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Confirmed: 50-state mortgage settlement is a “broad release” – Lawless conduct against mortgage holders tacitly ratified
[Executive summary] “The proposed Release contains a broad release of the banks’ conduct related to mortgage loan servicing, foreclosure preparation, and mortgage loan origination services. Claims based on these areas of past conduct by the banks cannot be brought by state attorneys general or banking regulators.” http://tinyurl.com/6wt6jp7 Occupy Harvard Occupies Lamont Library The group plans to hold study breaks, film screenings, knowledge shares, and facilitated discussions about many issues including access to higher education, the ongoing privatization of the university, and Harvard’s role in facilitating neo-liberalism worldwide. Topics for upcoming discussions include: “The role of knowledge in promoting social equality and social justice,” and “What is a library? What does the library of the future look like?” The group intends to maintain a presence in the cafe until 10:00pm on Friday February 17th. The Occupation of the Library coincides with a larger campus debate about plans for restructuring the Harvard library system. In a letter sent to the Harvard community last week, President Drew Faust wrote, “We are moving into an exciting yet uncharted new world of digital information in which experiments and innovations are constant and necessary, yet their outcomes not always predictable.” Such vague statements from the administration about restructuring the library have provoked serious concerns about the human and academic cost. Harvard Occupiers Protest Library Staff Cuts Shortly after 11 A.M. Monday, the Lamont Occupiers were informed by a library administrator that their signs-which they regard as protected speech-violated a policy against the hanging of signs in library buildings. They were told that although the policy is unwritten, it is widely known. Members of the Harvard University Police department then removed the signs as the Occupiers videotaped the event. http://tinyurl.com/83k6b48 Banking Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats – of the banks’ own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society’s rulers. The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector’s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement. http://tinyurl.com/7not24r
Organizers of Occupy Wall Street Sustainability Working group in concert with Eco Station NY are creating a 16,000-sq-foot rooftop farm in Bushwick Brooklyn, and we need your help. Bushwick, Brooklyn, is home to a population of 130,000 people, many of whom reside in neighborhoods that have been designated as food deserts. We assert that access to natural, nutrient dense, real food is a basic human right. This spring, as an affinity project of the OWS Sustainability movement group, members will collaborate to build, design and farm a 16,000 sq foot organic Roof Farm, utilizing smart and sustainable, Permaculture Design techniques to grow food which will be supplied to area restaurants, local schools, farmers markets, and CSA’s. http://tinyurl.com/76lrk56 The Tea Party’s war on mass transit – House Republicans try to gut federal funds for subways as they extend the culture wars to urban policy issues House Republicans seek to eliminate the Mass Transit Account from the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Mass Transit Account is where public transportation programs get their steady source of funding. Without it, transit would be devastated, and urban life as we know it could become untenable. And there’s the rub. “The Tea Party leaders and the Republicans who pander to them do not care about cost-effectiveness in the slightest,” wrote blogger Alon Levy in a comment about the bill on the Transport Politic. “They dislike transit for purely cultural and ideological reasons.” To the Tea Party, transit smacks of the public sector, social engineering and alternative lifestyles. Defunding transit is how you smack down urbanites, environmentalists, and people of color, all in one fell swoop. It’s how you telegraph a disdain for all things European. It’s how you show solidarity with swing-state suburbanites who don’t understand why their taxes are going toward subways they don’t even use. And it’s how you subtly reassure your base that you’re not concerned about the very poor. http://tinyurl.com/7ox3ofj Occupiers in Conservative Texas City Have Support of Mayor, Some Tea Partiers Even though they are enduring a bitterly cold winter, with