DEFEND OCCUPY DC! A CALL FOR NYC TO HELP PROTECT THE ENCAMPMENT!

Today, the National Park Service posted eviction notices on tents in both McPherson and Freedom Plaza! The memo covertly stated that while the protest can continue, camping cannot. While stating that tents might be allowed to remain with one flap open, the memo also warned of enforcement of the “no sleep” rule that we saw so violently imposed on protestors by Brookfield and NYPD in a paramilitary fashion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the eviction of Liberty Plaza, and the subsequent police violence and intimidation against peaceful protestors, the encampments at McPherson & Freedom Plaza have becomea important base for the protest. It also has brought the political grievances with the bureaucracy of the corporate capitalist state into the forefront of the movement with hunger strikes for the D.C. Vote, OccupyCongress, and many other actions.

When Bloomberg sought to evict Liberty plaza the first time, a massive defense from the people of New York prevented him from doing so. If you cannot get down to D.C. for Monday, support local events this weekend like the Occupy Town Square on #J29 being held at Washington Square Park in the middle of NYU. The day long occupation seeks to draw attention to the high cost of health insurance in New York, the high cost of higher education, and the need to reclaim free speech in public places. The contradictory letter posted on OccupyDC camps must not be underestimated, and the attacks must be defended through a massive outpouring of people out of their homes, workplaces, and schools and into the streets.

Follow NYCRevolution On Twitter

NYCRevolution has linked in with occupations all over the country to provide a national, global, and local perspective related to #OWS live on twitter daily. #OccupyAvenueD will promote conversation about occupying the large lower manhattan housing in my community in order to change the conversation from gentrification to empowering working class communities.

 

 

Romney Officially Has Money Out the Ass!

We all knew Romney was a greedy CEO. We all knew he was a millionaire. Some of us even know that Romney oversaw driving Bain Capital into the ground making millions, and outsourcing jobs for profit. But what we didn’t know until a few days ago, was to just what extent is the man part of the 1%. After extensive pressure, Romney released his records which showed that he had used a variety of rich people accounting tricks to get his tax rate down to only 13%!!! 

At that rate, poor & working people pay a higher tax rate! As we used to say working at a giant retail box store; “you work 5 days on the plantation, 1 day is going to the state.” We pay nearly 20% taxes, and we’re not even the ones with the money.

And when I talk about money, I mean like $23 million dollars in a year. With a year or two of Romney’s salary, we could probably fund universal healthcare and get the homeless off the street. 

Romney’s extremist wealth, and his local counterparts like Bloomberg, are part of a horrific trend of the wealthiest CEOs and businessmen taking hold of the government. These men who used their ‘business experience’ to cut & privatize social services. A horrific trend that is parralel to the growing inequality in mainstream society; being reflected in politics. Over 80% of our congress is part of the 1%! A disturbing view of how corporate blood money thrives in a capitalist puppet sham-democracy. 

No matter what options we have for president, they are all millionaires not out of pure coincidence, but rather as the product of a system which only allows millionaire candidates to have a serious campaign. 

The Bloomberg’s and Romney’s of America MUST be popularly rejected. YES…. we all think we’re going to be millionaires and dream about it, but seriously, WAKE THE FUCK UP and realize how every semblance of democracy is being bought up by the super rich looking to develop, capitalize, and exploit. These kind of politicians begin rapid processes of neo-liberal programs that have devastated poor & working communities in New York, and will devastate communities all over the nation.

Think about it. Corporate mouthpieces of the 1% are taking control of supposed public service positions. They are publicly promoting profit agendas and austerity measures. #OWS is the only alternative, and another world IS possible. We can have a General Assembly made up of the 99%, we can have politics of real transparency, rather than millionaires laughing at us on top of piles of money. 

People like Romney should be ashamed of themselves. Walking around fronting like they’re “man of the people” and “joe the plumber” when Romney has never done a day of real work. Yes you drove some stocks into the ground good job! But I’m talking real work. Real work like cleaning up shit off of toilets, and asbestos abatement like us REAL working people have to do. 

I’m talking come to the ghettoes of New York Romney, come take a tour and see where your millions made off of your gambling schemes should be invested. Patriot? Why not try investing in our broken windowed streets rather than gambling our jobs on some race-to-the-bottom for the cheapest labor in China.

