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Occupy protesters drop legal battle against city of Boston
The plaintiffs in the Occupy Boston lawsuit against the city filed a voluntary dismissal today, putting an end to their quest for legal permission to reside on Dewey Square. The lawsuit, originally filed last month, was an attempt to ensure that the Occupy Boston protesters would not be evicted from the camp by police. Two weeks ago, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Frances McIntyre decided that the group did not have a constitutional right to live on the public park. According to the statement from Urszula Masny-Latos, the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, the four plaintiffs from Occupy Boston decided not to appeal the decision because their fight for social justice would be hampered by “slow-moving long-term litigation.” http://tinyurl.com/6np7oor Occupy Wall Street: Where did all the money go? An evaluation of financial data provided by several Occupy movements across the country, together with an analysis by WePay, the protesters’ favored donation site, offers a picture of the kind of people supporting the movement and how the money has been spent so far. In Boston – where supporters have given more than $100,000 – finance working-group member Greg Murphy said that in addition to stripping the movement of a central space to interact with the public, the movement’s Dec. 10 eviction has had a financial toll of $200 to $1,500 in daily cash donations that used to come in on site. ‘Occupy Four Corners’ keeps beating drum loudly on the foreclosure front Five and a half miles from Dewey Square, a small crowd gathered on Fowler Street in Dorchester on a windy Friday afternoon. The forty people represented a range of young and old, a mix of those from the Four Corners neighborhood and those from outside it. While the ousted occupants of a trapezoid-shaped Financial District parcel once filled with tents consider their next steps, some members of the controversial movement known as “Occupy Boston” are joining up with City Life/Vida Urbana, a tenant advocacy group that has similar aims. Bryan MacCormack, a 22-year-old Northeastern University student, is one of them.
The Occupy Providence movement against economic inequality on Wednesday narrowly approved a proposal to dismantle its tent city downtown as soon as a day shelter for the homeless is opened in the city. http://tinyurl.com/cvun6zg Occupy a middle-class movement The “Occupy Wall Street” movement is the middle-class awakening to the class warfare that has been waged against them and Main Street by the “too big to fails” of Wall Street, their lobbyists on K Street and their bought Congress-critters on First Street. http://tinyurl.com/d5659w2 Why Occupy should embrace the poor The movement has to respond to the police sweeps of its encampments by becoming broader and more hard-hitting. It has to firmly include the vast number of people who have been marginalized by the rhetoric of American politics and by the realities of the American economy. In many places the homeless have joined the encampments. That is a beginning. But it’s not enough. To fully realize an ethic of inclusion, the poorest and most benighted Americans should become part of our protest movement. We need to increase their numbers at our demonstrations, and we need to undertake the protest actions that deal with their most urgent needs-including the attacks on the social safety net that hit them hardest. Three Generations Try To Escape Poverty Through Occupy Columbia In the previous installments of our Occupy Y’All Street series, The Huffington Post chronicled how the Occupy movement has drawn membership from victims of the Great Recession. We followed a recently laid-off painter and struggling restaurant owner in Gainesville, Florida, and a family whose home had been foreclosed on in the suburbs of Atlanta. Smith didn’t become another statistic during the Great Recession, however. She had already fallen through the safety net. Before she set up camp on the South Carolina capitol grounds, Smith was just poor. Proof the administration is comfortable, or even actively complicit, in foreclosure fraud coverup Let’s repeat that; the OCC – an arm of President Obama’s Treasury Department – signed off, allowing a company founded and managed by the woman who created Aurora’s foreclosure practices to audit her own firm’s work, and did so pursuant to a consent order and under the guise of consumer protection. Allonhill, the firm that promulgated and enforced foreclosure policies, is based less than a mile away from the address listed for Murrayhill, the firm auditing for foreclosure fraud on behalf of borrowers. Until now there has been a mountain of circumstantial evidence that the Obama administration has been comfortable with foreclosure fraud. There is the conspicuous lack of prosecutions, unwarranted and unwelcome intervention in the 50-state Attorney General review, and references that infer robosigning is a “victimless” crime. But, until this disclosure, there has been no solid evidence the federal government is actively covering up bank-perpetrated fraud. This