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درباره ی جنبش تسخیر وال استریت Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

This article is about the protests in New York City. For the wider movement, see Occupy movement.

"American Spring" redirects here. For the 1970s band produced by Brian Wilson, see Spring (American band).

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/Occupy_movement

Occupy Wall Street

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (April 2012)

This article is about the protests in New York City. For the wider movement, see Occupy movement.

"American Spring" redirects here. For the 1970s band produced by Brian Wilson, see Spring (American band).

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a protest that began on September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district. The Canadian activist group Adbusters initiated the protest, which has led to Occupy protests and movements around the world. The main issues are social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The OWS slogan, We are the 99%, addresses the growing income inequality and wealth distribution in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. To achieve their goals, protesters act on consensus-based decision made in general assemblies which emphasize direct action over petitioning authorities for redress.[6]

Origins

Antecedents for Occupy Wall Street (OWS) include the British student protests of 2010, as well as Greek and Spanish anti-austerity protests of the "indignados" (indignants) (2011–2012 Spanish protests starting 15 May 2011), along with the Arab Spring protests.[7] OWS was initiated by Kalle Lasn and Micah White of Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist publication, who conceived of a June 2011 occupation in lower Manhattan. Lasn registered the OccupyWallStreet.org web address on June 9.[8] In June, Adbusters emailed its subscribers saying “America needs its own Tahrir”. White said the reception of the idea "snowballed from there".[9][8] In a blog post on July 13 of 2011,[10] Adbusters proposed a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest corporate influence on democracy, the lack of legal consequences for those who brought about the global crisis of monetary insolvency, and an increasing disparity in wealth.[9] The protest was promoted with an image featuring a dancer atop Wall Street's iconic Charging Bull statue.[11][12][13]

Formation of the New York General Assembly (NYGA) began in June and July when a group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts (NYAB), began promoting a “People’s General Assembly” to “Oppose Cutbacks And Austerity Of Any Kind”. On August 2 NYAB met in Bowling Green Park. Activist, anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber and several of his associates attended the NYAB meeting, but grew frustrated when they discovered the event was not a "general assembly" that rules by consensus resulting from group discussions. Rather, the event was intended to be a precursor to marching on Wall Street with a corpus of predetermined demands such as "An end to oppression and war!" In response, Graeber and his small group created their own general assembly, which eventually drew all remaining attendees from the NYAB meeting and developed into the New York General Assembly. The group began holding weekly meetings to work out issues and the movement's direction, such as whether or not to have a set of demands, forming working groups and whether or not to have leaders. [14] The internet group Anonymous created a video encouraging its supporters to take part in the protests.[15] The U.S. Day of Rage, a group that organized to protest "corporate influence [that] corrupts our political parties, our elections, and the institutions of government", also joined the movement.[16][17] The protest itself began on September 17; a Facebook page for the demonstrations began two days later on September 19 featuring a YouTube video of earlier events. By mid-October, Facebook listed 125 Occupy-related pages.[18]

The original location of choice by the protesters was 1 Chase Plaza, the site of the "Charging Bull" sculpture. Police discovered this before the protest began and fenced off the location. Nearby Zuccotti Park was then chosen. Since the park was private property police could not legally force protesters to leave without being requested to do so by the property owner.[19] At a press conference held the same day the protests began, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg explained, "people have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we'll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it."[17]

Because of its connection to the financial system, lower Manhattan has seen many riots and protests since the 1800s,[20] and OWS has been compared to other historical protests in the United States. Writing for CNN, Sonia Katyal and Eduardo Peñalver have said "A straight line runs from the 1930s sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan, to the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins to the occupation of Alcatraz by Native American activists in 1969 to Occupy Wall Street. Occupations employ physical possession to communicate intense dissent, exhibited by a willingness to break the law and to suffer the—occasionally violent—consequences."[21] Commentators have put OWS within the political tradition of other movements which made themselves known by occupation of public spaces, such as Coxey's Army in 1894, the Bonus Marchers in 1932, and the May Day protesters in 1971.[22][23]

More immediate prototypes for OWS include the British student protests of 2010, Greece's and Spain's anti-austerity protests of the "indignados" (indignants), as well as the Arab Spring protests.[7] These antecedents have in common with OWS a reliance on social media and electronic messaging to circumvent the authorities, as well as the feeling that financial institutions, corporations, and the political elite have been malfeasant in their behavior toward youth and the middle class.[7][24] Occupy Wall Street, in turn, gave rise to the Occupy movement in the United States and around the world.[25][26][27] David Graeber has argued that the Occupy movement, in its anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian consensus-based politics, its refusal to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal and political order, and its embrace of prefigurative politics, has roots in an anarchist political tradition.[28] Sociologist Dana Williams has likewise argued that "the most immediate inspiration for Occupy is anarchism", and the LA Times has identified the "controversial, anarchist-inspired organizational style" as one of the hallmarks of OWS.[29][30]

"We are the 99%"

Main article: We are the 99%

"Occupy" protesters' slogan We are the 99% refers to income disparity in the U.S., a main issue for OWS. It derives from a We the 99% flyer calling for OWS's second General Assembly in August 2011. The variation "We are the 99%" originated from a tumblr page of the same name.[31][32] Paul Taylor said the slogan is "arguably the most successful slogan since 'Hell no, we won't go,'" of Vietnam war era, and that the majority of Democrats, independents and Republicans see the income gap as causing social friction.[33] The slogan is based on statistics which were confirmed by a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released in October 2011.[34][35]

Income inequality

Wealth inequality and income inequality have been central concerns among OWS protesters.[38][39][40]

Income inequality has increased over the last three decades with economic stagnation and unequal distribution of the wealth undermining the goals of working people.[41] It is a focal point of the Occupy Wall Street protests[42][43][44] Simon Rogers and the Guardian UK, in their piece "Occupy protestors say it is 99% v 1%. Are they right?" state:

one will be earning below the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. 14.5% of Americans households are defined as "food insecure". That means for every seven households, one will have trouble putting enough food on the table".[45]

Rogers also shows how executive pay in the largest US companies has quadrupled since the 1970s, but the average non-supervisory employee is paid 10% less and that between the 1940s and the 1970s, the income of the median American household doubled, but since then incomes have risen only 5% for the bottom 90% of Americans.[45][46][47][48] During the 1990s, economists began to release studies which showed the increasing income inequality in the United States. Although these were cited by liberal activists and Democrats, this information did not fully become a center of national attention until it was used as one of the ideas behind the OWS movement.[49] OWS protests were particularly concerned with income inequality in America, in addition to corporate greed and the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations.[50]

Goals

OWS's goals include a more balanced distribution of income,[51] more and better jobs,[51] bank reform[27] (including reduction or elimination of profits earned by banks),[51] a reduction in the influence of corporations on politics,[51] forgiveness of student loan debt[51][52] or other relief for indebted students,[53][54] and alleviation of the foreclosure situation.[55] Some media label the protests "anti-capitalist",[56] while others dispute the relevance of this label.[57] Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times noted "while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a 'mob' trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability".[58] Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi writes, "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street".[59]

Some protestors have favored a fairly concrete set of national policy proposals.[60][61] One OWS group that favored specific demands created a document entitled the 99 Percent Declaration,[62] but this was regarded as an attempt to "co-opt" the "Occupy" name,[63] and the document and group were rejected by the General Assemblies of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Philadelphia.[63] However others, such as those who issued the Liberty Square Blueprint, are opposed to setting demands, saying they would limit the movement by implying conditions and limiting the duration of the movement.[64] David Graeber, an OWS participant, has also criticized the idea that the movement must have clearly defined demands, arguing that it would be a counterproductive legitimization of the very power structures the movement seeks to challenge.[65] In a similar vein, scholar and activist Judith Butler has challenged the assertion that OWS should make concrete demands: "So what are the demands that all these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused. Or they say that demands for social equality, that demands for economic justice are impossible demands and impossible demands are just not practical. But we disagree. If hope is an impossible demand then we demand the impossible."[66]

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, pollster Douglas Schoen wrote that polling of the protesters revealed "a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas."[67]

Protester demographics

Early on the protesters were mostly young, partly because social networks through which they promoted the protests are primarily used by young people.[68][69] As the protest grew, older protesters also became involved.[70] The average age of the protesters was 33, with people in their 20s balanced by people in their 40s.[71] Various religious faiths have been represented at the protest including Muslims, Jews, and Christians.[72] Rabbi Chaim Gruber,[73] however, is reportedly the only clergy member to have actually camped at Zuccotti Park. [74][75][76] The Associated Press reported in October that there was "diversity of age, gender and race" at the protest.[70] A study based on survey responses at OccupyWallStreet.org reported that the protesters were 81.2% White, 6.8% Hispanic, 2.8% Asian, 1.6% Black, and 7.6% identifying as "other".[77][78]

