Occupy Wall St News Roundup
30.09.2011 § Leave a comment
news roundup:
38,000 NYC TRANSIT WORKERS TO JOIN OCCUPY WALL STREET NEXT WEDNESDAY
Up until this announcement, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been unwieldy and somewhat lacking in a coherent voice, but that’s all about to change. New York City labor unions have decided to descend upon the streets of Lower Manhattan on Wednesday.
The leadership of the Transit Workers Union Local 100–comprised of subway and bus workers–voted unanimously to support the protestors. With a membership of 38,000, 5 Oct. will easily be the largest day yet in the protest. On 12 Oct., SEIU 32BJ, representing doormen, security guards, and maintenance workers around the city, is also staging a rally in support of the cause.
It’s unclear for now whether the transit system will be completely shut down while the 38,000 workers are participating in the protest. If it is, the Occupy Wall Street movement will definitely make its mark in history. And either way, it now has a substantial footing to make a real statement about American economic policy.
TRANSGENDER OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTER SEGREGATED, HUMILIATED BY NYPD DURING ARREST, DETENTION
We stand in solidarity with Justin Adkins, and all transpeople who are subject to and deal with police brutality, physical and verbal assault and, profiling daily. However, we want to push the discourse away from separating the “good” prison population from the “bad” as these lines are drawn on lines of race and class. Adkins says “That I was not just a peaceful protestor exercising my rights on that bridge. That I deserved to be handcuffed to a railing in the side of the precinct with violent criminals.”
SLRP in their report “It’s War In Here: on Transgender and Intersex People in New York State Men’s Prisons” directly confronts this faulty division by looking at the criminalization of low-income transgender women of color—- “Transgender people report consistent police harassment, brutality, and profiling increased risk of contact with law enforcement. Transgender and Intersex People in New York State Men’s Prisons · In the face of poverty and discrimination, many transgender people engage in criminalized activity such as sex work, drug sales, or theft, or become entangled in the criminal justice system through other poverty-related arrests including loitering, turnstile jumping, or sleeping outside. These activities, in combination with police profiling of transgender individuals as mentally unstable and violent, pre- disposed to involvement in sex work, inherently deceitful, or all of the above, place transgender people—particularly low-income transgender women of color—at an increased risk of contact with law enforcement.”
As we condemn the violence and transphobia of the police we want to insist on an abolitionist perspective seeing white supremacy and transphobia not as two distinct operations, but as part of the same system of the criminalization of specific populations by the state.
POLICE VIOLENCE AGAINST TRANSGENDER PROTESTER, FIRST HAND ACCOUNT—–
NO SURPRISE HERE–MAYOR BLOOMBERG, NYC’S WEALTHIEST CITIZEN BACKS MASS ARRESTS OF WALL STREET PROTESTERS
New York City’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has endorsed the police operation in which some 700 peaceful protesters were arrested Saturday on the Brooklyn Bridge. Boomberg, whose net worth of some $19.5 billion is derived from Wall Street, voiced unqualified support for the police repression on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“The police did exactly what they are supposed to do,” he told reporters Sunday before marching in the Pulaski Day Parade. He declared that New York City “is the place where you can come to express your views. Protesting is fine, but you don’t have the right to go and without a permit violate the law.”
In reality, with or without permit, the city and its police department have increasingly restricted protest. They have used barricades to pen in and block demonstrations, employed undercover infiltrators and agents provocateurs to spy upon and entrap those participating and used excessive force, including beatings, pepper spray and mounted police charges to suppress unresisting demonstrators.
FIRST ‘OFFICIAL’STATEMENT OF THE OCCUPY WALL ST MOVEMENT
Here is a snippet of the declaration which looks like more of a list of grievances. We are SO grateful//relieved that rad people (so real it hurts, south asians for justice, safer space committee) stepped in to change the production of this document moving it away from flattening liberal adages that have served to justify racist/patriarchal projects of the state and capital. We’re disappointed to see no explicit anti capitalist, anti white supremacy, anti patriarchal threads in the statement, and know that a list of grievances is not tantamount to a critique of the current state of things. There’s certainly a problem that smells of white male activists when the liberation of non-human animals is mentioned before the liberation of people in cages (even though we need to see them on a continuum.) —The Nothing
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 nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.
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 supposed to be regulating them.
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 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.