A Goldman Sachs hedge fund worth over 20 million, and an off shore untaxable cayman island holding that ISN’T EVEN TAXED! After all that, an attempt to show he’s a regular joe who pays his fair share. Sadly he (and all these other 1%ers) are so isolated from real people that he can’t even phatom that we are taxed higher, and we are not allowed to avoid taxes by going to the cayman islands, and that WE THE PEOPLE aren’t going to put up with losing the class war anymore!

 

A Case Study of the Over-Policing of Low Income Urban Neighborhoods II: The Brownsville Gang Roundup

On Thursday, 43 people were rounded up from off the streets of Brownsville and indicted with gang related charges in a mega sweep of two gangs the ‘Hood Starz’ & ‘Wave Gang’. A wave of murders hit the high-crime low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn when the rival gangs spun out of control for territory of public housing blocks.

When you look at the mugshots of these 43, your immediately struck by how young these kids are. Residents told the New York Times that these kids were bored with nothing to do, caught up in the street life, and either in gang activity schools or dropped out. Residents also said none of these kids were really big players in organized crime in Brownsville, nor were the gangs highly organized.

Then it hits you when you hear residents talked about how afterschool programs had been cut, and community centers shuttered. Walking around Brownsville and East Brooklyn, it becomes immediately apparent that what little there is to keep the youth off the streets is often overcrowded and cash-strapped. A neighborhood of some of the most highly concentrated public housing in America; residents face racial profiling and harassment on a daily basis as well as a vast amount of backlogged work orders in building that the underfunded housing authority cannot meet. On top of this, Brownsville is not well connected to the rest of the city, and needs more community programs, afterschool program, jobs, and new education facilities (A promise that was broken by the city) to ease the overcrowding of existing schools.

Then there is the problem of the unemployment amongst youth over 50% in the area, and a lack of opportunities to even make ends meet legitimately. In the nearby Spring Creek section of East New York, the Gateway Shopping Mall was praised for providing jobs to unemployed youth, however it soon became apparent that these McJobs were low-paying with few hours and high turnover rates.

The issue is that youth in vast numbers turn to street crime as a result of the exploitation and oppression that youth in the inner city face. As a result of a lack of opportunities, schools, community programs, daycare, jobs, amongst other rights that the capitalist system deprives Brownsville. The issue is not that youth from the projects are bad because youth and projects are bad, as the puppet politicians and real gangsters on wall street would have you believe.

The reality is that the real boss gangs are on Wall Street. They have more than half the wealth, which leaves people in streets all over New York fighting for the crumbs. Its not these youth that are to blame, it’s the system that forgot them. The system that exploited them from birth. The societal problems that exist in the city after hundreds of years of increasing inequality between classes. Hundreds of years of poverty in city slums. In order to prevent this from happening again and again, we must occupy our communities for the community services we need to give our youth a better future and keep them off the streets.

Instead, a underfunded NYCHA uses money that should be used to repair and maintain crumbling infested buildings to fund the coffers of the NYPD; supposedly “paying” the NYPD for patrols. Patrols which result in residents getting harrassed and locked up constantly all over New York for non-crimes or low-level crimes. What we see is that instead of creating preventive social services and after school programs, the City resorts to closing schools all over the city and locking people up in record rates. While the banks get bailed out, our communities are getting desperate from foreclosures and unemployment and over-policing is not the solution. The solution housing, jobs, and education as a right.

#J20 Occupy the Courts & #J21 Occupy the Corporations on the Anniversary of Citizens United

Occupiers took to the steps of courthouses across the Country from San Francisco, to DC, Oakland, and of course New York. Here in New York, the government denied occupiers a permit to rally, of course free speech is not licensed by the government and the protests took place anyway. Many seriously heavy handed arrests and incidents of brutality occurred throughout the day on the steps of the Supreme Court in DC, and on the Streets of San Franscisco. ‘Police repression against the Occupy Movement like this cannot be tolerated’ read one sign.