a wind chill factor of close to zero on some mornings, it appears the Lubbock occupiers are there to stay. Mayor Tom Martin has said: “The land at 19th and University is street right of way, it’s not a park. So there is no curfew on that particular piece of property. The people that are engaged in the Occupy Lubbock movement are exercising First Amendment rights.” The young people who are occupying the encampment are dedicated to getting the word out in a community in which many people are unaware of the occupy movement, and they welcome the rank-and-file members of the Tea Party to join them in their efforts to overcome Citizens United. http://tinyurl.com/7dutfwu Ivy League Grads Reject Financial Services Field Are Ivy League graduates bailing on financial services? That seems to be the only conclusion one can draw from some numbers reported by the Yale Daily News today. With the Occupy Wall Street movement a visible presence on several Ivy League campuses until the cold weather set in, and the financial services industry taking it on the chin on many fronts (financial, public opinion) there are fewer graduates of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard taking jobs in the finance industry. At Yale, a report from the Office of Institutional Research out last June found that just 93 grads or 11 percent of the 2010 graduating class ended up in business and finance, down from 19 percent for the Class of 2008. At Harvard, 17 percent of the 2011 graduating class planned to enter financial services, down from 28 percent in 2008. And at Princeton, 35.9 percent of the 2010 graduating class took full-time work in financial services, a slight uptick from 2009, but down from 46 percent in 2006. http://tinyurl.com/7olbf59 Occupy Has Raised Class Consciousness: Now What? The one percent owns approximately 40 percent of the nation’s wealth and almost half of all investment capital. Five percent own 70 percent of all investment capital. “Those are medieval numbers,” says Alperovitz. “That’s the way medieval society was organized. We need systemic change. Who owns the wealth is the primary question people should be asking.” So, what are the solutions? What’s on the top of your demands list? And what are some real victories that can be won this year? Korten sees it as a two-front agenda. . . http://tinyurl.com/7hbddeh A Dozen Occupy Atlanta Protesters Arrested Police say about a dozen people associated with Occupy Atlanta have been arrested at a midtown office building. WXIA-TV reports that the arrests came as a group of protesters moved into the lobby level of the AT&T Midtown Center building on Monday. Occupy Atlanta spokesman Tim Franzen tells the television station that his group and members of the Communications Workers of America union are refusing to leave the lobby and were setting up tents outside. Franzen says they don’t plan to leave until AT&T rehires hundreds of people he says were recently laid off. Demonstrators petition Comcast to broadcast Al Jazeera English Retired Philadelphia police Captain Ray Lewis is making waves again today with the Occupy movement, this time in Philadelphia. Today he has taken up with the Occupy Philadelphia protesters who are participating in a demonstration at the Comcast Center where activists will present a petition carrying a reported 23,000 signatures for the cable company to include Al Jazeera’s English news service among its channel lineup. http://tinyurl.com/88bhd9q El Pasoans Protest Corporate Greed Lina Murillo, a mother of two, was there to “Protest and stand up because the Government has sold out to large corporations.” She was there with her two kids and husband. They all camped out together near the sidewalk facing the Bank of America. Mrs. Murillo was very well spoken and not the typical image you conjure up when you think of someone who wants to “stick it to the man.” She could be your aunt, teacher, next-door-neighbor or any other person you run into everyday. This showed the diversity of the people that camped out. I also spoke to Nick who was cooking food for the people there. He even offered me food when I approached his counter. It was a lunch style table with crockpots, spoons, napkins and a tub of water. His reason for being there was to protest the corporate greed but mainly to support the others there. He wants to bring awareness to the problem which is the main goal of most protesters. Dyllan, who just returned from service in the Navy, was there to support his fellow El Pasoans. He wanted to be there for his friends that could not.
