This Can't Be Happening!

Mayor Bloomberg has announced that Occupy Wall Street must leave Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, October 14, allegedly so the city can clean it.

Almost verbatim notices have been served on other occupations around the United States and the world. Invariably, they have turned out to be a ploy to clear the space and not let demonstrators back in. Mayor Bloomberg has a long history of lying and police state tactics of crowd control.

As I write, Occupy Wall Street is cleaning all of Zuccotti Park, even spending $3000 of its own funds to hire professionals with steam cleaners as well as gardeners who are replacing trampled flowers. The park had become somewhat messy with all the wet sleeping bags and tarps, but it was never filthy. Uniquely among New York’s urban public spaces, it is completely free of pigeons, who cannot find a meal, despite enormous the amounts of free food being served daily. The demonstrators have been cleaning up after themselves from the beginning.

The OWS General Assembly has voted not to leave the park voluntarily. It has issued an urgent call for all supporters to come to Zuccotti Park by 6 a.m. tomorrow (Friday, October 14) and defend the occupation.

Occupy Wall Street has been steadfastly non-violent from its start on September 17. The police are another matter–especially the supervisory goons in white shirts and the “Paid Detail Unit,” which is composed of active-duty city cops directly employed by the banks and the New York Stock Exchange. But if thousands of people show up, link arms and refuse to leave, the police can’t arrest everyone and Zuccotti Park, or Liberty Plaza as it has been called lately, will remain liberated space.

Occupy Wall Street and the countless other occupations across the country it has inspired is the most important and effective demonstration the left has organized in at least 40 years. The New York action has garnered $150,000 in donations. It has support from the most important unions and community groups in New York. It has inspired millions around the world to fight back against greed and corruption with their own occupations. It must be defended.

We call on all our readers to go to Zuccotti Park now. At the latest, get there by 6 a.m. Preferably spend the night, because Mayor Bloomberg should not be trusted about when the “cleaning” will start. He is, after all, a billionaire.

Please forward this alert to everyone and anyone you know who lives within driving range of New York City!

Hey Mayor Mike! Show us the #%&*!# dirt in Zuccotti Park!

Here’s a prediction: Seth Williams, the district attorney of Philadelphia, will decide not to seek to reimpose the death penalty on Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world-famous journalist, former Black Panther and condemned prisoner who has spent the last almost 30 years of his life on Pennsylvania’s overcrowded death row.

The choice belongs to Williams, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided, today, on its second time around dealing with the issue, not to overturn the decision of a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which had, on orders of the Supreme Court, reheard, reconsidered and reaffirmed its earlier decision upholding the tossing out of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence by a lower federal district court.

For years since the dramatic 2001 decision by Federal District Judge William Yohn overturning Abu-Jamal’s death sentence on grounds that the trial judge’s instructions to the jury had been faulty and that the jury verdict form was dangerously misleading, Abu-Jamal has remained stuck in brutal solitary confinement at SCI-Green. That’s the super-max facility that houses Pennsylvania’s condemned prisoners, where Abu-Jamal and the others who are actually facing death are denied any human contact either with each other or with close relatives and friends (visits are conducted through heavy bullet-proof plexiglass, with the inmate in chains, for no good reason beyond simple gratuitous cruelty, since escape is impossible). He was kept there for the last decade through the machinations of a vindictive DA’s office, which argued that as long as the lifting of his death sentence was on appeal, he should have to stay put as if he were facing imminent death.

There remains no reason or lame excuse to keep him in that hell hole now, and he should be immediately moved out.

The only way he could face a death penalty at this point would be if the DA, within the next 180 days, were to order up a new trial on the penalty phase of his case, with a new jury hearing arguments for and against sentencing Abu-Jamal to death all over again for the crime he was convicted of back in 1982: the shooting death of white Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. (There is no easy avenue for appeal of Abu-Jamal’s conviction at this point, as all his habeas claims of constitutional violations and trial errors have been rejected by the highest federal courts.)

Already, the wheels are turning against a penalty retrial.

Film footage of the shooting scene from a local Philadelphia TV news archive. Note the absence of any taxi parked behind Faulkner’s squad car (courtesy Ted Passon).

 
“The First Amendment right to gather news is, as the Court has often noted, not one that inures solely to the benefit of the news media; rather, the public’s right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press.”
– United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit, August 26, 2011
 

I spent a day in Freedom Plaza, a triangle of concrete adjacent to several high-end hotels with shiny black Mercedes limos out front three blocks from the White House. It’s Washington DC’s entry in the Occupy America phenomenon.

I came wearing two hats. One, I’m a Vietnam veteran member of Veterans For Peace who has actively worked for over a decade against our bankrupting wars. And, two, I’m an experienced journalist with a master’s degree who works in both images and words. I won’t take a back seat to anyone in what is known as the Main Stream Media.