Protests were called for today #J20 in order to condemn the one year anniversary of Citizens United ruling, which allowed corporations “corporate personhood” and unlimited spending influence on elections. People poured into the streets today because Citizens United helps create a less democratic electoral system where politicians are beholden to the growing sums of coporate contributions that sustain their campaigns, rather than the needs of the people. Citizen’s United has only stood because of the lack of mass resistance against it until today, as well as the strength of the corporate lobby and influence that corporations already have excercised on the highest chambers of policy making.

The Audacity of the Citizens United ruling is that it allows corporations to no longer seek loopholes in contributing, but be able to openly and secretly donate unlimited amounts of money that weighs heavily on what the candidate will do once in office. Take Goldman Sachs for example. Goldman is an Octopus that owns and controls elements of all sorts of industries, but most importantly they own politician and encourage them to ease restrictions on Wall Street by giving candidates like Obama over a million dollars an election, according to the Open Secrets Center for Responsive Politics.

The Occupy Movement calls for a participatory and directly democratic society that functions with horizontal organization by employing a structure of clusters of affinity groups sending recallable empowered/non-empowered delegates to a spokes council. We want a system that allows the people to be a part of the process, not a system which openly allows big business to buy candidates like free market items. Capitalism is destroying democracy before our eyes in the past few years through a variety of motions by the capitalist police state

1. Citizens United v F.E.C. : Establishes No Campaign Contribution Limit for Corporations
2. National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA): Allows US government ability to detain and imprison without trial
3. SOPA & PIPA: Allow the government to further restrict internet use in the name of entertainment industry

In response, the other prong of the attack; #J21 Occupy the Corporations! will gather at 12PM at the City Hall Park for a tour of some of the greediest corporate centers in the belly of the beast.

#J21 Solidarity With Tahrir Square Rally & March @ Times Square!

On #J21 groups in solidarity with the Egyptian revolution will gather at 12 PM at Times Square, and march around 2:30. The march has been called in solidarity with recent woman’s march against the escalating brutal police repression Tahrir Square has been facing since the inception of the revolution. In December, Eyptian police and military amassed together and stormed Tahrir Square burning tents, beat people, shooting at their own people! In response Egyptians took the streets united against the brutality of the state repression. Shocking footage of a woman beaten, and dragged with her clothes torn and bra hanging out, while a man next to her is beaten (1.) has galvanized the movement in the same way as footage of UC Davis students getting pepper sprayed (2.) and #OWS protestors getting their heads bashed in (3.,4.) has galvanized and symbolized the tyranny of the corporate state, and the strength of people’s unity against such wicked oppression.

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The police state doesn’t simply exist in Egypt and other countries as the first world politicians like Obama and Hillary Clinton claimed in the months before Occupy, but it exists everywhere where there is a state. Everywhere banks, corporate profit, and the 1% are building a highly stratified society, technologically advanced police state, and stripping away rights and social programs that the masses all over the world fought long and hard for. Now it is time for the 99% to build our society, and take back our world from the 1%. From Kano to Cairo to New York City, the global struggle persists.

Occupy Our Homes! Occupy 702 Vermont St., East New York!

The New York Post and New Yorker magazine along with several other conservative mass media outlets in New York have attempted to demonize Occupy Wall Streets work with community organizations to fight back against the rampant foreclosure of homes across the nation and city. In particular East New York and Jamaica have been ravaged by the housing bubble burst. 

the NYP claims that Azahdi, the original owner of the house who speculated & bought the house at twice its value and lost the mortgage, is “pissed” at Occupy taking over the home and starting $10,000 in renovations. The reality though is quite different. Alfredo and his family, who were homeless, have been accepted to the community and Occupy Vermont St. has been working with Azahdi to make sure he is not homeless and is welcome in the home. 

The reality of the misunderstanding is that the corporate media is over-hyping a internal misunderstanding, and highlighting their own lack of understanding over why 702 Vermont St. has been occupied. 

I’m close with a neighbor of Occupy 702 Vermont St, and familiar with the neighborhood from work. My experience in East New York is that the largely residential neighborhood has been dotted with boarded up foreclosed homes on many blocks, and high unemployment is rampant. In an area where so many people have been kicked out of their homes and ended up homeless, occupying Vermont St. is the culmination of a myriad of community organizations working together to create a liberated space where discussion about the economic warfare being waged on low-income communities lives.