According to a survey of occupywallst.org website visitors[79] by the Baruch College School of Public Affairs published on October 19, of 1,619 web respondents, one-third were older than 35, half were employed full-time, 13% were unemployed and 13% earned over $75,000. When given the option of identifying themselves as Democrat, Republican or Independent/Other 27.3% of the respondents called themselves Democrats, 2.4% called themselves Republicans, while the rest, 70%, called themselves independents.[80] A survey by Fordham University Department of Political Science confirmed the Baruch College findings and gave further details: the protester's political affiliations were 25% Democrat, 2% Republican, 11% Socialist, 11% Green Party, 12% Other, and 39% independent.[81] Ideologically the Fordham survey found 80% self-identifying as slightly to extremely liberal, 15% as moderate, and 6% as slightly to extremely conservative.[81]

Participation and organization

The New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) is the main OWS decision-making body and provides much of the leadership and executive function for the protesters.[82] At its meetings the various OWS committees discuss their thoughts and needs, and the meetings are open to the public for both attendance and speaking. [83] The meetings are without formal leadership, although certain members routinely act as moderators. Meeting participants comment upon committee proposals using a process called a "stack", which is a queue of speakers that anyone can join. New York uses what is called a progressive stack, in which people from marginalized groups are sometimes allowed to speak before people from dominant groups, with facilitators, or "stack-keepers", urging speakers to "step forward, or step back" based on which group they belong to, meaning that women and minorities may move to the front of the line, while white men must often wait for a turn to speak.[84][85] Volunteers take minutes of the meetings so that organizers who are not in attendance can be kept up-to-date.[86][87] In addition to the over 70 working groups[88] that perform much of the daily work and planning of Occupy Wall Street, the organizational structure also includes "spokes councils," at which every working group can participate.[89]

Even with the perception of a movement with no leaders, leaders have emerged. A facilitator of some of the movement's more contentious discussions, Nicole Carty, says “Usually when we think of leadership, we think of authority, but nobody has authority here,” - “People lead by example, stepping up when they need to and stepping back when they need to.”[90] According to Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson, Occupy Wall Street and similar movements symbolize another rise of direct democracy that has not actually been seen since ancient times.[91][92]

Funding

During the beginning weeks of the park encampment it was reported that most of OWS funding was coming from donors with incomes in the $50,000 to $100,000 range, and the median donation was $22.[71] According to finance group member Pete Dutro, OWS had accumulated over $700,000.[93] During the period that protesters were encamped in the park the funds were being used to purchase food and other necessities and to bail out fellow protesters. With the closure of the park to overnight camping on November 15, members of the OWS finance committee stated they would initiate a process to streamline the movement and re-evaluate their budget and eliminate or merge some of the "working groups" they no longer needed on a day-to-day basis.[94][95]

Met with increasing costs and significant overhead expenses in order to sustain the movement, an internal audit from the fiscal management team known as the "accounting working group" revealed on March 2nd, 2012 that only $44,000 of the several hundred thousand dollars raised still remained available. The report warned that if current revenues and expenses were maintained at current levels, then funds would run out in three weeks.[96][97] Some of the movement's biggest costs include ground-level activities such as food kitchens, street medics, bus tickets, subway passes, and printing expenses.[98][99] On March 3rd, a group of business leaders including Ben Cohen, Jerry Greenfield, Danny Goldberg, Norman Lear, and Terri Gardner[100] created a new working group, the Movement Resource Group, and with it have pledged $300,000 with plans to add $1,500,000 more. [101][102] The money would be made available in the form of grants of up to $25,000 for eligible recipients.

Zuccotti Park encampment

Prior to being closed to overnight use, somewhere between 100 and 200 people slept in Zuccotti Park. Initially tents were not allowed and protesters slept in sleeping bags or under blankets.[103] Meal service started at a total cost of about $1,000 per day. While some visitors ate at nearby restaurants, according to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post many businesses surrounding the park were adversely affected.[104][105][106] Contribution boxes collected about $5,000 a day, and supplies came in from around the country.[104] Eric Smith, a local chef who was laid off at the Sheraton in Midtown, said that he was running a five-star restaurant in the park.[107] In late October kitchen volunteers complained about working 18 hour days to feed people who were not part of the movement and served only brown rice, simple sandwiches, and potato chips for three days.[108]

Many protesters used the bathrooms of nearby business establishments. Some supporters donated use of their bathrooms for showers and the sanitary needs of protesters.[109]

New York City requires a permit to use "amplified sound," including electric bullhorns. Since Occupy Wall Street did not have a permit, the protesters created the "human microphone" in which a speaker pauses while the nearby members of the audience repeat the phrase in unison. The effect has been called "comic or exhilarating—often all at once." Some feel this provided a further unifying effect for the crowd.[110][111]

During the weeks that overnight use of the park was allowed, a separate area was set aside for an information area which contained laptop computers and several wireless routers.[112][113] The items were powered with gas generators until the New York Fire Department removed them on October 28, saying they were a fire hazard.[114] Protesters then used bicycles rigged with an electricity-generating apparatus to charge batteries to power the protesters' laptops and other electronics.[115] According to the Columbia Journalism Review's New Frontier Database, the media team, while unofficial, ran websites like Occupytogether.org, video livestream, a "steady flow of updates on Twitter, and Tumblr" as well as Skype sessions with other demonstrators.[116]

On October 6, Brookfield Office Properties, which owns Zuccotti Park, issued a statement saying: "Sanitation is a growing concern... Normally the park is cleaned and inspected every weeknight [but] because the protesters refuse to cooperate ... the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16 and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels."[117][118]

On October 13, New York City's mayor Bloomberg and Brookfield announced that the park must be vacated for cleaning the following morning at 7 am.[119] However, protesters vowed to "defend the occupation" after police said they wouldn’t allow them to return with sleeping bags and other gear following the cleaning, and many protesters spent the night sweeping and mopping the park.[120][121] The next morning the property owner postponed its cleaning effort.[120] Having prepared for a confrontation with the authorities to prevent the cleaning effort from proceeding, some protesters clashed with police in riot gear outside City Hall after it was canceled.[119]

On October 20, residents at a community board meeting complained about inadequate sanitation, verbal taunts and harassment by protesters, noise, and related issues. One resident angrily complained that the protesters "[a]re defecating on our doorsteps"; board member Tricia Joyce said, "They have to have some parameters. That doesn't mean the protests have to stop. I'm hoping we can strike a balance on parameters because this could be a long term stay."[122]

Shortly after midnight on November 15, 2011, the New York Police Department gave protesters notice from the park's owner (Brookfield Office Properties) to leave Zuccotti Park due to its purportedly unsanitary and hazardous conditions. The notice stated that they could return without sleeping bags, tarps or tents.[123][124] About an hour later, police in riot gear began removing protesters from the park, arresting some 200 people in the process, including a number of journalists. While the police raid was in progress, the Occupy Wall Street Media Team issued an official response under the heading, "You can't evict an idea whose time has come."[125]

On December 31, 2011, Protesters started to re-occupy the park. At one point, protesters started to push police barricades into the streets. Police quickly put the barricades back up. Occupiers then started to take down barricades from all sides of the park and stored them in a pile in the middle of Zuccotti Park.[126] Police called in re-enforcements while at the same time more activists entered the park. Police tried to enter the park, but were pushed back by protesters. There were reports of pepper-spray being used by the police. About 12:40 a.m. after the group celebrated New Years in the park, They exited the park and marched down Broadway. Police, in riot gear, started to clear out the park around 1:30 a.m. Sixty-eight people were arrested—including one accused of stabbing a police officer in the hand with a pair of scissors—in connection with the event, which was over within several hours.[127]

Since the closure of the Zuccotti Park encampment, some former campers have been allowed to sleep in local churches, but how much longer they will be welcomed is in question and even former park occupiers debate whether or not they can continue to provide funds and meals for homeless protesters. Since the removal, New York protesters have been divided in their opinion as to the importance of the occupation of a space with some believing that actual encampment is unnecessary, and even a burden.[128] Since the closure of the Zuccotti Park encampment, the movement has turned its focus on occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, college and university campuses, and Wall Street itself. Since its inception, the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City have cost the city an estimated $17 million in overtime fees to provide policing of protests and encampment inside Zuccotti Park. [129][130][131]

On March 17, 2012, Occupy Wall Street demonstrators attempted to mark the movement's six month anniversary by reoccupying Zuccotti Park. Protestors were soon cleared away by Police, who made over 70 arrests. Veteran protesters said the force used by police was the most violent they had witnessed and a Guardian reporter witnessed a protester being slammed into a glass door by a "burly police officer, resulting in a large crack in the glass."[132][133] On March 24, hundreds of OWS protesters marched from Zuccotti Park to Union Square in a demonstration against police violence.[134]