This is a movement with the common man standing up to fight what is wrong. These people are standing up for an injustice and they need support. El Paso should stand up as a community and support them.
http://tinyurl.com/73lfnz5 Pepper-Spraying NYPD White-Shirt Tony Bologna Sued By OWS Protesters NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who was filmed pepper spraying a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters near Union Square in September, has been sued by two of the women who were injured in the incident. According to the Daily News, Chelsea Elliot and Jeanne Mansfield are suing Bologna and the city for damages for “physical pain and mental suffering.” “I think he allowed his emotions to get the best of him,” Mansfield said. Just Chill Out and Let the NYPD Photograph Your Eyes NYPD spying is not quite as dystopian- and science fiction-seeming as a database of citizens’ eye pictures. A handful of people arrested recently in New York City, including a few Occupy Wall Street protesters, are complaining that cops are insisting that the accused allow the department to photograph their irises, despite the fact that the security measure is supposed to be voluntary. “[An officer] said: ‘It’s not really optional. It’ll take you longer to get out of here if you don’t do it,'” one protesters claims. The department’s spokesperson, Paul Browne, says unsurprisingly that he’s never heard of such a thing. http://tinyurl.com/6mvxwr6 Occupy Draws Strength From the Powerless There is a recipe for breaking popular movements. I watched it play out over five years in the war in El Salvador. I now see these familiar patterns in the assault against the Occupy movement. It goes like this. Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations — the group Stand for Oakland seems to be one of these attempts — to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries, a tactic carried out consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, by an anonymous West Coast group known as OLAASM — Occupy Los Angeles Anti Social Media. Provoke the movement — or front groups acting in the name of the movement — to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative. In the war in El Salvador it was Jose Napoleon Duarte. For the Occupy movement it is someone like Van Jones. And use this “reformist” to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement’s core aims through the electoral process. http://tinyurl.com/884762p Conservatives Try Occupying ‘Occupy DC’ An attempt by conservative activists to begin a month of counter-protests at an Occupy D.C. encampment kicked off on Monday. Roughly two dozen demonstrators showed up at Washington’s Freedom Plaza to launch what promoters had dubbed “Occupy Occupy D.C.” espite the low turnout the conservatives were not outnumbered by their progressive counterparts. The daytime populations of Freedom Plaza and the main Occupy site, McPherson Square, are typically low. They were further decimated earlier this month when National Park Police cracked down on a standing ban on camping in the two parks. Typically the majority of Occupy demonstrators assemble en masse only for nightly meetings or organized events, such as last week’s CPAC convention. http://tinyurl.com/79kx84c Punishing Protest, Policing Dissent: What is the Justice System For? Occupiers, though, have racked up many more detentions, with 6,526 arrested in 110 U.S. cities so far, according to OccupyArrests.com. This wave of action and reaction has kept National Lawyers Guild (NLG) chapters and members very busy working to protect demonstrators’ constitutional rights. Founded 75 years ago to use the law to advance social justice and support progressive social movements, NLG coordinates attorneys, legal workers and law students, and provides legal briefing, case law research, legal strategy and tactical advice to activists. Over the past several months, its members have filed constitutional rights challenges, represented protesters in criminal court, trained and acted as Legal Observers(r), and often provided ’round-the-clock legal advice to Occupy encampments. Their director, Heidi Boghosian, told me that guild members “…have probably pulled more all-nighters in the past few months than they did in all of college. But we hope that the Occupy movement continues, in as many creative incarnations as possible. For most of us, this kind of grassroots activism is what we live for.” So I asked Boghosian this weekend how her view of the hierarchy of governmental threats to the exercise of political speech described in her 2007 book, Punishing Protest, has changed. She responded that two new significant trends are evident: “One, the use of high-technology and sophisticated military equipment, and two, cooperation between law enforcement and the private business sector, especially with regard to surveillance/spying and controlling media access to police actions.” Occupy Oakland holds forum at Grand Lake Theater on recent protests Occupy Oakland protesters sought to draw connections between police actions at recent demonstrations and what they say is a history of misconduct by the department at a forum held at the Grand Lake