arrangement clarifies that the Federal Government, at the highest levels, are comfortable, or even arguably complicit, covering up foreclosure fraud. http://tinyurl.com/bm58nle A Cynicism That Veils Hope: Why More Americans Should Support Occupy Wall Street The polls reflect a contradictory situation. The Occupy movement expresses grievances and fears shared by most Americans. But those who most loudly express our national dissatisfaction are booed or ignored. http://tinyurl.com/7n56gmp Occupy Wall Street: what would Gandhi say? Gandhi matched each populist call for a negative action with a call for a positive action. It was what he called “constructive programming.” For example, his call for non-violence included a call for a populist effort to help the wounded in the Boer War. His argument for the eradication of “untouchables” – people outside the caste system whom Gandhi renamed Harijan or Children of God – included a call for caste Hindus to clean sewage in Harijan colonies; a reversal of their positions and jobs. His rejection of goods whose raw materials were grown in India, then shipped to British factories and sold back to Indians at a high price, was also a call to support village artisans by buying their goods instead. Millions of volunteers were given something tangible to do. Rich and poor, women and men, entitled and disenfranchised; all joined in. Coming to know each other and challenging their customary beliefs about each other changed them. Occupy support and anarchism explored at Redway meeting A different take on the political and economic situation was presented on Monday evening, Dec. 12, at the Garberville Veterans Hall. Two self-identified anarchists, Brian and Dan, who are on a speaking tour of the North Coast, presented the anarchist view of the current economic situation. Their presentation before a group of ten or so included a short history lesson going back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, when weavers and craftsmen who had formerly worked individually from their homes were replaced by a system of factories and mass production. Brian and Dan say the Occupy Movement is one where ordinary people see themselves as the protagonists of the movement’s story in contrast to past political movements that sought to save whales or forests or Central American peasants. But in contrast to the general leftist political discussion that sees the problem as a struggle between Reagan-era unregulated supply side economics as opposed to the classic Keynesian economic theory that includes regulation of the economy, the anarchists favor moving past capitalism altogether for an economy based on the concept of “the commons” and a shared, communal approach to daily life. http://tinyurl.com/cdjdu7a Thank You, Anarchists The radicals who lent this movement so much of its character have offered American political life a gift, should we choose to accept it. They’ve reminded us that we don’t have to rely on Republicans or Democrats, or Clintons, Bushes or Sarah Palin, to do our politics for us. With the assemblies, they’ve bestowed a refreshing form of grassroots organizing that, if it lasts, might help keep the rest of the system a bit more honest. There will, however, be tensions. “Any organization is welcome to support us,” says the Statement of Autonomy passed by the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly on November 1, “with the knowledge that doing so will mean questioning your own institutional frameworks of work and hierarchy and integrating our principles into your modes of action.” Occupy doesn’t have a platform The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal establishment) for not offering a clear list of official demands – for, in other words, not offering a platform. But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform – a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them. Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands – with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity. Occupy Des Moines disrupts Gingrich speech Gingrich didn’t stop and talk to any of the protesters when he left, however, and he was heckled while going down the stairs and out the door to a waiting SUV to take him to his flight to New Hampshire for a a second scheduled appearance Wednesday night with O’Brien. “We’ll be waiting for you in New Hampshire. We’ll be everywhere you go,” David Goodner, an organizer with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, shouted at Gingrich as he got into the vehicle. Occupy Wall Street’s ‘occucopter’ – who’s watching whom? Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone. Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”. It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone. It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at. Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds. Occupy Wall Street Thank You Video Released Occupy Wall Street protesters got into the holiday spirit this week by releasing a video thanking the supporters. The 6-minute video catches viewers up on what the group has been up to. Various protesters share stories of how they got involved and explain the group’s daily routine.