Security and crime

OWS Demonstrators complained of thefts of assorted items such as cell phones and laptops; thieves also stole $2500 of donations that were stored in a makeshift kitchen.[135] In November, a man was arrested for breaking an EMT's leg.[136]

Police Commissioner Paul Browne said protesters delayed reporting crime until three complaints were made against the same individual.[137] The protesters denied a "three strikes policy", and one protester told the New York Daily News that he had heard police respond to an unspecified complaint by saying, "You need to deal with that yourselves".[138]

After several weeks of occupation, protesters had made enough allegations of sexual assault and gropings that women-only sleeping tents were set up.[139][140][141][142] Occupy Wall Street organizers released a statement regarding the sexual assaults stating, "As individuals and as a community, we have the responsibility and the opportunity to create an alternative to this culture of violence, We are working for an OWS and a world in which survivors are respected and supported unconditionally... We are redoubling our efforts to raise awareness about sexual violence. This includes taking preventative measures such as encouraging healthy relationship dynamics and consent practices that can help to limit harm.”[143]

It was revealed that the Department of Homeland Security has labeled Occupy Wall Street a threat, stating "mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas". The DHS keeps a file on the movement and monitors social media for information, according to leaked emails released by Wikileaks.[144][145] In response to a FOIA request pertaining to the DHS's role in monitoring the movement, nearly 400 pages of redacted documents were released, showing that DHS officials as well as the Secret Service and DHS sub-agencies like ICE closely monitored Occupy, gathered intelligence on the group and disseminated internal threat assessments on OWS actions, characterized by one DHS official as possibly unconstitutional.[146]

Legal issues

In May, 2012, three cases in a row were thrown out of court, the most recent one for "insufficient summons".[147] In another case, photographer Alexander Arbuckle was charged with blocking traffic for standing in the middle of the street, according to NYPD Officer Elisheba Vera. Video evidence shows Arbuckle on the sidewalk and proving Officer Vera lied under oath.[148] In yet another case, Sgt. Michael Soldo, the arresting officer, said Jessica Hall was blocking traffic. But under cross-examination Soldo admitted, it was actually the NYPD metal barricades which blocked traffic. This was also corroborated by the NYPD's video documentation.[149]

Brooklyn Bridge arrests

On October 1, 2011, a large group of protesters set out to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge resulting in 700 arrests. Some said the police had tricked protesters, allowing them onto the bridge, and even escorting them partway across.[150][151] In June, 2012, the incident was found to be the fault of NYPD, not the protesters.[152] The judge ruled that the protesters had not received sufficient warning of arrest pending entrance onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Police claimed that the protesters had received adequate warning. After reviewing video evidence, judge Jed S Rakoff sided with protesters, saying "a reasonable officer in the noisy environment defendants occupied would have known that a single bull horn could not reasonably communicate a message to 700 demonstrators". [153]

Three days after the arrests, several people involved filed a class-action lawsuit accusing police officers and other officials involved in the arrests of leading the protesters into a trap and violating their constitutional rights. On June 8, 2012, a judge ruled that the case may proceed. The lawsuit calls for "all arrest records stemming from the incident to be cleared, an injunction to end the police practice of trapping and detaining demonstrators, and damages to be awarded to those who were arrested".[154]

Notable responses

During an October 6 news conference, President Barack Obama said, "I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country ... and yet you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place."[155][156]

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said that while there were "bad actors" that needed to be "found and plucked out", he believes that to aim at one industry or region of America is a mistake and views encouraging the Occupy Wall Street protests as "dangerous" and inciting "class warfare".[157][158] Romney later expressed sympathy for the movement, saying, "I look at what's happening on Wall Street and my view is, boy, I understand how those people feel."[159]

House Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi said she supports the Occupy Wall Street movement.[160] In September, various labor unions, including the Transport Workers Union of America Local 100 and the New York Metro 32BJ Service Employees International Union, pledged their support for demonstrators.[161]

Five days into the protest, political commentator Keith Olbermann, formerly of CurrentTV, vocally criticized mainstream media outlets for failing to cover the initial Wall Street protests and demonstrations adequately.[162][163]

The Internet Archive and the Occupy Archive, a project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has been collecting material from Occupy sites beyond New York.[164]

References: http://www.en.wikipedia.org

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http://occupywallst.org

OccupyWallStreet

The following was written yesterday, June 11. For more: SaveRiverdale.com

This morning, we were informed by a utility worker that construction crews affiliated with Aqua America are planning to begin excavation on the land of the Riverdale mobile home community tomorrow (Tuesday).

We have successfully delayed construction of a massive water withdrawal facility, permitted to suck up to 3 millions gallons of water daily from the Susquehanna River for use in fracking operations, for over 10 days now. The encampment is in urgent need of support at this time! Now is the time to show your conviction and solidarity with these brave residents and volunteers who have decided to stand their ground in the face of ruthless corporate giant - Aqua America.

Ways to Support:

COME TO RIVERDALE: If you live within a few hours of Riverdale, now is the time to drop everything and support a community in dire need. The families that have stood their ground face imminent homelessness upon their removal. Call in sick to work, or take a vacation day - do it for the Riverdale residents.

DONATE: It has cost hundreds of dollars to feed and house the dozens of people who have come to support the residents of Riverdale. Money will be needed to support residents who face homelessness, and bail will need to be posted ASAP for those brave supporters who are holding the barricade.

Call or Email those responsible for fracking and the construction of this (and all) water withdrawal facilities.

CONTACT your friends, neighbors, allies, churches, and other networks that you may belong to. Ask them to spread the word, donate, write letters to the editor of their local newspaper.

This fight can still be won, but only with immediate action from people like you!

Update, 7am Tuesday: via @SaveRMHC: ¨Breakfast served at the encampment, a good crew of folks from @OccupyWallSt are here.¨ Follow them on Twitter, and get down there!

Occupy Berlin Biennale & Occupy Wall Street action against Deutsche Bank

Posted 13 hours ago on June 12, 2012, 6:26 a.m. EST by anonymous

Occupiers in front of the Deutsche Bank headquarters. October 22, 2011, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

via Take the Square, via Occupy the Berlin Biennale

The crisis of global capitalism requires a global response. We will now act against its leading institutions one by one. Transnational banks are central to this crisis and profit from the suffering of the people everywhere. Our first target will be Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank is active in over 70 countries in the world, creating complex local crisis in various regions. For example, Deutsche Bank is speculating on the lives of people in Southen Europe, using economic and political mechanisms to ensure the payment of odious debts. In the United States, Deutsche Bank is known as the “foreclosure king” for driving millions of people from their homes.

We need a new global tactic. Like Deutsche Bank, the movements are everywhere, we are connected, and now we can act in coordinated ways, targeting socioeconomic injustices through the specific companies that spread them; from Berlin to Cairo, to Madrid to Mexico City to New York to New Dehli. We will respond to situations in their local complexity and global commonality and share these actions and tactics on a platform for everyone to see.

We are people from many regions of the global Occupy/15M movements who met in Berlin within the seventh Berlin Biennial. This human zoo, financed by the German Government, objectifies and de-politicizes activists who have been exhibited in a room where they have their meetings, discussions, and sleep. However, as people who believe in action, we do not see this situation as a static one. It embodies the problematic nature of many contermporary neoliberal spaces which the Occupy/15M must confront.

Our first targets are worldwide Deutsche Bank locations on Wednesday June 13. We will be at Deutche Bank Berlin on Unter de Linden. We call on all movements to do creative actions at their Deutsche Bank and upload documentation to the N-1 network under “International Targets: Round One” The backup location is on Facebook under the same name.

Let’s build on the global actions of the past and keep connecting a cooperative mass resistance for the future.

Summer Disobedience School Week 3: Exposing Debt (video)

Posted 1 day ago on June 11, 2012, 7:13 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Starting at Bryant Park, OWS Summer Disobedience School presents the issue of student debt in front the Bank of America Tower, in front of the I.R.S under the National Debt Clock, and in the fountain on 6th Avenue opposite Radio City Music Hall. The school day concludes with "The People's Alarm" in Times Square.

Cacerolada en toda Europa! / Protest Against Spanish Bank Bailout

Posted 1 day ago on June 10, 2012, 10:48 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

via 15-M Brussels

WE WILL NOT PAY PRIVATE DEBTS WITH PUBLIC MONEY!!

Pl. Schuman at 18h - Brussels

Once more, the EU has decided to use public funds to cover the losses of private institutions. This time, Spain is asking for a bail out in order to recapitalize it's banking system. We know for certain that the banks are not going to pay back this capital injection and in the end it will be the taxpayers (it doesn't matter whether European or Spanish) that pay for the financial system's greed. Politicians are playing with the future of fellow European citizens in order to increase their popularity at home, entering in a loss-loss game. Under the false allegation that governments are defending their national interests they are pointing fingers at other countries. In reality, Merkel&Co are not defending the German people, Merkel is defending the interest of German investors even if German taxpayers are forced to pay the bill.