Theater on Thursday. Protesters gathered at the theater near Lake Merritt for Occupy Oakland’s “Citizen Police Review Board” event, which was organized after a meeting by the city’s official police review board on recent protests was canceled. http://tinyurl.com/6sktrc2 Union employees showed CPAC a good time – and their union pride This weekend, as tuxedoed waitstaff quietly served drinks and dinner to paying CPAC attendees interested in the bon mots of union-busting Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (R), few of the guests likely took the time to peer at their servers’ chests. If they had, the CPACers might have noticed something ironic: even as Walker was lauding the optimism of Wisconsin’s business community in the wake of his union-busting, union employees were placing and removing their dinner plates (which were assembled by union employees in the kitchens and washed by union employees after). Though some of the contract employees brought in to serve CPAC’s needs were not unionized, the Marriott Wardman Park (like CPAC’s original home, the Omni Shoreham) is a union hotel – which means its employees are organized under the banner of UNITE HERE’s Local 25. And, as part of their contract, every employee is allowed to wear their union button under their Marriott nametag. The buttons ranged from the above subtle button to one displaying a white, cougar-like paw print on a black background to more simple text buttons. But for each, the message was clear to those who noticed: we’re union employees, and we’re not going to hide it, even at CPAC. Lies, Loathing, and Hope at the Democratic Convention and Beyond The response to the small Occupy/anti-National Defense Authorization Act protest at the Democratic convention was indicative of where we are politically in many ways. Some delegates fearfully scurried away from the protesters, others angrily told them they were protesting the wrong party (although Obama did sign it), and others, still, stopped and expressed solidarity with Occupy. As one activist who was there holding a Millionaires Tax banner outside the hall reported: “It was like a Rorschach test. You could tell where folks were on the political spectrum by how they reacted. The thing that stood out to me was how the slickest suits in the crowd just walked by like we didn’t exist.” At the CPAC-Occupy beer summit (video) A couple of Tea Party militiamen understood that if you buy a few cold ones and start talking, you may discover you have some things in common (along with some huge differences). There have been other friendly encounters of these two movements. In Richmond Virginia for example. The re-energised US left has much to teach its dismal European counterparts In Europe the city’s aflame, but America’s Athens, Philadelphia, city of the founding fathers, has lit a very different touchpaper: its Occupy movement is the first in the country to announce it’s running for Congress. Whether or not 29-year-old Nathan Kleinman beats the moderate incumbent, it says something about a new spirit of opportunism on the American left. In December, a poll by the Pew Research Center found support for socialism now outweighs support for capitalism among a younger generation of Americans. In 2012 so far, in a spectacular series of victories, American progressives have taken on big oil, Hollywood and (some people’s version of) God, winning every time. The European left, meanwhile, is in freefall: the social democrats, once synonymous with Scandinavia, got just over 6% in last month’s election for the Finnish presidency. In fact the only socialists governing alone in Europe today are Carwyn Jones in Wales and the Moscow-trained president of Cyprus. What has gone so badly wrong for the Euroleft, and what can they learn from the US? Steelworkers/Occupy Toronto Flash Mob Highlights Bank of Montreal’s Role in 2-Year Strike The United Steelworkers (USW) and Occupy Toronto joined forces today to highlight the Bank of Montreal’s (TSX:BMO) role in prolonging one of the longest strikes in Toronto history. The flash mob of dozens of demonstrators, including more than 25 Occupy Toronto dancers and singers, showed up at the main Bank of Montreal branch at King and Bay to challenge BMO to help end the 27-month strike at Infinity Rubber. In a choreographed song and dance number set to the tune of “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5, the group urged onlookers inside the branch, and later on the street, to “Move from BMO” because of the bank’s role in funding an attack on workers. http://tinyurl.com/6o6mg4e Hungarians Protest ACTA in Demonstration A crowd of about 1,000 people took to the streets as the Hungarian installment of a global protest effort, objecting to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. The Hungarian event was organized by the local cell of the Anonymous international hacker group, the “Pirate” party, and the Occupy Budapest movement, which was set up last autumn mirroring the Occupy movements in the United States. The organizers object to ACTA since they see it as a restriction to accessing cultural goods as well as giving content providers unfair jurisdictions in tracking digital content. |