in Texas – for their use of PVC pipe, a judge said Wednesday.
The Houston Police Department made the charge upon breaking up a demonstration at the Port of Houston, conducting in tandem with West Coast port occupations. The demonstrators used PVC “arm tubes” to lock their linked arms together, which prevented police from arresting them, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle. Houston police then called in the Houston Fire Department rescue team, the report said.
The HPD has used the “criminal instrument” against protesters on previous occasions, according to Attorney Randall Kallinen, who is representing one of the seven arrested on the charge. The charge usually does not hold up in court, but because it is a felony charge it has a chilling effect on would-be activists, he said.
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_n
#Occupy & 350.org Stage “Human Oil Spill” at John Boehner’s Office
Hundreds of 350.org climate activists and Occupy Wall Street protesters flocked to Speaker of the House John Boehner’s Ohio office today, and proceeded to stage a “human oil spill”. The action was intended to draw attention to the GOP’s efforts to attach a provision to a popular payroll tax cut bill that would clear the way for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Garbed in black, the activists acted out a scene in which the pipeline ruptured and spread oil across a pristine Midwestern environment.
http://www.treehugger.com/corp
Oakland police captain under investigation for OK’ing bean bag projectiles against Occupy demonstrators
Amid a swirling debate about police tactics against Occupy protesters, Oakland Police are investigating the captain who authorized officers to fire bean bag projectiles at demonstrators Nov. 3. The captain could be fired or demoted pending the investigation, he said Wednesday.
Capt. Ersie M. Joyner III, 42, was placed in a bureaucratic job in the police department’s Office of the Inspector General about two weeks ago. The officer who fired the “less lethal” projectile, Victor Garcia, was removed from the police SWAT team and also is being investigated. The bean bag struck a videographer, Scott Campbell, in the upper thigh; Campbell captured the shooting on video.
http://www.mercurynews.com/occ
Occupy, Democrats meeting cancelled at lat minute
The U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus axed a meeting with Occupy activists, a move observers say shows growing tension between Democrats and the movement.
A Democratic lobbyist agreed, telling Roll Call anonymously, “I think Democrats need to stay away from embracing OWS. We can acknowledge their frustrations without embracing their movement.”
The Occupy movement — with its encampments, confrontations with police, property damage and arrests — doesn’t resonate well with middle America, the lobbyist said.
“Let the Republicans be the party of the angry right,” he said. “We need to be the party where moderates feel welcomed.”
Former foreign minister of Mexico to the US: What’s wrong with you that you would let your middle class die?
Jorge Casteneda, high-placed son of Mexico, has a warning for the United States. A warning born of long, bitter experience in Latin America. And this is it: do not, warns Casteneda, let your middle class die. The American middle class, he says, has been the envy of Latin America.
Latin America had rich and poor and a canyon between, and all the problems that flow from inequality. The United States had a proud middle class that brought cohesion and optimism. Don’t let it go, he says.
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/1
March participants say Occupy movement’s concerns aligned with Catholic social teaching
Father Vitale has been studying – and participating in – social movements since the ’60s. Like the civil rights and antiwar movements of that era, he said, the Occupy movement is rooted in the principles of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of the human person, the common good, a preferential option for the poor, global solidarity, stewardship of God’s creation and economic justice.
_”All those resonate clearly with the Occupy movement,” said James Salt, executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Catholics United.
http://www.catholic-sf.org/new
Too Big to Stop: Why Big Banks Keep Getting Away With Breaking the Law
For the country’s biggest financial institutions, it’s still worth it to break the law, because the government has no way to make the banks pay for acting illegally.
Economists Push for a Broader Range of Viewpoints in Their Field
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, mainstream economists in academe were criticized for treading in ethically murky waters. The 2010 documentary Inside Job recounted how influential economists were being paid by the companies and governments that they were analyzing, but failing to disclose conflicts of interest publicly or in reports they produced.