Spain's public debt is lower than the average public debt of European countries. However, the private banks owe 300% of the Spanish GDP to private foreign investors. It's important to recall that this private debt is held by financial institutions an not by citizens. Most of the creditor financial institutions were banks that used financial engineering (like subprime and dodgy derivates products) to increase their lending capacity. The real state bubble was possible thanks to abundant credit and the passivity of regulators (such as the BCE, the Bank of Spain, etc), regulators that are not democraticly accountable. If Spain was organizing a house party, foreign investors would be paying the alcohol tab. Now, imagine that you get a mortage 3 times the value of your house, who carries the risk of nonpayment? A question that should have been answered before the mortgage was sold.

Due to the irresponsability of the Spanish banks, the European banks, their accomplices the European Central Bank as well as European and national supervisors and regulators this crisis has unfolded. Meanwhile European governments aren't attending to the real needs of their people and are dictating a shift in the social model without the citizens have not been able to express about. When governments defend the interests of private institutions against the wellbeing of it's people, it is time for us, the citizens, to rise up and defend ourselves!

Four years after the beginning of the crisis, it is clear that this is not an economic crisis, this is a political crisis. And this is not a Spanish crisis, its a European crisis. We need to say Basta! and demand that our governments do their job and defend our interests. There are alternatives. Iceland used public money only to warranty deposit and let all irresponsible banks fall. The government, the central bank and the national regulator are being tried by the justice. Icelandic people decided not to pay private debt with public money and created a new constitution to prevent this happening again. Currently their economy is growing at three times the rate the EU is.

Join us on Monday at 18h and call for a demonstration in your city. We will be protesting in Brussels in front of the European Commission. Bring your pots, pans, and spoons, we are going to be loud!!!

Occupy National Gathering Promo Video

Posted 1 day ago on June 10, 2012, 10:32 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

The Occupy National Gathering will be held at Independence Mall in Philadelphia, June 30 - July 4, 2012. Come be part of history.

Emergency Call for Support from the Riverdale Mobile Home Encampment

The following was written yesterday, June 11. For more: SaveRiverdale.com

WE WILL NOT PAY PRIVATE DEBTS WITH PUBLIC MONEY!!

Pl. Schuman at 18h - Brussels

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articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com

Occupy Wall Street movement: The tale of versus

Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN Jan 1, 2012, 12.21pm IST

WASHINGTON: There was no brutal crackdown by a tyrant, no runaway tanks that mowed down demonstrators, no trigger-happy police firing, and no self-immolation by any protestor. Even flash mobs require more organization and coordination, so innocuously did the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement begin. And unlike the civil rights and anti-war movements, it wasn't even all-American to start with.

On July 13, 2011, the Canada-based Adbusters Foundation, best known for its ad-free, anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, put out a blog post proposing a peaceful occupation of Wall Street in Manhattan to protest corporate greed, growing wealth disparity, and the absence of legal action against banking mavens blamed for the global financial crisis. It was almost three years since the Lehmann Brothers' collapse climaxed the meltdown but the financial fiddlers who caused it had not been brought to justice. Hopes that a fresh-faced Barack Obama would reform the system had been belied. He was seen as a "gutless wonder" whose answer to the problem was to bail out the tricksters and offer platitudes.

By this time the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo were already into the sixth month. Followed avidly in the US, especially on fast-evolving social media, the movement kindled the spirit of America's disenchanted. But where the Arab Spring was a roar for democracy triggered by blood on the streets, the American Fall was a vague cry for accountability first booted up online. Adbusters' opening demand online was for "a presidential commission to separate money from politics" which would then "start setting the agenda for a new America". Their debut poster featured a dancer atop the Charging Bull, the Wall Street mascot that, depending on where you stood, was already emasculated or needed to be brought to heel.

Two months later, on September 17, when the first lot of people trickled into Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, heeding the call from Adbusters and an allied internet civil disobedience group called Anonymous, the motley crowd still did not attract any media, even though there were a gaggle of cameras nearby at the UN Plaza where the General Assembly jamboree had begun. But away from the cameras, the movement went viral online.

Occupy Wall Street Facebook pages, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds with the movement's own hashtag #OWS began erupting on the net. A week later, media coverage was ignited by the macing of a young woman by a police officer and the first arrests. By the time 700 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, it was a conflagration — in the media.

Since then, Occupy Wall Street has gone from a social media circus to a spotty global movement, still largely driven by — and on — the internet. By one account, there are now more than 2,500 Occupy sites worldwide in physical terms, but nowhere is there a crowd comparable in energy and passion to the one in Tahrir Square, or in a soccer stadium, or in the desperate and unseen hinterlands of India and China which are seeing bigger movements. OWS' biggest achievement, it appears, is in riding the social media to generate a public discourse about its objectives, which appear unclear. In part, this is because of the movement's all-encompassing nature that is not tightly focused.

It is vivid, virtuous, and occasionally volatile, but because of its large umbrella that has taken in everyone from the merely disenchanted and the dispirited, to the seriously dispossessed and desperate, all adding up to what the movement's loose leadership call the "99%", its message is construed as being vague. A vast majority of the disaffected are still not actively involved.

Some have called it the Left-leaning version of the Tea Party movement while right-leaning politicians have suggested sections of the OWS movement are dissolute and diabolical. Polls bear out the growing but limited support for OWS. A November 3 survey by Quinnipiac University found that 30% of American voters have a favourable view of the protests, while 39% do not. A Pew Research Center poll, released mid-December, found that nearly three months after the start of OWS, 44% support the movement and 35% oppose it.

But more than the numbers, what it has done is brought the issue of economic injustice and disparity out in the open. Although it remains more of a social media movement rather than a mass protest, with the small physical presence amplified in the rapidly expanding digital era, it has sharply defined the growing chasm between the elites and the commons with a vigorous debate backed by numbers and fuelled by dialectics. National Public Radio picked "Occupy" as the word of the year and Time magazine chose "The Protester" as person of the year. OWS is now turning out to be contemporaneously the well-chronicled dissent in the history of mass movements.

The political class in America has been forced to respond to these new age protests. President Obama, the commons' mascot-turned-mediator , gave the movement plenty of lip-sympathy , saying "it expresses the frustrations the American people feel...seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place."

So where does OWS go from here? The polls in November 2012, of course. For at the end of the day, the biggest revolutions dissipate in the ballot box. Till then, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, America's great protest singer, the wheels of the OWS movement are still in spin and there's no telling who it is naming.

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news.sky.com

A shocking video showing a police officer pepper-spraying Occupy Wall Street protesters as they sat calmly on the ground at a US university has gone viral on the internet.

The footage, which was circulated on YouTube, captured the policeman walking up and down the line of protesters, releasing the spray into their faces at close range.

The officer's actions prompted immediate outrage among the faculty and students.

In the footage, onlookers can be heard screaming out to the officer to stop before chanting "shame on you" as the protesters on the ground were handcuffed and led away.

The incident happened on Friday at the University of California campus in Davis, about 80 miles north of San Francisco.

Police reaction to Wall Street protesters has been in the spotlight worldwide

The university's chancellor, Linda Katehi, described the video as "chilling" and said she was forming a task force to investigate - despite calls for her to step down.

In a message posted on the school's website she added that it "raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this".

Many Twitter and Facebook comments supported the students and criticised the response. Actress Mia Farrow tweeted that it was a "stomach-churning" video.

However, a law enforcement official who watched the clip called the use of force "fairly standard police procedure".

An 'Occupy' protest camp outside St Paul's cathedral in London

University spokeswoman Karen Nikos said nine people hit by pepper spray were treated at the scene, while another two were taken to hospitals and later released. Ten people were arrested.

Police actions have been in the spotlight as officers clash with the thousands of people who have been holding protests and marches in cities across the world as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement for the past two months.

One of the most notable cases was in Oakland where a large police force, armed with shot guns, tear gas and riot gear entered the non-violent 'Occupy' protest and forcibly dismantled tents and evicted protesters on October 25.

His case lead to police chiefs and mayors holding conference calls to discuss containment strategies.

It was decided that police departments would turn to pepper spray to try to quell large crowds instead of rubber bullets and tear gas.

Supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement say they are upset that billions of dollars in bail-outs given to banks during the recession allowed them to make huge profits again, while average Americans have suffered from high unemployment and rising costs as the economy struggles to recover.

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online.wsj.com

Fairness and the 'Occupy' Movement

The protesters are on firm ground when they denounce those who get rich because of their political pull.

