Tag: OWS

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.

Late last night, Scott Olsen, a former Marine, two-time Iraq war veteran, and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, sustained a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a police projectile while peacefully participating in an Occupy Oakland march.  The march began at a downtown library and headed towards City Hall in an effort to reclaim a site-recently cleared by police-that had previously served as an encampment for members of the 99% movement.

Scott joined the Marines in 2006, served two-tours in Iraq, and was discharged in 2010.  Scott moved to California from Wisconsin and currently works as a systems network administrator in Daly, California.  

Scott is one of an increasing number of war veterans who are participating in America’s growing Occupy movement. Said Keith Shannon, who deployed with Scott to Iraq, “Scott was marching with the 99% because he felt corporations and banks had too much control over our government, and that they weren’t being held accountable for their role in the economic downturn, which caused so many people to lose their jobs and their homes.”

Scott is currently sedated at a local hospital awaiting examination by a neurosurgeon.  Iraq Veterans Against the Wars sends their deepest condolences to Scott, his family, and his friends.  IVAW also sends their thanks to the brave folks who risked bodily harm to provide care to Scott immediately following the incident.

Keith Shannon, the roommate of injured Occupy Oakland protester Scott Olsen and a fellow Iraq War veteran, shares what happened Tuesday night when the Oakland Police Department fired upon the crowd with rubber bullets, bean bags and tear-gas canisters, one of which gave Olsen a skull fracture and trip to the emergency room. Shannon, himself a vocal protester, provides an update on Olsen’s condition – saying Olsen is “stable, but critical” – and says the incident has only bolstered his resolve to continue working for the movement.

In tonight’s Special Comment, Keith calls out Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, for her use of 500 police officers in a pre-dawn raid Tuesday morning, followed by more tear-gas bombs, rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds on Tuesday night. Quan, herself once a victim of the Oakland police’s bullying, now “is the bully,” Keith says. He calls on Quan to dismiss acting Police Chief Howard Jordan and allow protesters to return to their location, “or, having betrayed everything she’d supported and all those who have supported her, she must resign.”

Hundreds of protesters in New York City marched on Wednesday night to show solidarity with protesters in Oakland, Calif., where the police used tear gas to disperse crowds a night earlier. About a dozen demonstrators were arrested in New York, the police said.

Just after 9 p.m., about 500 people left the Occupy Wall Street base in Zuccotti Park and went on a winding march around the financial district and City Hall, accompanied by drummers and a man playing the bagpipes as a helicopter followed overhead.

Less than an hour later, a smaller group of protesters poured into the streets, ignoring orders from police officers to stay on the sidewalk, and began a frantic cat-and-mouse game. More than 250 protesters walked quickly and sometimes ran through the streets of SoHo and the West Village, at one point storming through a movie set on Macdougal Street as groups of police vehicles with lights and sirens pursued them closely. People emerged from bars along the way asking what was going on and offering encouragement.

Yesterday afternoon Occupy Wall Street group Healthcare for the 99% marched to the headquarters of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, WellCare and St Vincent’s Community Hospital, a casualty of profit-driven insurers and a healthcare system that leaves 50 million Americans uninsured. Last night Keith’s guest, Dr. Steve Auerbach of Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, spoke about the need for affordable, accessible national healthcare.

2.24pm: I’ve just spoken to Keith Shannon, roommate of Scott Olsen, the Iraq veteran who is in hospital after apparently having been hit in the head by a police projectile.

Shannon said doctors told him Olsen has a “skull fracture and swelling of the brain”. A neurosurgeon will assess Olsen later today to determine whether he needs surgery, Shannon said.

Olsen, 24, was in 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, before leaving the military last year. He had been opposed to the Iraq war even before his first tour to the country, Shannon said. Shannon and Olsen met in November or December 2005, and share an apartment in Daly City, south of San Francisco.

Rubber bullets and shotgun propelled bean bags can maim and kill, if the person is hit in the head, chest or abdomen. This is over-reaction by the Oakland Police on the orders of Oaklands Chinese-American mayor Jean Quan

While President Obama was telling the small crowd at a $7500-a-plate fundraiser in San Francisco that “Change is possible,” Pooda Miller was across the bay trying to get her plate back from the Oakland Police Department. “They came, pulled out rifles, shot us up with tear gas and took all our stuff,” said Miller, at an afternoon rally condemning the violent evacuation of more than 170 peaceful, unarmed Occupy Oaklanders by 500 heavily-armed members of the Oakland Police Department and other local departments yesterday morning.