HOW KILLER DEBT AND UNEMPLOYMENT MADE YOUNG PEOPLE THE LEADERS AT OCCUPY WALL ST.
- Employment among young adults between the ages of 16 to 29 was at its lowest level since the end of World War II. Just 55 percent were employed, compared with 67 percent in 2000.
- Nearly 6 million Americans between the ages of 25 to 34 lived in their parents’ homes last year.
- Young men are nearly twice as likely as women to live with their parents.
- Marriages among young adults hit a new low. Just 44 percent of Americans in that age group were married last year.
- Other trends were also headed in the wrong direction. In 43 of the 50 largest metro areas — often a magnet for 20-and-30-somethings — employment declined.
Even if we can ever move out of the short-term recession, it will impact young people for years to come. Looking at a research summary compiled previously by Roosevelt Institute super-intern Charlie Eisenhood, Beaudry and DiNardo (1991) found “that every percentage increase in the [national] unemployment rate is associated with a 3-7 percent drop in entry-level contract wages.” Kahn (2009) found an estimate on the high end of that spectrum, discovering an “initial wage loss of 6 to 7% for a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate measure.”
Unfortunately, the recession’s effect is not limited just to the initial job search and wages. The negative impact persists far beyond that. Kahn found that the effect “falls in magnitude by approximately a quarter of a percentage point each year after college graduation. However, even 15 years after college graduation, the wage loss is 2.5% and is still statistically significant.”
ANONYMOUS ISSUES THREAT: NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE WILL BE ERASED FROM THE INTERNET OCT 10
Greetings, Institutions of the Media. We are Anonymous.
The events transpiring within Wall Street have caught our eye.
We witness the Government enforcing the laws that punish the 99% while allowing the 1% to escape justice, unharmed, for their crimes against the people. This is why we choose to declare our war against the New York Stock Exchange. We can no longer stay silent as the population is being exploited and forced to make sacrifices in the name of profit.
We will show the world that we are true to our word. On October 10th, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet. On October 10th, expect a day that will never, ever, be forgotten.
TRANSPORT WORKERS UNION BLASTS CITY FOR PUTTING HANDCUFFED OCCUPY WALL ST PROTESTERS ON BUSES
The Transport Workers Union will go to court Monday to try to stop the city from forcing bus drivers to transport Wall Street protesters arrested by the NYPD, the Daily News has learned.
The union, whose leaders voted last week to support the protesters, said police brass commandeered three MTA buses to transport many of the 700 demonstrators arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday.
Union President John Samuelsen called ordering bus drivers to drive prisoners “a blatant act of political retaliation.”
“TWU Local 100 supports the protesters on Wall Street and takes great offense that the mayor and NYPD have ordered operators to transport citizens who were exercising their constitutional right to protest – and shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Samuelsen said Sunday night.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5 4PM: UNIVERSITIES WALKOUT TO OCCUPY WALL ST
COMMUNITY AND LABOR MARCH LINK HERE
We will also be joining students from around the city who are organizing walkouts against unforgivable student debt and soaring tuition rates.
Join us to protest the arrest of 700 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday, while the banksters who wrecked the economy remain free. Join us to protest the horrific inequality that leaves 1 in 3 New York City children in poverty while Mayor Bloomberg sits on a $20 billion fortune. Join us to protest the foreclosure crisis that has driven millions from their homes, while bank profits soar. Join us because We Are the 99 Percent!
700 PERSON MASS ARREST SATURDAY EVENING SEPT 31 ON BROOKLYN BRIDGE
More than 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening during a march by anti-Wall Street protesters who have been occupying a downtown Manhattan square for two weeks. IT IS CONFIRMED THAT NYPD ARRESTED A 12 YEAR OLD. (link here)
During the afternoon a long line of protesters numbering several thousand snaked through the streets towards the landmark bridge across the East River with the aim of ending at a Brooklyn park.
However, during the march across the bridge groups of protesters sat down or strayed into the road from the pedestrian pathway. They were then arrested in large numbers by officers who were part of a heavy police presence shepherding the march along its path.