By ARTHUR C. BROOKS

The Occupy Wall Street movement has just passed its two-month anniversary. The protesters' calls for greater income redistribution and their denunciations of capitalism have become shriller, and the protests are becoming more violent and destructive.

A major topic of debate in conservative circles these days is how to respond. There are two schools of thought. One advocates the firehoses-and-handcuffs approach. The other is to ignore the movement and hope it fades away.

Neither is correct. Conservatives and free-enterprise advocates should seize the moment to show their own passion for the issues being debated—and, where appropriate, even embrace the protesters' moral critique of America's distorted and depressed system.

The most important area of disagreement concerns what our country needs today. The "We are the 99%" signs at every Occupy rally make it clear the protesters believe greater income equality—not more free enterprise—is what America needs. Unsurprisingly, the White House has found this class-struggle leitmotif quite handy to divert attention from its economic record. Last month White House spokesman Josh Earnest assured the public that the "interests of 99% of Americans are well represented" by Mr. Obama. This came after the president's well-worn attacks on "millionaires and billionaires," who, as we have heard many times, are not paying their "fair share."

Free-enterprise advocates should view this as a rare opportunity to expose mistaken and misleading arguments about income inequality. The dreaded top 1% earns about 20% of income today, we hear. Yes, and they also pay 37% of the federal income taxes, according to the Tax Foundation. Further, as my colleague Jim Pethokoukis has shown, wealth inequality is roughly unchanged from 20 years ago—and from 40, 60 and 80 years ago too, for that matter. According to the Congressional Budget Office, every income quintile has seen a real increase in purchasing power of at least 18% over the past 30 years.

The Occupy protesters are dead wrong on income inequality—but they are not so wrong in indicting our system today for unfairness, and for being wracked with crony capitalism, insider dealings and corruption. What is a fair economic system? Some define it in terms of forced income redistribution. The overwhelming majority of Americans, however, believe fairness means rewarding merit, even if that means some people have a lot more than others.

In 2006, the World Values Survey asked a large sample of Americans to, "Imagine two secretaries, of the same age, doing practically the same job. One finds out that the other earns considerably more than she does. The better paid secretary, however, is quicker, more efficient and more reliable at her job." When asked if it was fair that one secretary be paid more than the other, 88.6% of respondents answered that it was fair indeed.

According to the meritocratic definition of fairness, we have been getting less fair as a nation with every new redistributive policy and regulation that unnecessarily hinders entrepreneurship. Greater fairness means rewarding hard work and innovation—not handing out stimulus cash to politically well-connected corporations and campaign donors. It means lowering disincentives to invest, not trying to squeeze more money out of private entrepreneurs while protecting public-sector unions. Penalizing earned success destroys jobs and lowers growth, which especially hurts the economically vulnerable.

This brings us to a second Occupy goal that free-enterprise advocates can embrace: denouncing crony capitalism. Like statism, crony capitalism is just a way to use government to weaken competition for the sake of those who are powerful yet unwilling or unable to compete.

Indeed, crony capitalism is statism's co-dependent wife: Lurking behind almost every company deemed "too big to fail," you will find close proximity to government power. For example, Washington's auto-industry bailouts and its "Cash for Clunkers" program—handing out government grants to buy new cars—are opposite sides of the same coin. Wall Street malfeasance in the housing market is real and was spawned by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Want less crony capitalism, fewer insider deals and a smaller lobbyist-industrial complex in Washington? Then shrink and reform the government.

Capitalism's advocates should not see today's protests as a threat, but rather as an opportunity to express their own core values. The issues the protesters raise invite the champions of free markets to demonstrate their passion for true fairness and their anger toward crony capitalists and statist operators. In this way they can recommit themselves to the free enterprise system that has created more opportunity for more people than any system in the history of the world.

Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is "The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future" (Basic Books, 2010).

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit.

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usliberals.about.com

Declaration and Manifesto of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

By Deborah White, About.com Guide

he Occupy Wall Street Movement, also known as the 99 Percent Movement, has rapidly grown from a grassroots band of several hundred protesters marching in New York City on September 17, 2011 to, by October 1, 2011, energized protest demonstrations in ten major U.S. cities, as well as a powerful internet presence.

As of October 6, 2011, the fledgling movement had been directly endorsed by more than 50 organizations and labor unions, and supported by Democratic political leaders, celebrity-activists, and local officials across the nation.

This article presents the full-text of Occupy Wall Street Movement's admirably bold and clear declaration, published on the internet on September 30, 2011.

Declaration and Manifesto of Occupy Wall Street Movement

"As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

"As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.

"We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

"To the people of the world,

"We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

"Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

"To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

"Join us and make your voices heard!"

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http://www.time.com/time/

Occupy Wall Street, Re-energized: A Leaderless Movement Plots a Comeback

Excerpted from What Is Occupy? Inside the Global Movement, a new book from the editors of TIME. To buy a copy as an e-book or a paperback, go to time.com/whatisoccupy.

In a society in which we're used to taking direction from Presidents and CEOs, captains and quarterbacks, Occupy Wall Street's leaderless structure seems like a formula for chaos. And yet nearly a month after protesters were evicted from the movement's birthplace in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan the exercise in organized anarchy is still going strong. On Tuesday, Occupy Wall Streeters in 20 cities across the country marched in neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by foreclosures. In East New York, Brooklyn, about 400 protesters broke into a foreclosed vacant property and moved in a family that was homeless after losing their house to a bank.

Since the Nov. 15 eviction, much of New York Occupy Wall Street group's day-to-day activities have moved inside. Occupy Wall Streeters have moved in to a donated small office space in downtown Manhattan, with desks for about 50 workers. Crowds have dwindled, particularly at Zuccotti Park, where protesters are allowed to gather, but no longer sleep. Organizers say a smaller but more dedicated group is now doing much of the work of planning marches and deciding Occupy Wall Street's next moves. (See pictures of the Occupy Wall Street movement.)

Nonetheless, as it has been since the beginning of the movement, the leaderless structure appears to be working. Crowds come together on cue. Messages go out to the media. Lawsuits are filed. Funds are raised (more than $500,000 by the end of November). And the silliest ideas, like building an igloo city in Central Park, get voted down. "There have been challenges, but generally the group has been effective," says Marina Sitrin, a sociologist who has written a book on leaderless movements and is an active member of Occupy Wall Street. "The lack of leadership has been able to get more people engaged in the process, which I think shows how effective it has been."

So how does Occupy Wall Street make all this happen with no titles and no corner offices? By organizing as a network of dozens of working groups, Occupy Wall Street keeps its participants focused on particular tasks they can perform with autonomy and attention to detail. A look at the division of labor:

Idea Generation

The only power at first was the power of suggestion. Kalle Lasn, editor of the Canadian anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, coined the name Occupy Wall Street and called for protesters to fill the streets of lower Manhattan. Catchy idea, but how to organize this? In August 2011, about 100people showed up in lower Manhattan to talk about it, on the same day that Washington faced a government shutdown deadline because of gridlock over the federal budget deficit. Activists gave windy speeches calling for a list of demands, like a massive jobs program. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, David Graeber, an anarchist and influential activist, didn't like what he heard. He and a few others broke off from the group, formed a circle and started organizing the Sept. 17 march on Wall Street. Graeber proposed the slogan "We Are the 99%." (See a video from Occupy Wall Street's "Day of Action.")

By the end of the afternoon, nearly everyone had abandoned the original rally for Graeber's less formal discussion group, which became the model for Occupy's governing system. Meanwhile, untitled leader Lasn maintained the flow of ideas from up north. In early November, Lasn told a Canadian radio program that it would be a good idea for the Occupiers to leave the park before frustration and violence erupted. "Now that winter is approaching, I can see this first wild, messy, crazy Occupation phase kind of slowly winding down." He was right about the Occupation phase ending, but not slowly.

The People's Congress

Occupy Wall Street makes its decisions by consensus at what started as a nightly meeting called the general assembly. The group now holds general assembly meetings every other day, which are sometimes in Zuccotti Park or in an indoor public space on Wall Street. Attendance, though, has significantly shrunk to around 100 people a night, from as many as 1,500 before the police cleared the park. Facilitators run the meetings, but anyone is allowed to sign up to make proposals. Crowd members show approval by holding their hands up and wiggling their fingers. Downward wiggling fingers means you don't approve. Anyone can raise a finger to make a point. Rolling fingers means it's time to wrap it up. Since no bullhorns are allowed, the crowd repeats everything every speaker says, a technique dubbed the "people's mic," which has become a signature of the movement. (See "On Scene: The Night the Police Cleared Occupy Wall Street.")

While the general assembly gets decisions made, a by-product is recruitment. At a time when many people believe government isn't working, the general assembly gives a sense of true democracy. A bit too much, in fact, as the group grew larger, the meetings began to drag on and become more about fund distribution than what the movement was about. "General assemblies need to go back to what they first were, which was a movement-building body," says Chris Longenecker, an original member. "They get people excited." In October 2011, when the general assemblies were pared back to every other night, a smaller spokescouncil was created to make some of the group's decisions.