Miller and others are calling for the recall of Jean Quan, who made history as Oakland’s first Asian-American mayor (full disclosure: Quan’s daughter is my Facebook friend); and they are complaining about the use of excessive police violence authorized by Interim Chief Howard Jordan, an African American. Such conflicts between former minorities are becoming the norm in what more conservative commentators call the “post-racial” era ushered in by the election of Obama.

Quan and Jordan are in the throes of dealing with a police department plagued by officer-involved shootings and killings, corruption and other crimes-crimes that have forced a federal consent decree to reform the department, after officers were convicted of planting evidence and beating suspects in West Oakland. Taking her cue from the Obama campaign of 2008, Quan announced Jordan’s appointment at a public safety forum titled “Creating Hope in the Community.”

Many like Miller and other Occupy Oaklanders are having second thoughts about what feels like the affirmative actioning of policing and state violence. Others, like Ofelia Cuevas of the University of California’s Center for New Racial Studies, see the workings of a not-so-21st-century pattern of policing and power.

From Slate, Why Isn’t Tear Gas Illegal?

Yes, but only in war. The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention doesn’t apply to domestic law enforcement. (The United States was a major proponent of the exemption, fearing that the convention might be interpreted to prohibit lethal injection.)

[]

In enclosed spaces, however, the chemical agent can have much more serious effects. When police plan to use tear gas grenades to flush suspects out of a house, they start by comparing the dose of CS with the volume of the building and calculating a “lethal concentration time.” That’s the number of minutes it will take before most people inside would die from exposure. If the lethal concentration time is nearing, and the suspects haven’t yet emerged, the police start breaking windows for ventilation.

It’s not entirely clear how many people have been killed by CS. Amnesty International said 50 Palestinians died from inhalation in the late 1980s-prompting a brief suspension of tear gas sales to Israel-but those conclusions are disputed. The FBI used CS in its raid on the Branch Davidian compound (PDF) in Waco, but the ensuing fire left it unclear how, exactly, the cult members were killed. Such incidents have prompted a search for less toxic crowd-dispersing chemicals such as malodorants, but none has proven as effective as tear gas. Russia appears to be moving in the other direction, using the powerful opiate fentanyl to incapacitate rebels during a 2002 hostage crisis. That approach ended up killing more than 100 innocent people.

The United States is so enthusiastic about riot-control agents that it has a standing Executive Order reserving the right to use them on the battlefield, in spite of the Chemical Weapons Convention’s prohibition, to protect convoys or prevent the use of civilian shields. While the U.S. hasn’t invoked the order since ratifying the Convention in 1997, Donald Rumsfeld made news in 2003 when he raised the possibility.

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.

Date/Time

Date(s) – 26 Oct 2011

3:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Location

Liberty Plaza

Under the Big Red Thing

   March

Time:

3:00pm Sign Making in Liberty Plaza

4:00pm Open Speakout – come share your personal struggles with our healthcare system

4:30pm March Against the Health Insurance Industry

March Details:

4:30pm – Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield / One Liberty Plaza: located across the street from Zuccotti park, Empire is a subsidiary of WellPoint, the largest publicly-traded health insurance company. CEO Angela Braley’s overall compensation is $13.1 million dollars, enough to cover 1455 New Yorkers.

5:30pm – WellCare / 110 5th Ave: the for-profit company that administers Medicaid and Medicare Advantage programs in New York and other states. Currently being investigated for fraud with estimates that WellCare illegally siphoned $400 million to $600 million from state health insurance programs for the poor. (1)

6pm – St Vincent’s Community Hospital / 12th St & 7th Ave: closed earlier this year due to bankruptcy, St Vincent’s is a casualty of profit-driven insurers and a healthcare system that leaves 50 million Americans uninsured. There are now no hospitals on the westside below 57th st.

From our friend evenyc at Daily Kos

OAKLAND — Police fired tear gas at least five times Tuesday night into a crowd of several hundred protesters backing the Occupy movement who unsuccessfully tried to retake an encampment outside Oakland City Hall that officers had cleared away more than 12 hours earlier.