By taking a vacant boarded up home that has been taken through foreclosure by Wall Street banks, and creating a safe space for a homeless family the movement has shown us the logical answer to this eyesore on our neighborhood and one of our greatest social problems. Take out two birds with one stone; stop bankforeclosures on peoples home, and use all the empty housing created by capitalism to give housing to the homeless! Housing is right, and we the people liberating these boarded up homes they have sitting there in order to sustain their broken system of markets is the only way we are going to stop people from getting kicked out of homes by the vultures on Wall Street. 

While in the neighborhood, I stopped by Occupy 702 Vermont St. today and found a house in transformation, a liberated space. We discussed the need for community, the symbolism of a liberated foreclosed home to the people of Brooklyn, and what doing needs to get done to make the space a safe and livable space. 

702 Vermont St. was liberated by a whole community coming out and protecting it. Come out and support the people’s battle for a right to housing, and the battle against the 1% taking away our homes.

Report Back From #J15 Occupy The Dream March From Liberty Plaza

MLK’s Birthday commemoration march was a great success! Several hundred people from all walks of life showed up from all over the city to commemorate a revolutionary who fought for racial and social justice that #OWS is struggling for a half century later.

In the blistering cold, hand warmers were passed out, and an anarchist black flag, a gay pride flag, and an occupy banner led the contigent. The march zig-zagged throughout lower manhattan passing though many sites of income inequality and corporate greed. Through the winter, and the criminal eviction of Liberty Plaza, OWS NYC has persisted with the struggle against the 1%.

During the march, occupiers mic checked “I have Dream” demands like an end to the corporate money in politics and and end to stop & frisk. A vigil is taking place tonight, and several event are planned for tommorow.

But most importantly, on #J17 OWS NYC will “take to the streets” by meeting at Liberty Plaza now that the barricades are down, it is time to reclaim our right use our parks, reclaim free speech in public space, and commemorating 4 months of Occupy Wall Street.

Barricades Down: Reoccupation Underway!

A Reoccupation at Zuccotti Park started tonight when a NYCLU law suit citing laws against restriction of public access to parks resulted in the removal of barricades today. Over 200 people have gathered, and the people’s library and kitchen are up as of now. There is a celebratory atmosphere here as people discuss the J17 Rally at DC, an NDAA demo tommorow at 3 PM, and the harrassment of protestors next to the barricades earlier that was captured on the globalrevolution.tv livestream.

LATER

Over 60 people were arrested as they tried to lay down in the park. The NYPD used force and coercion to arrest many of the peaceful protestors who attempted to stay overnight

4th St. Food Co-Op: An Experiment in People Powered Nutrition

The 4th St. Food Co-Op is the perfect example of a post-capitalism glimpse of the new society; A society where a sustainable, nurtitious, collective ideology is applied towards feeding people. When you walk in you are greeted by a warm staff of co-op members who work 2 and 1/2 hours every week to recieve a 20% discount on already affordable groceries. the Co-Op excepts both EBT benefits and SNAP benefits, and is open to the public (w/o the 20% discount of course). Furthermore, the food is all organic and stocked with hard to find affordable healthy rices, beans, and vegetables from locally sourced farmers. The best part is that the Co-Op supports social justice struggles, and most recently has established support for Occupy Wall Street by donating food to the Kitchen Working Group of OWS, while also having a donation jar for customers next to the register.

This progressive, organic, model of food distribution is essential for the Lower East Side area, where corporate chains are generally in control of food distribution. These chains sell GMO vegetables, injected meat, and other fairly unhealthy groceries at escalating prices.

food is a human right, nobody should go without healthy food. The profit-orientated goals of the food industry have resulted in low-wages for workers that give no incentive to the workers, while decreasing quality of our food at the same time. In order to reverse this trend, it is important to support community control of staple foods. Working families shouldn’t need to worry about the rising costs and decreasing quality of food; We must demand it as a right. In order to accomplish this, we adopt a model where every industry is owned and run collectively by the workers for the masses, and we must ditch the perverted system based on profit. The 4th St. Co-Op is an example of what people-powered organization is capable of. If you live in the New York City area, support OWS and cooperative food, stop in and buy a pound of brown rice.