Getting the Word Out

The revolution has not only been televised; it has also been tweeted, Tumblred and streamed. The Occupiers, mostly in their 20s, have been heavy users of social media to get their message to friends and the rest of the world. By November the group's Twitter account had more than 125,000 followers. Occupy Wall Street has two main websites: one that makes official statements, and another devoted to the group's meetings and day-to-day activities. The latter features a calendar of events and a list of Occupy's dozens of working groups, along with chat boards. According to that website in November, the media working group had 310 members and the Internet group 365.

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www.bloomberg.com

Occupy Wall Street Plans Global Protests in Resurgence

By Henry Goldman and Esmé E. Deprez - 2012-04-30T17:28:57Z

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe today calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.

Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s 55-story tower.

“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail.

Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity, decrying high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the past six months, similar groups, using social media and other tools, have sprung up in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Pooling Resources

The Occupy movement in New York has relied on demonstrations and marches around the city since Nov. 15, when police ousted hundreds of protesters from their headquarters in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street, where they had camped since Sept. 17.

Banks have pooled resources and cooperated to gather intelligence after learning of plans to picket 99 institutions and companies, followed by what organizers have described as an 8 p.m. “radical after-party” in an undetermined Financial District location.

“If the banks anticipate outrage from everyday citizens, it’s revealing of their own guilt,” said Shane Patrick, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team. “If they hadn’t been participating in maneuvers that sent the economy into the ditch, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

Police Prepared

New York police can handle picketers, according to Paul Browne, the department’s chief spokesman.

“We’re experienced at accommodating lawful protests and responding appropriately to anyone who engages in unlawful activity, and we’re prepared to do both,” he said in an interview.

About 2,100 Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York have been arrested since the demonstrations began, said Bill Dobbs, a member of the group’s media-relations team.

In U.S. District Court in Manhattan yesterday, four City Council members accused JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Brookfield Office Properties Inc., Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, of suppressing free speech and using excessive force against protesters. The mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

Organizers describe the May Day events as a coming together of the Occupy movement, with activists also calling for more open immigration laws, expanded labor rights and cheaper financing for higher education. Financial institutions remain a primary target of the protests.

Bigger Banks

“Four years after the financial crisis, not a single of the too-big-to-fail banks is smaller; in fact, they all continue to grow in size and risk,” the group’s press office said in an April 26 e-mail.

Five banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) together held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, compared with 43 percent in 2006, according to central bankers at the Federal Reserve.

Occupy Wall Street began planning for May Day in January, meeting in churches and union halls with a decision-making system that avoids a single leader. Instead, participants rely on group “break-out” sessions in which clusters discuss such tasks as crowd-building, logistics and communications.

About 150 attended an April 25 meeting at the Greenwich Village headquarters of the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union, making last-minute preparations for how to deploy legal and medical help; site selection for picketing; purchasing, production and distribution of protest signs; and how to talk to reporters.

Blockades Planned

The meeting convened inside the union hall basement, where attendees arranged chairs in a circle as three facilitators asked each of the assembled to identify themselves by first name and gender -- he, she or they. Most appeared under age 30, though gray-haired baby boomers also participated. One of the older attendees pulled a ski mask over his head to protest the presence of a photographer from Tokyo.

Today, beginning at 8 a.m. in Bryant Park, scheduled events include teach-ins, art performances and a staging area for “direct action and civil disobedience,” such as bank blockades.

Tom Morello of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Rage Against the Machine along with 1,000 other guitar-playing musicians will accompany a march to Union Square at 2 p.m., according to the maydaynyc.org website. That will be followed by a “unity rally” at Union Square at 4 p.m.; a march from there to Wall Street at 5:30 p.m.; and a walk to a staging area for “evening actions,” which organizers at the April 25 meeting said would be the so-called after-party.

Golden Gate

Occupy-related events are planned in 115 cities throughout the U.S., from college towns such as Amherst, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia.

In San Francisco, a group calling itself the Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition abandoned a plan to close the span while carrying on with a day of picketing to support bridge, ferry and bus workers seeking reduced health-care benefit costs, according to its website. Protesters still plan a rally at 7 a.m. at the toll plaza, without blocking the bridge, the group said in a statement.

Across the bay in Oakland, protesters said they intend morning marches on banks and the Chamber of Commerce, followed by an afternoon rally and a march downtown.

“We’re looking forward to vigorously asserting our constitutional right to protest and giving a loud outcry about Wall Street and greed,” Dobbs said. “We’re hoping this will make a splash. We hope it will bring a lot of more people into the Occupy movement.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Goldman in New York at hgoldman@bloomberg.net; Esmé E. Deprez in New York at edeprez@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net

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www.guardian.co.uk

Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?

Occupy Wall Street what is to be done next Slavoj Žižek Comment is free guardian_co_uk

A demonstrator in Oakland holds a sign on 2 November, 2011. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Getty Images

What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world?

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

"They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time."

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the "occupied" places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, "capitalism" is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.

The first two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it:

"The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality."

Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch's Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies:

"Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?"

Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled.

One should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order should replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over? It is at this crucial point that we encounter the fatal weakness of the protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a minimal positive program of socio-political change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

Reacting to the Paris protests of 1968, Lacan said:

"What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one."

It seems that Lacan's remark found its target (not only) in the indignados of Spain. Insofar as their protest remains at the level of a hysterical provocation of the master, without a positive program for the new order to replace the old one, it effectively functions as a call for a new master, albeit disavowed.

We got the first glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy, and Spain will probably follow. As if ironically answering the lack of expert programs of the protesters, the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with a "neutral" government of depoliticized technocrats (mostly bankers, as in Greece and Italy). Colorful "politicians" are out, grey experts are in. This trend is clearly moving towards a permanent emergency state and the suspension of political democracy.

So we should see in this development also a challenge: it is not enough to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the most ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant economic organization, to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of organization, to search for the germs of the New. Communism is not just or predominantly the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline, hard work.

The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture. In boxing, to "clinch" means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching; Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half". What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of "concrete" pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New. The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the third world troubles is enough to make them feel good.

Economic globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Due to their international character, large economic processes cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms which are, by definition, limited to nation states. In this way, people more and more experience institutional democratic forms as unable to capture their vital interests.

It is here that Marx's key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever: for Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the "apolitical" network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform, but a change in the "apolitical" social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory, etc – all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by "extending" democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing "democratic" banks under people's control. In such "democratic" procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is, the solution is sought in applying the democratic mechanisms – which, one should never forget, are part of the state apparatuses of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction.

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn't know to what they are answers, and the analyst has to formulate a question. Only through such a patient work a program will emerge.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aaware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends:

"Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false."

After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink:

"Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair – the only thing unavailable is red ink."

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants – the only thing missing is the "red ink": we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict – "war on terror", "democracy and freedom", "human rights", etc – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy Naomi Wolf Comment is free guardian_co_uk

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

Naomi Wolf: reception, responses, critics

Naomi Wolf's rebuttal of her critics

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create fake derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

• This article was amended on 30 November 2011. The original said incorrectly that the Committee to Protect Journalists was one of the organisations that filed a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The article also referred to "kale derivatives"; this was a typographical error for "fake derivatives", amended on 1 December 2011.

Wall Street protesters vow to reoccupy on movement's anniversary

Wall Street protesters vow to reoccupy on movement's anniversary World news guardian_co_uk

Activists at Occupy Wall Street have issued a call to thousands of protesters across the US to reoccupy outdoor public spaces to mark the movement's three-month anniversary.

The Occupy movement has stalled in recent weeks after a wave of evictions swept away a raft of encampments, including the largest in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York. On Wednesday, it suffered a fresh blow as police in riot gear cleared Occupy San Francisco camp on the orders of the mayor, who had been sympathetic to protesters, while Occupy Boston lost legal protection against eviction.

Organisers said they hoped the call to reoccupy on the 17 December would galvanise and grow the movement.

Amin Husain, a press spokesman for OWS, said: "We know that occupation empowers people and eliminates fear. It permits individuals to assert themselves as political beings even although the system doesn't represent them."

"The question is not to make a splash, the question is how are we going to get the space to make that happen."

Sandy Nurse, one of the direct action committee responsible for the call, said: "The need for physical space is one of the top five priorities for direct action. My personal opinion is that people have gotten scared. They have gotten arrest fatigue. They are not willing to put their bodies on the line. But the call would re-galvanise the movement and remind it how powerful it is."

Citing the conference call by mayors across the US to deal with various encampments, Nurse said: "They have identified occupation as a threat to them – that's how powerful it is."