SO REAL IT HURTS: Notes on Occupy Wall Street
On Thursday night I showed up at Occupy Wall Street with a bunch of other South Asians coming from a South Asians for Justice meeting. Sonny joked that he should have brought his dhol so we could enter like it was a baarat. When we got there they were passing around and reading a sheet of paper that had the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street on it. I had heard the “Declaration of the Occupation” read at the General Assembly the night before but I didn’t realize that it was going to be finalized as THE declaration of the movement right then and there. When I heard it the night before with Sonny we had looked at each other and noted that the line about “being one race, the human race, formally divided by race, class…” was a weird line, one that hit me in the stomach with its naivety and the way it made me feel alienated. But Sonny and I had shrugged it off as the ramblings of one of the many working groups at Occupy Wall Street.
But now we were realizing that this was actually a really important document and that it was going to be sent into the world and read by thousands of people. And that if we let it go into the world written the way it was then it would mean that people like me would shrug this movement off, it would stop people like me and my friends and my community from joining this movement, one that I already felt a part of. So this was urgent. This movement was about to send a document into the world about who and what it was that included a line that erased all power relations and decades of history of oppression. A line that would de-legitimize the movement, this would alienate me and people like me, this would not be able to be something I could get behind. And I was already behind it this movement and somehow I didn’t want to walk away from this. I couldn’t walk away from this.
…
After the meeting ended we ended up finding the man who had written the document and telling him that he needed to take out the part about us all being “one race, the human race.” But its “scientifically true” he told us. He thought that maybe we were advocating for there being different races? No we needed to tell him about privilege and racism and oppression and how these things still existed, both in the world and someplace like Occupy Wall Street.
Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to.
This all has been said by many many strong women of color before me but every time, every single time these levels of power are confronted it I think it needs to be written about, talked about, gone through over and over again.
And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it. I’m going to say that again: we had to fight for it. But it felt worth it. It felt worth it to sit down on the on a street corner in the Financial District at 11:30 pm on a Thursday night, after working all day long and argue for the changing of the first line of Occupy Wall Street’s official Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. It felt worth it not only because we got the line changed but also because while standing in a circle of 20, mostly white men, and explaining racism in front of them: carefully and slowly spelling out that I as a women of color experience the world way differently than the author of the Declaration, a white man, that this was not about him being personally racist but about relations of power, that he needed to, he urgently needed to listen and believe me about this, this moment felt like a victory for the movement on its own.
QUELLE SURPRISE! ” J. P> MORGAN CHASE “DONATES” $4.6 MILLION TO NYPD #OCCUPYWALLST
JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.
“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”
NYC TRANSIT UNIONS JOIN OCCUPY WALL ST.
New York City labor unions are preparing to back the unwieldy grassroots band occupying a park in Lower Manhattan, in a move that could mark a significant shift in the tenor of the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street protests and send thousands more people into the streets.
The Transit Workers Union Local 100’s executive committee, which oversees the organization of subway and bus workers, voted unanimously Wednesday night to support the protesters. The union claims 38,000 members. A union-backed organizing coalition, which orchestrated a large May 12 march on Wall Street before the protests, is planning a rally on Oct. 5 in explicit support. And SEIU 32BJ, which represents doormen, security guards and maintenance workers, is using its Oct. 12 rally to express solidarity with the Zuccotti Park protesters.
DO NOT MISS THIS VIDEO: THE BOURGEOIS PRESS GETS SMART!!
“This weekend a few trouble makers turn a peaceful protest against Wall St. greed into a violent burst of chaos. The troublemakers carried pepper spray and guns and were wearing badges.”
“Everyday in America police cross the line and abuse citizens. White America was shocked at what they saw done to Rodney King. Black America would have loved to have been shocked by what they saw the police do to Rodney King. There is a Rodney King everyday in this country and Black America has always known that. Everything those cops did this weekend to those protesters they’ve done to somebody else when the cameras weren’t rolling. They’ve done it and they’ve gotten away with it. They know just how much assault and battery they can do, they know just how many false arrests they can make.”
PILOTS ON STRIKE BRING FIGHT TO WALL ST.
CITY’S BIGGEST UNIONS AND COMMUNITY ORGS JOIN WALL ST OCCUPATION
“It’s become too big to ignore,” said one political consultant.
The United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ SEIU, 1199 SEIU, Workers United and Transport Workers Union Local 100 are all expected to participate. The Working Families Party is helping to organize the protest and MoveOn.org is expected to mobilize its extensive online regional networks to drum up support for the effort.