Recently critics have mounted a more fundamental line of attack on mainstream economists, taking aim at the ideology that has grown dominant over the past 30 years, which they say played a significant part in causing the Great Recession and not doing much to help solve it.
http://chronicle.com/article/E
MF Global Cash at JPMorgan Presumed Its Own, Government Investigator Says
[Says one blogger: “They stole a bunch of money, but another pot of money can’t possibly be customer money, so suck on it customers.”]
MF Global Holdings Ltd.’s $25.3 million in cash held at JPMorgan Chase & Co. is presumed to be its own, the bankrupt company’s Chapter 11 trustee said in response to customer objections to its bid to use the money.
MF Global Holdings should be allowed to use the cash collateral of JPMorgan, trustee Louis J. Freeh said in papers filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Customers of the company’s failed brokerage, MF Global Inc., had asserted that the money may have been part of the $1.2 billion believed to be missing from their segregated accounts.
http://www.businessweek.com/ne
PA’s GOP governor about to strip local municipalities of right to regulate gas pipelines in residential neighborhoods, as gas companies press for imminent domain rights
In what is shaping up as a key victory for the shale-gas industry, Gov. Corbett and the legislature appear close to stripping municipalities of the power to impose tough local restrictions on wells and pipelines. Under a pending measure, wells and pipelines would be permitted in every zoning district – even residential ones – statewide.
And the industry isn’t stopping there.
Two pipeline companies are seeking the clout of eminent domain. While the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has yet to rule, it signaled this year that it was leaning toward giving firms condemnation power to gain rights-of-way for their pipelines.
http://articles.philly.com/201
‘Wealth defense industry’ protects oligarchs from the rabble and its taxes
Occupy protesters are putting their bodies on the line day and night — leaving their homes, living in tents, braving the elements, and being treated as criminals by the police.
But the super-rich whose influence they are protesting have others to do their fighting for them. “Oligarchs can go about their business as literally thousands of fulltime professionals work for their interests,” says Northwestern University political economist Jeffrey Winters, author of the 2011 book Oligarchy.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/
‘Privatize Everything’ movement’s latest victory: Massive budget cuts may result in billionaire buying public housing
While thousands of families in public housing are placed at risk of living in substandard conditions or made homeless, the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA) has recently entered into an exclusive negotiating rights contract to sell Berkeley’s 75 occupied public housing units to billionaire Stephen M. Ross, owner of The Related Companies of California and the Miami Dolphins.
Billionaire Ross is already involved in a housing project in Oakland that displaced 178 poor public housing families from their homes at the former Coliseum Gardens Public Housing Project, now called Lion Creek Crossings.
Revealed: huge increase in executive pay for America’s top bosses
Chief executive pay has roared back after two years of stagnation and decline. America’s top bosses enjoyed pay hikes of between 27 and 40% last year, according to the largest survey of US CEO pay. The dramatic bounceback comes as the latest government figures show wages for the majority of Americans are failing to keep up with inflation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/busi
Banks Cash In On Muni-Default Scare
The $3.7 trillion municipal- bond market rebounded this year, generating an average total return of 10 percent through Dec. 12, better than U.S. Treasuries and corporate bonds, Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes show. Munis also trounced equities as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lost (SPX) 0.6 percent in the same period.
JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, was among the biggest municipal lenders, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. Yet [JPMorgan CEO Jamie] Dimon, 55, publicly urged would-be buyers of state and local debt to use extra care in the months after [bank analyst Meredith]Whitney made her default comments on CBS Corp.’s Dec. 19 “60 Minutes” broadcast. In March, Dimon said he anticipated 100 municipal bankruptcies.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/
Analysis: Europe’s austerity zeal risks killing the patient
Europe’s “no pain no gain” attitude to solving its sovereign crisis risks exacerbating the bloc’s problems, choking off the very growth needed to raise the money to pay down the debt.
“The expansionary fiscal contraction story says that you cut, you show you are serious about cutting and then the confidence fairy will come along and she will start pulling in private investment,” said Stephen Kinsella, professor of economics at the University of Limerick.
“The expansionary fiscal contraction story is a lie. You don’t cut your way to growth.”