posted April 04, 2012 12:14 PM            

"It's somewhat fitting that the winter that interrupted the momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement was one of the warmest in recent memory. As the fourth-hottest on record, the exceptionally mild season served as palpable evidence that we're in the midst of global climate change.

And climate change is the ultimate 1% issue—polluting corporations, or rather, their shareholders and executives, are largely responsible for the continued spewing of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Primarily, they're responsible for erecting and maintaining the political and economic barriers that prevent the mass deployment of clean energy and the transition away from fossil fuels needed to rein in those emissions.

So as spring approaches, it should come as no surprise that Occupy aims to put climate in its sights. The New York City General Assembly, the movement's most notable decision-making body, has issued a call to 'Occupy Earth Day' during so-called Earth Month, beginning March 23rd and persisting through April.

Here's the call:

'We are at a dangerous tipping point in history. The destruction of our planet and climate change are almost at a point of no return. Our mountains in Appalachia are blasted; our drinking water in the northeast threatened by fracking; our American heartland is charted for an oil pipeline; and our forests in the northwest targeted for further deforestation. Our climate and earth risk never returning to a balanced state.

At this crucial moment, a small group of polluting businesses financed by the 1% have hijacked our political system for their benefit. They’ve rigged the system by paying off politicians, who in turn give these companies taxpayer handouts to continue to destroy our planet and atmosphere.

While the a majority of American people call out for alternative energy sources, our government only responds the interests of these big polluters. The very corporations that lobby our government in order to pollute, publicly admit that climate change is an issue, but ignore it in favor of continued record profits for Wall Street.'

...It looks like Occupy may take square aim at climate issues—and bring the fight directly to the doorstep of the fossil fuels industry." http://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/ows-calls-occupy-earth-day-global-month-action.html

posted April 04, 2012 02:28 PM            

Daily Intel: "A Zuccotti Park Reunion at Occupy.com’s Launch Party" (Joe Coscarelli at New York Magazine)

"The line was half-a-block long and growing down Avenue A just before 10 p.m. last night, but Arrow Bar was already filled to capacity. The East Village spot was hosting the launch party for Occupy.com, a new media platform created by local filmmaker David Sauvage with funding from 61-year-old lawyer/Hollywood producer Larry Taubman. After a winter hibernation, Occupy protesters are finally stirring for Spring, and with Zuccotti Park no longer occupied, a bar was as good a place as any for demonstrators to reunite, with many hugging like they hadn't seen each other in months. For those who could get in, the mood was electric, giving the impression that the movement is itching to get going again, perhaps in time for the planned "General Strike" on May 1. Or maybe it was the free food and music.

"The second week I went down there, I saw it was beautiful and made a 30-second commercial, or PSA, that went viral," said Sauvage, 31, who has also done work for Maybelline and the Wall Street Journal. "This guy Larry reached out to me. I thought the movement could use a media channel, so he bought the domain." Sauvage refused to name the price, but OccupyWallStreet.net went for $8,000. "It was more than that," Sauvage said.

Plenty of Occupy Wall Street websites already exist — OccupyWallSt.org, Occupy.net, and the official site of the local General Assembly — but the site's social-media editor Justin Wedes said, "What we've been missing is a really outward-facing, entry-level website aimed to serve the needs of the larger, non-activist community." He set up his Rhodes piano, planning on an impromptu jam later, as East Village standards by Modest Mouse and MGMT played over the bar's P.A.

The new website is not beholden to Occupy's general consensus standards. "This project could not exist within that framework," Sauvage said. Occupy.com has a staff of about fifteen people who work out of a midtown office, and they will not take paid ads, said Seth Adam Cohen, who likened himself to the site's CEO, and sits on the company's board with Sauvage and Taubman, their investor.

posted August 08, 2012 09:01 AM            

What it was? An attempt to reelect Barack Hussein O'Bomber. All our little Marxist Messiah's support groups were front and center and the "Occupier" movement was directed, controlled and protected by and from elements of O'Bomber's reelection efforts...all the way up to the White House.

It just takes a little time for all to become crystal clear...even to those who really don't want to hear or even know the truth.

So, all that trash, the vermin on sites, the rapes, drugs, prostitution, health risks, attacks on police and effective closing of private businesses near "Occupier" sites had the support, backing and protection of the White House...ie, Barack Hussein O'Bomber...just as I said from the beginning.

We now know for certain this is true because of direct testimony by the GSA and memo from the White House directing the GSA to "stand down" and not arrest "Occupiers" who were trashing federal property or engaging in other illegal activities...in their efforts to get their little Marxist Messiah, O'Bomber reelected.

Obama White House told GSA to 'stand-down' on Occupy protesters
August 7, 2012

Documents obtained by Judicial Watch confirm that somebody in the White House told officials with the General Services Administration (GSA) to "stand down" and not arrest Occupy Portland protestors who may have broken the law last year.

Former GSA Public Buildings Service Commissioner Robert Peck told a senior Department of Homeland Security official that the federal housekeeping agency had been instructed by the Obama White House to go easy on the Occupy protestors.

In a Nov. 6, 2011, DHS/National Protection and Programs Directorate Chief of Staff Caitlin Durkovich asked GSA's Peck if it was true that his agency had asked Federal Protective Service officials not to take action against the Occupy Portland protestors.

"Yes, that is our position," Peck responded. "It's been vetted with our Administrator and Michael Robertson, our chief of staff, and we have communicated with the WH [White House], which has afforded us the discretion to fashion our approach to Occupy issues...The arrests last week were carried out despite our request that the protesters [sic] be allowed to remain and to camp overnight..."

The Occupy Portland protestors had been protesting for several days on GSA-owned property in the Portland area. Eleven of the protestors had chained themselves to a railing in a downtown Portland park. A week before the Peck email, Portland police, some dressed in riot gear, had arrested more than two dozen Occupy Portland protestors.