REBEL DIAZ on the occupation:
“Our analysis on whats going in Wall Street is that its very similar to the Syntagma Square uprisings in Greece, and other city squares like the ones in Madrid. In these movements, there is no central leadership, its about something, but then again not really, because the demands arent clear. What is clear is the identification of the common enemy : the greedy banks….There is an obvious access to some privilege as the MacBook Pros and coffee seem to be part of the growing everyday scenery. #OccupyWallStreet seems to be a new phenomenon in that we are witnessing a first generation in which massive numbers of young white people are no longer experiencing the economic benefits of the capitalist system. Their working class parents have had their homes foreclosed, their school loans cant be paid because they too now are unemployed or underpaid in the shrinking job market. Their reality has gotten closer to what black and brown folks have lived for many many years. There is a blatant economic inequality in this country and it is a result of corporate Wall St greed. The middle class is almost extinct as most people nowadays are working merely to survive and pay bills. We encourage folks to support the occupations and see them for themselves. Perhaps the topless nude activists, or the drum circle may not be for you, but the idea of having a national dialogue sparked about these greedy bankers and their abuse of the people is important and needed. We plan on going back with more people!! All Power to the People!!”
BROWN POWER AT OCCUPY WALL ST.
At the general assembly a document was introduced called “The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City”. I, Thanu, Sonny, Manissa, and Natasha felt that some language needed to be urgently changed. The line was: “As one people, formerly divided by the color of our skin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or lack thereof, political party and cultural background, we acknowledge the reality: that there is only one race, the human race, and our survival requires the cooperation of its members…”
The first major concern amongst us was that the phrase “formerly divided by” was unrealistic, and erased histories of oppression that marginalized communities have suffered. The second concern was that the “human race” language also felt very out of touch.
I started shouting “mic check!”, got the crowd’s attention, and said that we did not agree with the phrase “formerly divided by” and instead felt it could perhaps be “despite”, and said that the original phrasing erased histories of oppression. Unfortunately, even though about 4 or 5 presumably white people had spoken up before me about changes to the document, I was told that this was a time for questions, not changes to the document – by a facilitator who was a man of colour. Talk about feeling shut down.
I again shouted “mic check!” and our spontaneous Brown Power crew again shouted my words after me – I reiterated again that the phrasing erased much history, and that it was idealistic and unrealistic. I think at this point I looked around and realized everyone was staring at me; it hit me what we were doing, that we had the floor, that we were demanding a change.
The protestors at Occupy Wall Street have been saying that there will be efforts to reach out to people of colour, to have communities of colour engage and be a part of the protests, to help create real change – because, let’s face it, the protests have been very white and people of colour need to be present, and need to speak up. Well, that’s exactly what we were doing, and I realized that we were helping to make that change happen.
PATRIARCHY DOESN’T DELETE ITSELF JUST CAUSE YOU’RE IN AN OCCUPATION– A NOTE FROM SOME FEMINISTS FROM WITHIN OCCUPY WALL ST.
Last night “Safer Spaces Committee was initiated at the occupation. A note from folks involved:
“We understand the various problematics of the term “safe space” but think people were at least into the idea of making a commitment to confronting people on their shit. We had a long talk about instances of oppressive behavior at the occupation (like people talking over not-men, making rape jokes, being touchy-feely, holding racist signs) and the 50 or so people who were there decided to make this committee. And some of us who don’t feel confident enough to handle a situation ourselves would look around for other allies from this group to back them up when the time comes.
Things we discussed doing:
-integrating anti-oppression teach-ins as a daily feature in the daily General Assemblies— having sub-groups to make daily mini-lectures to address gender, race, LGBTQ, and ability
-creating a sleeping space for those who feel vulnerable at the occupation (ie survivors/female-identified/queer folks)
-making a commitment to being allies in calling out oppressive behavior or mediate situations— we may mark ourselves by pink armbands “
ANONYMOUS LEAKS PERSONAL DETAILS OF ALLEGED WALL ST. PEPPER SPRAY COP
Online hacktivist collective Anonymous has posted the personal details of a New York Police Department inspector caught on camera apparently pepper spraying female protestors at an anti-establishment march in Wall Street at the weekend.
The footage, which has been widely circulated, depicted a white shirted police officer who casually walked up to a group of protestors, many of whom were women and penned in behind orange netting, and sprayed them in the face before walking away.
RADIOHEAD TO PLAY FRIDAY (TODAY) 4PM AT OCCUPY WALL ST.
SIKE!
not yet dead nyc 
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