Eleven mayors participated in a conference call in November about Occupy protests in their cities, including those in New York, Denver and Portland, Oregon, but they denied any co-ordination of raids to clear encampments.

The need for a physical space has been on OWS's agenda since police raided Zuccotti Park in November. In a piece published this week in the first issue of Tidal, a magazine published by the Occupy movement, Judith Butler, academic and feminist theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke of its importance.

Butler said: "When bodies gather together as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are also making broader demands. They are demanding to be recognised and to be valued; they are exercising a right to appear and to exercise freedom; they are calling for a liveable life.

"These values are presupposed by particular demands, but they also demand a more fundamental restructuring of our socio-economic and political order."

At one point, the movement had more than 1,000 occupations, but now they have less than 100 – and that number is dwindling daily. With the onset of winter's plummeting temperatures – which was already driving people from Zuccotti Park before the eviction – and the hardening attitudes of city authorities against encampments, notwithstanding the dearth of public spaces in the US, seeking a place to camp is a massive challenge for activists.

Even within OWS, where the movement began, activists have a battle on their hands. In Zuccotti Park, the space's owners have imposed strictly enforced rules which no longer allow tents or sleeping bags, or allow people to lie down, which would make it impossible to set up camp.

The place they want to occupy on December 17, is Juan Pablo Duarte Square, a currently vacant lot on the corner of 6th and Canal Street in Soho, about 15 minutes walk' from Wall Street, named after the founder of the Dominican Republic.

But it has already proved controversial.

It is owned by the real estate branch of Trinity Episcopalian church in Wall Street, Trinity Real Estate, one of the largest real estate companies in New York.

Activists at OWS, which had previously counted Trinity church among their supporters, have repeatedly asked for the use of this space for a winter camp. But Trinity church has refused, drawing criticism from other church leaders and a handful of activists who went on hunger strike, pledging not to eat until the church allowed protesters on the site.

In a statement on its website, Trinity said it offered its continued support of the movement – including providing meeting space at church buildings – but not the use of its enclosed vacant lot at the city-owned Duarte Square, which it leases to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The property, Trinity said, is unsuitable "for large-scale assemblies or encampments."

For activists, the matter is simple: they need the space and the church should hand it over.

Husain said: "They're part of the 1% and they are choosing profit over God."

The church is also facing pressure from the religious community.

Reverend John Metz, of the Episcopalian Church of the Ascension, in Brooklyn, who describes himself as a "real mainstream church guy" said: "Trinity church is in a challenging position. They are a church with an enormous real estate holding. It's one thing to deliberate and review grants. It's another thing for a church to respond in real time to one of the largest movement for social change that this country has see for four decades.

"This is an opportunity to engage in mutual actions to transform a space, and make it a catalyst for the revitalisation of public squares that have all been eliminated in the United States, to create a space where the cause for social justice can be forwarded."

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www.reuters.com

Occupy Wall Street finds money brings problems too

By Ben Berkowitz and Chris Francescani

NEW YORK | Wed Nov 2, 2011 9:32am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Occupy Wall Street has raised more than $500,000 in New York alone to support anti-greed demonstrations and, seven weeks into the movement, protesters are finding that having money creates headaches.

The challenges have included how to become a non-profit entity, how to deal with credit card companies withholding donations, choosing a bank that shares the movement's philosophy and budgeting what to spend cash on.

The totals raised -- more than $500,000 in New York and around $20,000 in Chicago, Richmond and other cities -- have surprised everyone from the protesters to those overseeing their finances.

"I figured they would bring in maybe $10,000, maybe $20,000 and it would be no big deal. They were quickly bringing in that much and more a day," said Chuck Kaufman, the Tucson-based national co-coordinator of Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), the movement's fiscal sponsor.

"We were surprised and unprepared so it was a scramble to get our end of the system functioning at the volume the money was coming in."

AFGJ is a non-profit group with roots in Nicaraguan solidarity activism of the 1970s that has since used its tax-exempt status to be a financial umbrella for other groups.

Occupy Wall Street pays 7 percent of its takings for AFGJ's support -- book-keeping, tax returns and donation processing.

Although the Occupy Wall Street finance committee's website lists 87 members, Kaufman said the core was about six people, including a lawyer, an accountant and a tattoo artist.

They deal with more than 400 donations coming in daily via credit card, averaging less than $50 each. Actually getting those donations has proved hard.

CREDIT CARD WOES

In the early days, before switching providers, the alliance took in some $250,000 in donations. Kaufman said credit card processors have held back $75,000 of that, claiming they expect an abnormally high level of disputes on the charges.

He expects the funds to be released in $25,000 increments every two weeks, once October credit card statements start going out.

None of the major credit card networks returned calls for comment on any unusual reserves being taken.

Since the movement switched to the online donation site WePay, another $196,000 has come in, which gets routed like the rest of the money to Occupy Wall Street's bank account.

A survey of Occupy camps across the country reveals each protest is relying on local donations.

Protesters holding the purse strings in New York were keen to stress how expensive the city is and how hard it will be for the movement to sustain itself over the winter.

"People don't understand that this is New York, we pay New York prices," said Pete Dutro, one of the core members of the Occupy Wall Street finance committee.

"These occupations ain't cheap," said Dutro, a tattoo artist who was studying finance at New York University before putting his studies on hold to join the protest.

The movement is keeping its money at Amalgamated Bank, which was started in the 1920s by a garment-workers union and was until recently 100 percent union-owned.

That sole union ownership ended in September just as the protests were starting. Nine days after the demonstrations began, Amalgamated sold 40 percent of its stock to two of America's best-known investors, Wilbur Ross and Ron Burkle.

Ross buys and merges distressed companies in industries such as steel, coal and auto parts. Burkle is best known for his investments in grocery companies and has good relations with unions. Both Ross and Burkle are billionaires.

An Amalgamated spokesman did not return calls for comment.

Dutro was wary about Ross and Burkle's stake in Amalgamated but said "the people in that bank and in their management are very committed to their principles, and I really don't see them being co-opted by a couple of vultures."

Representatives for Ross and Burkle did not return calls for comment.

Last Friday, the Occupy Wall Street finance committee made one of its first detailed reports, saying it had spent $55,000 to date, including $22,000 for food, medical care and laundry and $20,000 on communications systems.

Dutro, who has a background in operations management at Internet services companies, said the amount raised so far should be taken in context.

"People see like $500,000 and they say 'Wow that's a lot of money' but the reality is it's not that much money. You have a huge community -- we're bigger than most of the occupations -- and we probably spent a lot more money," he said.

While Occupy Wall Street has had attention over its money and whether it should share with movements in other cities, most camps say they are just fine on their own.

"People have come up and said they want to give us contributions from $5,000 to $15,000 but we've told them no," Occupy Chicago's Orion Swann said, adding the group has raised less than $20,000.

"Right now we are figuring out how to establish a legal identity so we're holding off on accepting donations."

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York, Lily Kuo in Washington, Ned Barnett in Raleigh, Barbara Liston in Orlando, Jason Tomassini in Baltimore, Matthew Ward in Richmond, Bruce Olson in St. Louis, Daniel Lovering in Pittsburgh and Andrew Stern in Chicago; Editing by Mark Egan and John O'Callaghan.)

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www.usnews.com

'Occupy Wall Street' Seeks to Reinvigorate Movement with May Day Protests

Protesters set up an encampment in New York City's Bryant Park on Tuesday morning, and they also planned to block off entrances to the headquarters of major financial institutions throughout the city, such as the nearby Bank of America tower. As hundreds of protesters marched through midtown on Tuesday afternoon, a group of activists shut down the Williamsburg Bridge, which stretches from Brooklyn into Manhattan, prompting police to arrest at least four people according to the New York Daily News. More marches were planned for later in the day on Tuesday, and some groups have vowed to obstruct traffic in the city as they march through the streets, according to the Occupy Wall Street website.

According to an affidavit unsealed on Tuesday, five Cleveland men—at least three whom are self-described anarchists—were recently arrested for plotting to blow up a bridge as part of the May Day protests, according to the Daily Mail. A member of Occupy Cleveland revealed that some of the men had ties to the group as well, but their media coordinator denied any knowledge of the planned attacks.

The men, whose ages range from 20 to 35, allegedly targeted a bridge in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, about 15 miles outside of Cleveland, and they reportedly considered using a car bomb to attack the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Cleveland.

"The individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views," FBI Special Agent Stephen D. Anthony said in a statement. The men were arrested by the FBI on charges of conspiracy and trying to use explosives to damage property affecting interstate commerce, and they will appear in Federal court on Tuesday afternoon.

In California, Occupy Oakland—an encampment that saw one of the worst episodes of violence last fall—called for protesters to gather at the Golden Gate bridge to protest alleged unfair treatment of bridge workers who are engaged in a contract dispute over wages and benefits. Thousands of protesters in neighboring Los Angeles planned to close off streets as well, and workers at LAX planned to walk off their jobs over contract disputes.