Police gave repeated warnings to protesters to disperse from the entrance to Frank Ogawa Plaza at 14th Street and Broadway before firing several tear gas canisters into the crowd at about 7:45 p.m. Police had announced over a loudspeaker that those who refused to leave could be targeted by “chemical agents.”

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.

New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, got told “No, we won’t do that” by Albany’s police and New York State troopers when ordered to clear Occupy Wall Street protesters from a park across the street from the state Capitol and Albany ‘s City Hall:

ALBANY — In a tense battle of wills, state troopers and Albany police held off making arrests of dozens of protesters near the Capitol over the weekend even as Albany’s mayor, under pressure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration, had urged his police chief to enforce a city curfew.

The situation intensified late Friday evening when Jennings, who has cultivated a strong relationship with Cuomo, directed his department to arrest protesters who refused to leave the city-owned portion of a large park that’s across Washington Avenue from the Capitol and City Hall.

At the Capitol, in anticipation of possibly dozens of arrests, a State Police civil disturbance unit was quietly activated, according to officials briefed on the matter but not authorized to comment publicly. But as the curfew neared, the group of protesters estimated at several hundred moved across an invisible line in the park from state land onto city property.

“We were ready to make arrests if needed, but these people complied with our orders,” a State Police official said. However, he added that State Police supported the defiant posture of Albany police leaders to hold off making arrests for the low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and the public.

“We don’t have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble,” the official said. “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.”

And to add to the ego deflation for Gov. Cuomo, Albany County District Attorney David Soares has stated:

“Our official policy with peaceful protesters is that unless there is property damage or injuries to law enforcement, we don’t prosecute people protesting,” Soares said. “If law enforcement engaged in a pre-emptive strike and started arresting people I believe it would lead to calamitous results, and the people protesting so far are peaceful.”

The camp has been named “Cuomoville”

Some protesters Monday were angry with the governor.

“Gov. Cuomo’s new name is Gov. 1 Percent because that’s who he chooses to represent – the more wealthy residents of New York state, those on Wall Street, his backers and supporters,” said Victorio Reyes, 37, a community organizer with the Social Justice Center of Albany who was making video reports from the park. “We’re not going to stand for it.”

Cuomo insists the temporary surcharge on incomes over $200,000 should expire Dec. 31, as planned when it was created under Gov. David Paterson to address a fiscal crisis. Cuomo and other opponents of the tax say it and a new proposal to tax earnings over $1 million would drive tax revenue and jobs out of state.

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided — to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S. have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or, better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne, Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night. Anyone with restroom-related issues — arising from age, pregnancy, prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome — should prepare to join the revolution in diapers.

Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities — “as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist,” travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed.  And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest.

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.

Naomi Wolf, political activist and author of “Give Me Liberty,” calls attention to the enormous power that the federal government can wield to prevent constitutionally guaranteed rights. “History shows they start with the Other and it gets closer and closer and closer and someday they come for you.”

Mayor Bloomberg is planning Draconian new measures to crack down on what he calls the “disruption” caused by the protesters at Zuccotti Park, and he is citing neighbors’ complaints about noise and mess. This set of talking points, and this strategy, is being geared up as well by administrations of municipalities around the nation in response to the endurance and growing influence of the Occupation protest sites. But the idea that any administration has the unmediated option of “striking a balance,” in Bloomberg’s words, that it likes, and closing down peaceful and lawful disruption of business as usual as it sees fit is a grave misunderstanding — or, more likely, deliberate misrepresentation — of our legal social contract as American citizens.

Some kinds of disruption in a free republic are not “optional extras” if the First Amendment governs the land, as it does ours, and are certainly not subject to the whims of mayors or local police, or even DHS. Just as protesters don’t have a blanket right to do everything they want, there is absolutely no blanket right of mayors or even of other citizens to be free from the effect of certain kinds of disruption resulting from their fellow citizens exercising First Amendment rights. That notion, presented right now by Bloomberg and other vested interests, of a “disruption-free” social contract is pure invention — just like the flat-out fabrication of the nonexistent permit cited in my own detention outside the Huffington Post Game Changers event this last Tuesday, when police told me, without the event organizers’ knowledge and contrary to their intentions, that a private entity had “control of the sidewalks” for several hours. (In fact, the permit in question — a red carpet event permit! — actually guarantees citizens’ rights to walk and even engage in political assembly on the streets if they do not block pedestrian traffic, as the OWS protesters were not.)