The Obama White House denied on multiple occasions during the Occupy protests last year that anybody in the Obama administration had given aid or encouragement to the demonstrations, many of which erupted into public and private property destruction, arrests for drug dealing and prostitution and public health violations.

Peck was forced to resign from GSA earlier this year following revelations that agency officials had spent lavishly on a regional conference in Las Vegas.

"We now have a new GSA scandal - one that involves the Obama White House," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "These documents clearly show that federal agencies colluded with the Obama White House to allow the Occupy Wall Street protestors to violate the law with impunity. These documents tell us that the GSA and DHS can't be relied upon to protect federal workers or property."

For more from Judicial Watch on the Occupy documents, go here. http://www.judicialwatch.org/

posted August 08, 2012 01:17 PM            

in other words, the white house gave them free rein to make their own decisions about what actions to take. this is WAY different than telling them to "stand down".

posted August 08, 2012 01:32 PM            

The GSA was specifically ordered by the White House to lay off arresting Occupy members.

What is it you don't understand about what you just read?

The GSA gave orders to not arrest Occupy members and their orders were ignored.

posted November 10, 2012 12:32 AM            

"ON Wednesday night, as a fierce northeaster bore down on the weather-beaten Rockaways, the relief groups with a noticeable presence on the battered Queens peninsula were these: the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Police and Sanitation Departments — and Occupy Sandy, a do-it-yourself outfit recently established by Occupy Wall Street.

This stretch of the coast remained apocalyptic, with buildings burned like Dresden and ragged figures shuffling past the trash heaps. There was still no power, and parking lots were awash with ruined cars. On Wednesday morning, as the winds picked up and FEMA closed its office “due to weather,” an enclave of Occupiers was huddled in a storefront amid the devastation, handing out supplies and trying to make sure that those bombarded by last month’s storm stayed safe and warm and dry this time.

“Candles?” asked a dull-eyed woman arriving at the door.

“I’m sorry, but we’re out,” said Sofia Gallisa, a field coordinator who had been there for a week. Ms. Gallisa escorted the woman in, and someone gave her batteries for her flashlight. As she walked away, word arrived that a firehouse nearby was closing for the night; the firefighters there were hurrying their rigs to higher ground.

“It’s crazy,” Ms. Gallisa later said of the official response. “For a long time, we were the only people out here doing relief work.”

After its encampment in Zuccotti Park, which changed the public discourse about economic inequality and introduced the nation to the trope of the 1 percent, the Occupy movement has wandered in a desert of more intellectual, less visible projects, like farming, fighting debt and theorizing on banking. While several nouns have been occupied — from summer camp to health care — it is only with Hurricane Sandy that the times have conspired to deliver an event that fully calls upon the movement’s talents and caters to its strengths.

Maligned for months for its purported ineffectiveness, Occupy Wall Street has managed through its storm-related efforts not only to renew the impromptu passions of Zuccotti, but also to tap into an unfulfilled desire among the residents of the city to assist in the recovery. This altruistic urge was initially unmet by larger, more established charity groups, which seemed slow to deliver aid and turned away potential volunteers in droves during the early days of the disaster.

In the past two weeks, Occupy Sandy has set up distribution sites at a pair of Brooklyn churches where hundreds of New Yorkers muster daily to cook hot meals for the afflicted and to sort through a medieval marketplace of donated blankets, clothes and food. There is an Occupy motor pool of borrowed cars and pickup trucks that ferries volunteers to ravaged areas. An Occupy weatherman sits at his computer and issues regular forecasts. Occupy construction teams and medical committees have been formed.

posted November 15, 2012 02:19 PM            

"Big Problems, Little Solutions: For the New Occupy, Size Is Everything" (November 15, 2012, Paul Ford, New York)

"This is the idea of Rolling Jubilee: Raise funds online; buy up consumer debt for pennies on the dollar; cancel it; set those in bondage free. So far the Occupy Wall Street offshoot has raised $200,000 to forgive $4 million. Strangers giving money to strangers to help other strangers: an inversion of the financial order, a genuine kindness, a great prank, and not incidentally a way to highlight how simultaneously abstracted and connected the world has become...

Scaling is everything. A site that works perfectly for a hundred people fails catastrophically with a hundred thousand. If you expect traffic you can’t just hope for the best. There are dials to turn, files to configure, variables to tweak. For big companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, a huge portion of their annual effort is in scaling—ferreting out weak links and choke points and replacing them with finely tuned code on finely tuned hardware. Scaling matters in other realms too. The Obama campaign’s engineers built a get out the vote apparatus that got smarter as it consumed ever more data; Romney’s project ORCA suffered an epic system failure at the worst possible moment, and its candidate went down with it...

When I got home there were dozens of boxes of food in the hallway. After the storm, Occupy Sandy came, unexpectedly, to the forefront of relief efforts, tweeting furiously, moving food and doctors around as fast as it could. Desperate needs were compiled as gift registries on Amazon—the company no longer just an Internet retailer but a provider of infrastructure for all manner of everyday activities and mid-sized apocalypses.

As the scope of the Sandy damage became clear, many of the young mothers in my building, including my wife, started cooking and running hot meals down to the Rockaways. Somehow our apartment became an Occupy substation, with random people dropping off bags of rice or large cardboard boxes filled with pie donated by the Colbert Report. We put the pie on the balcony, to keep it cool, until somebody came to take it away. Mothers, man. Moms on missions. They started using a walkie-talkie app on their phones to exchange quick voice messages. Voices of moms were coming out of nowhere, babies chattering in the background. They were planning tomorrow, making lists, who will cook, who will buy meat, who will drive.