The Politics and Economics of Occupy Wall Street

By David Francis

December 12, 2011 RSS Feed Print

The Occupy Wall Street movement shut down a shipping port in Portland Monday morning as part of a larger effort to cut corporate profits.

"By shutting down work at the ports this [is] one more day that Goldman Sachs and Wall Street firms are unable to create profit," said Occupy Portland spokeswoman Kari Koch, according to the Portland Tribune.

The Portland protest is part of what the movement calls its "Shut Down Wall Street on the Waterfront" effort, an attempt to disrupt trade at San Diego, Portland, Los Angeles, Tacoma, Oakland, and Seattle. Previously, Occupy Wall Street protesters managed to shut down the port in Oakland, one of the biggest on the West Coast.

Meanwhile, back on the East Coast where the movement originated, protesters surrounded Goldman Sachs, demanding that the company pay more taxes. "We're standing in solidarity against an investment firm that was highly responsible for the economic crisis," demonstrator Rick McAllister, 22, told the New York Daily News. "My message is: 'For us to survive, you have to go.'"

These renewed protests come weeks after the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to be drawing to a close. Police in cities throughout the country cleared protesters from parks that served as the center of the movement against the country's "1 percent"—a nebulous group that possess 1 percent of the nation's wealth, and includes corporations, politicians, and the news media. They believe this group is behind the income inequality in America, or the gap that has been growing between the middle and upper classes.

After parks were cleared, the news media had abandoned the story and the general public, which watched the movement grow with a mix of support and disdain, stopped paying attention.

But today's protests show that the Occupy Wall Street movement is far from dead. Calls to a phone number provided to the media by the group were not returned.

Occupy Wall Street's next step remains unclear. According to a message on its website, it is currently planning additional actions following today's port protest. "To the 1%'s pundits who claim Occupy is over: We are still here. Even as the agents of the 1% evict our communities and eviscerate our rights, we are evolving. What we have set in motion cannot be stopped with tear gas, bulldozers, rubber bullets, or metal barricades," the group proclaimed on its website.

But what exactly has this movement set in motion? What outcomes has it affected? As Occupy Wall Street begins a new phase of protesting, U.S. News explored just what effect the protests have had on American politics and the American economy.

Political. Compared with the Tea Party, the political impact of Occupy Wall Street has been minimal. Unlike the Tea Party, no national politicians have publicly aligned themselves with the movement and no members have been elected to national office.

However, prominent Republican pollster Frank Luntz recently told the Republican Governor's Association that he's "scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death." Luntz said he believed the movement is "having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism."

President Barack Obama reflected this impact in a speech last week in Kansas. He blasted Republicans as out of touch with everyday Americans and accused Wall Street of hurting the middle class though fraud and dishonest practices. "At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement," Obama said.

The Politics and Economics of Occupy Wall Street

By David Francis

December 12, 2011 RSS Feed Print

All of these themes reflect the sentiments of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. So while it hasn't changed national politics yet, the movement could influence the 2012 presidential election.

"The major impact of [Occupy Wall Street] has been on the center of gravity of the public conversation in the U.S. It has expanded the conversation and changed its center of gravity," said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington political think tank. "The content of that speech was influenced by the conversation that Occupy Wall Street helped spark."

The economy. The economic impact of the movement is difficult to gauge. At this point, it's almost impossible to know how camps have affected local businesses, or how much protests at ports have affected revenue from trade.

However, one cost associated with Occupy Wall Street that is readily available is the cost incurred by police as they patrolled the movement, originally in a watchdog status, and eventually as they cleared protestors from parks throughout the country.

According to the Associated Press, as of November 24, taxpayers have paid at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services. This includes $7 million in New York, and $2.4 million in Oakland, which faces a budget gap of $58 million this year.

However, in New York, $7 million is a drop in a bucket of the city's $4.5 billion police budget.

KARNEME

جنبش اشغال وال استریت

اشغال وال استریت [۱] عنوانی است در اشاره به اعتراض‌ها و گردهمایی‌های خیابانی که از تاریخ ۱۷ سپتامبر ۲۰۱۱ در وال استریت نیویورک آغاز شده‌است و همچنان در جریان است.[۲] تصرف و اشغال وال استریت به وسیله گروه کانادایی اکتیویسم ادباسترز فراخوانده و صورت گرفته شده‌است. [۳] برخی این جنبش را با خیزش‌های مردمی بهار عربی به ویژه تجمعات میدان تحریر و انقلاب ۲۰۱۱ در مصر مقایسه می‌کنند. [۴] خواسته اشغال‌کنندگان وال استریت عمدتا" رفع نابرابری‌های اقتصادی، مبارزه با فرهنگ اقتصادی سرمایه‌داری و از بین بردن دسترسی و نفوذ دلالان شرکتی و غول‌های پولی در دولت آمریکا می‌باشد. [۵]

برخی از جوانان امریکایی در خیابان وال استریت مقر بورس نیویورک در تاریخ ۱۷ سپتامبر در اعتراض به اوضاع وخیم اقتصادی و اختلاف طبقاتی آمریکا و سیاست کنونی این کشور دست به تظاهرات گسترده زدند.

در این تجمع که آرام و بدون هیچ گونه ابراز خشونتی از سوی معترضان بوده، معترضان از مردم آمریکا می‌خواهند برای اعتراض به سیاست‌های دولت آمریکا، به آن‌ها بپیوندند. معترضین در این تجمعات در پارک خصوصی «زوکوچی» در نیویورک، کمپی برای اقامت برقرار کردند که چند خیابان با بورس اوراق بهادار، واقع در ساختمان وال استریت فاصله دارد. بررسی گفته‌های معترضین نشان می‌دهد که دلایل این اعتراضات، «طرح نجات بانک‌ها»، «بحران وام مسکن» و «اعدام تروی دیویس»، سیاهپوست آمریکایی است که چندی پیش، توسط دستگاه قضایی آمریکا اعدام شد. معترضان معتقدند که مدل تجمع آنها، استقرار شبانه‌روزی در مقابل ساختمان وال استریت با هدف افزایش تعداد تظاهرات کنندگان و رسیدن به خواسته‌هایشان است و آن‌ها این مدل را از تظاهرات مصر و اسپانیا الهام گرفته‌اند. [۶]

این نوع اعتراضات در امریکا «وال استریت را تسخیر کنیم» نام گرفته‌است. [۷] در میان شعارهای تظاهرکنندگان جملاتی همانند "به کار بانک مرکزی پایان دهیم!"، "وقتی ثروتمندان پول فقرا را می‌دزدند، نام آن را معامله تجاری می‌گذارند!"، "وقتی فقرا از خود دفاع می‌کنند، نام آن خشونت گذاشته می‌شود!"، "وال استریت را نابود کنیم، پیش از آن که دنیا را نابود کند!" شنیده می‌شد. [۸]

پلیس نیویورک در اقدامی تحصن کنندگان را به جرم مزاحمت در حرکت عبور و مرور و مقاومت در برابر پلیس دستگیر کرده‌است. [۹][۱۰] در آخرین آمارها پلیس نیویورک ۷۰۰ نفر را با این جرم دستگیر کرده‌است. [۱۱] در ۱۴ اکتبر ۲۰۱۱ میلادی هفت نفر از اعضای جنبش تسخیر وال استریت با حضور در یکی از جلسات کنگره آمریکا با قطع سخنان لئون پانه تآ وزیر دفاع آمریکا و سردادن شعار ضد جنگ، خواستار خروج نظامیان آمریکایی از عراق و افغانستان شدند.این معترضان با سروصدای خود بارها اظهارات لئون پانه تآ، وزیر دفاع امریکا را در کمیته نیروهای مسلح مجلس نمایندگان امریکا قطع کردند. [۱۲]

منابع

BBC فارسی - جهان - تجمع معترضان در نیویورک در برابر خانه های ثروتمندان

Marcinek, Laura (September 17, 2011). "Protesters Converge on Lower Manhattan, Plan ‘Occupation’". Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-16/wall-street-protesters-vow-to-occupy-lower-manhattan-for-months.html. Retrieved September 17, 2011.

About Adbusters.org. Accessed: 3 October 2011.

Saba, Michael (September 17, 2011). "Twitter #occupywallstreet movement aims to mimic Iran". CNN tech. http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/16/tech/social-media/twitter-occupy-wall-street/index.html. Retrieved September 17, 2011.

Wall Street protesters: We're in for the long haul Bloomberg Businessweek. Accessed: 3 October 2011.

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Яoholl@ Taghinejad پنج‌شنبه 25 خرداد‌ماه سال 1391 ساعت 02:02