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.

Spirits were high last night as occupiers were joined by 92-year-old folk legend Pete Seeger for a late night march to Columbus Circle, where a midnight performance featuring Seeger’s grandson Tao Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, composer David Amram, bluesman Guy Davis and others.

A live stream of the action offered millions an opportunity to view the transcendental nature of the moment that was unfolding. The march was one of the most inspiring yet because the repetitive chants were abandoned for folk songs Pete Seeger & others are known for singing. “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep” & “This Little Light of Mine” were all sung by people while marching to Columbus Circle.

[]

It was truly a spiritual experience and opportunity for younger generations to hear some of the best folk/protest music in the history of America. Songs like “This Land is Your Land” have become patriotic songs yet the song written by Woody Guthrie is actually a song for revolutionaries. That is why a sanitized version of the song is often sung. Pete Seeger actually sang the version with lost verses during a “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial that was part of Obama’s Inauguration.

This is one of the typically absent verses:

“As I went walking I saw a sign there

   And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

   But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,

   That side was made for you and me.”

Pete Seeger, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Tom Paxton, Tom Chapin and David Amram joined Occupy Wall Street on a march from Broadway and 95th Street in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, down to Columbus Circle at Broadway and 59th Street. When we got there, this is what happened.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman celebrates the Occupy Wall Street movement’s ability to refocus the country’s and Washington’s attention from deficits to jobs when economists like Krugman could not. “It turns out that no number of learned papers on how we’re doing this wrong, no number of sober editorials on how we’re doing this wrong was making a dent.”

I visited Zuccotti Park yesterday. Michael Moore gave a short speech, transmitted by the human microphone. I gather that right-wingers are claiming that OWS is anti-Semitic; someone forgot to tell the excellent Klezmer band.

Overall, what struck me was how non-threatening the thing is: a modest-sized, good-natured crowd, mostly young (it was a cold and windy evening) but with plenty of middle-aged people there, not all that scruffy. Hardly the sort of thing that one would expect to shake up the whole national debate. Yet it has – which can only mean one thing: the emperor was naked, and all it took was one honest voice to point it out.

As for how the emperor got that naked: read Ari Berman’s article on the austerity class, and its dominance in Washington.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – When “Occupy Wall Street” protesters took over two parks in Portland’s soggy downtown, they pitched 300 tents and offered free food, medical care and shelter to anyone. They weren’t just building, like so many of their brethren across the nation, a community to protest what they see as corporate greed.

They also created an ideal place for the homeless. Some were already living in the parks, while others were drawn from elsewhere to the encampment’s open doors.

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.

If you have to ask , you haven’t been listening

Cenk Uygur and “The Young Turks” are at Occupy Wall Street in New York City all week.

In this interview, writer Jesse LaGreca tells Cenk about becoming Fox News public enemy No. 1 after he called out a producer’s biased questions in a clip that made it online, if left on the cutting room floor.

A campaign against arbitrary searches by the NYPD gets a boost from Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street headed to Harlem Friday afternoon in a solidarity march that ended with the arrests of a few dozen protesters including Princeton professor Cornel West – just days after his arrest in Washington, D.C., at another demonstration.

The arrests, which occurred after marchers linked arms in front of a fortress-like NYPD station just off Frederick Douglass Boulevard, were a planned act of civil disobedience.

[]

Finally, here is West’s speech just a few minutes before he and other protesters were arrested:

The New York Post reported there will be more arrests of Occupy Wall Street participants, who do not abide by New York City laws for demonstrations. Bloomberg also warned that a crackdown was coming.

The Post quoted the Occupy Wall Street media coordinator Thorin Caristo, who stated:

  “His inability to create a clear and definitive opinion or position on OWS just shows he’s being tossed around like a bird in a storm. We all know what that storm is, that storm is the growing concern in the higher factions of Wall Street, that this movement might actually be making a difference…The mayor’s statements sound hardline and I have no doubt he may actually try to enforce those. But we all know that every time excessive police force is used in this situation the movement grows exponentially.”

The city should not take this point lightly. Use of excessive police force or any effort to disperse the encampment will only invigorate the occupation with renewed support. It will only lead to more marches and gatherings that the police will be deployed to babysit. It will only amplify scrutiny of New York City and its police force by the media and the people of the world.