Tea Party to square off against Occupy at the Rose Parade
The Pasadena Tea Party Patriots, also know as TEAPAC, are enraged by what they see as the politicizing of the parade and have promised to stage their own protest if the city and the Tournament of Roses don’t keep Occupy from demonstrating, TEAPAC leader Michael Alexander said. http://tinyurl.com/88dutuz Oakland port policing proposal fails to pass A proposal before the Oakland City Council directing police to stop any future port blockades didn’t even make it to a vote Tuesday night, as four of the eight council members used a procedural move to prevent it from being heard. Stores threaten to bypass Port of Oakland if Occupy not reined in There is a very dire warning today for the Port of Oakland from four major retailers. Target and Crate and Barrel are telling port commissioners that they’re prepared to completely bypass Oakland, if local authorities can’t control the occupy situation. The retailers say they’ll ship their goods into Los Angeles instead. Currently 40 percent of their imports move through the Port of Oakland. The threat comes one week after an occupy protesters shut down the port for 24 hours. http://tinyurl.com/ckqf7g8 Why Occupy? Countrywide is why The U.S. Justice Department has announced the highest residential fair-lending settlement in this nation’s history, with Bank of America agreeing to pay $335 million for the sins committed against minority borrowers by Countrywide Financial, which BOA purchased for $2.8 billion in 2008 in what had to be one of the dumbest deals ever. Indeed, Countrywide took advantage of some 200,000 minority borrowers across the country – 15,000 of them in Illinois – by charging them higher fees and interest rates than their white counterparts, even though Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan found, according to the Chicago Tribune, that “these disparities could not be explained by objective factors such as borrowers’ credit scores and their debt-to-income ratios.” In short, Countrywide discriminated because it could. This latest slap comes on top of a $108 million settlement with Uncle Sam over Countrywide socking it to people struggling to hold on to their homes with excessive fees, and $600 million in restitution paid to shareholders who’d gotten creamed by Countrywide’s recklessness. http://tinyurl.com/cxlwrcw Economic growth even weaker than feared The U.S. economy was even weaker than previously thought in the third quarter, according to a government report that showed growth slowing to near stall speed. Grover Norquist’s Real Game: Shifting Power and Wealth to the 1 Percent Grover Norquist is fast becoming the man everyone loves to hate – except those who fear him. Norquist, the leader of Americans for Tax Reform, is both the architect and enforcer of the Republican Party’s obsessive opposition to all taxes – an obsession that threatens to drive America off a fiscal cliff. http://tinyurl.com/d48zubk 1.4 Million Workers To Benefit From Minimum Wage Increase In 2012 In January, San Francisco will officially be the first U.S. city to have a minimum wage of above $10, nearly $3 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. And that won’t be the only locale in which workers will see a little extra pay in 2012. In fact, eight states will be raising their minimum wage next year, which, according to the Economic Policy Institute, will benefit 1.4 million workers. http://tinyurl.com/7yq9x8l Why Are We Forced to Worship at the Feet of ‘Mythical’ Financial Markets Controlled by the Elite? The markets are “jittery,” “upset,” “skittish” and “unnerved.” They are “confident” or “unsure.” They are “demanding” that political leaders “put up or shut up.” And they are “reacting unfavorably” to Obama’s newfound populism. These are just a few of the many ways financial markets are described each and every day by the media, financial players and public officials. At first it seems as if these markets are humanoids onto which we project our feelings. Yet, on closer inspection, it’s more like we have ascribed to them god-like powers. We are told to appease the market gods or face eternal financial damnation. As President Obama warned Europe recently, they must “muster the political will” to “settle markets down.” http://tinyurl.com/7fdmunq Americans could be transferred to foreign prisons under Indefinite Detention act When the commander-in-chief inks his name to NDAA FY2012, Americans can be on their way to the same torture cells that have kept al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked terrorists for the last decade. It’s now been revealed, however, that US citizens and anyone suspected of a crime against America can be sent all over the world. Under the legislation, the president has the power to transfer suspected terrorists “to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.” China? Sure. Iran? Why not! North Korea? That’s a possibility too. David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, tells Mother Jones that this was an authority that the president has had before, but only under the new NDAA is the legislation endorsed and insured that it could be applied to Americans. “If the president could lawfully transfer a German prisoner of war to a foreign country, then in theory he could do the same thing with an American prisoner of war,” Glazier says. http://tinyurl.com/d5vgao5 Occupy Movement Widespread In California A UC Riverside researcher says the Occupy Wall Street movement has expanded to nearly 30 percent of the state’s municipalities in the past few months, based on a survey of Facebook pages. 30,000 Chinese ‘Occupy’ Highway to Protest Polluting Coal Plants Tens of thousands of residents in China’s southern Guandong Province gathered in the streets yesterday, occupying a highway to demonstrate against the development of a new coal plant near Shantou city. The residents say existing coal plants in the area are fouling local air and water, and are making people sick. http://tinyurl.com/7x6y2z6 |