The crowd of maybe 700 people occupying Freedom Plaza was fired up. The focus of the occupation was on the wars and the “one percenters” at the top of the economic heap in America who control our lives more and more as they pursue more and more “free market” profiteering.

This monster of greed has always existed in history, but this latest binge was unleashed by a hack Hollywood actor who became President of the United States 30 years ago. Everything has been deregulated and the ruthless financial reapings by this class led to a progression of bursting bubbles, an economic meltdown and a subsequent tax-payer bubble in the form of massive bailouts.

Andrea Egizi, one of millions of victims of the bailed out bankers and financiers. (All photos: John Grant)

We all know the story by now. We know who got bailed out and who ended up holding the bag and losing their homes, people like Andrea Agizi, a single mother from Atlantic City I ran into in Freedom Plaza. Up until the recent wave of “occupations” across America, those who ended up paying for this free-market extravaganza were silenced and marginalized.

The slick financial wizards who sliced and diced Andrea’s mortgage for profit all worship the “free market.” They tend to be very liberal with those profits when it comes to financing political candidates who, once in office, lower their taxes even further. But a funny thing happened when these free marketeers saw the baroque money-making machine they’d created swirling in circles down the toilet — they suddenly turned into flaming socialists with all our tax dollars. After all, the machine had been fully endorsed, and shilled for, by the Federal Reserve’s Oracle at Delphi Alan Greenspan, and the nation didn’t want high-finance pirates jumping out of windows.

As I headed out in my ’94 Volvo to drive from Philadelphia to Washington for the first day of October2011.org, the occupation of Washington, I spotted some trouble: the ABS warning light on my dashboard panel was lit. Stopping at my neighborhood mechanic to get his okay for the drive, I found him busy inflating the tire of a new white Mercedes. As the driver, a well-dressed middle-aged woman, looked on, he asked me what my problem was. I asked if it was safe to drive the car to D.C. with the ABS not working.

After telling me my brakes were fine and I just didn’t have skid prevention, he asked why I was going to the capital. “To cover the first day of the occupation there,” I said.

The woman interjected, “Oh, is that part of those protests against corporate greed?”

As I pulled onto the Interstate and headed for Washington, I thought about her question. Clearly, something huge has just happened. Occupy Wall Street, and the wave of occupations that have spread to over 100 cities across the country, have broken through some invisible wall in American consciousness. If this member of the upper class, or at least upper middle class, with her $50-60,000 car, can casually talk about “corporate greed,” a term that is also starting to appear in the nation’s mainstream media, we are in a new place.

I got the same sense of being in some kind of alternate reality or new world as I joined thousands of people marching through the streets of Washington, first denouncing President Obama at a stop in front of the White House, then briefly blockading the entrance and shutting down the US Chamber of Commerce building just down the street from the White House, and then finally blocking traffic on K Street, the home of the big corporate lobbying offices. Unlike at prior anti-war demonstrations I’ve attended over the past decade in Washington, nobody heckled or cursed us out this time for inconveniencing them at rush hour. Nobody derided our signs or our rousing chant of “Banks got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out!” In fact, we got cheers, beeping horns, and raised fists and peace signs from passing drivers and people standing along the sidewalks–including men in tailored suits and women in heels.
Chris and Jerry McDonough, union activists from Madison, WI, came to occupy Washington (photos by Lindorff)

Check out this cartoon by Portland, Ore. film company Softbox of Dave Lindorff being interviewed by Flashpoints host Dennis Bernstein on how the US spends 53% of the annual budget on war and the military.

Tax Dollars at War

London – The many criticisms of capitalism leveled over a century ago by Karl Marx, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, may prove to be more right than wrong.

Evidence both anecdotal and empirical of many of Marx’s observations abounds across London, the city where the German-born Marx, who held a doctorate in philosophy, lived for three decades before his death in 1883.

Income inequity – an element of the capitalism Marx criticized – is at historic high in Britain as in the US.

The richest ten percent in Britain live 100 times better off than the poorest, according to a report published last year in the Guardian newspaper.

In London, the richest capital city in Europe, 41 percent of children live in poverty, according to statistics listed in a Museum of London exhibit.

That Guardian report placed average household wealth for Britain’s top ten percent at the equivalent of $1.3-million-U.S. dollars compared to the equivalent of $13,531 for Britain’s poorest.
Marx spoke of the immiseration of the workers, and today's capitalists are proving him right (Washington photo)

This statement was released after a unanimous vote of Occupy Wall Street’s general assembly:
 

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.
Wall Street and the corporatocracy are behind America's rampant militarism

Check it out on Radio Free Kansas

New York — I took the subway down to Zuccotti Park on Saturday morning to go on the Slut Walk. Since it was on the official schedule of Occupy Wall Street, and since I had heard it promoted by various members of the Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals, I figured that the Slut Walk was an official Occupy Wall Street event. I envisioned a few dozen Non-Male Identified Individuals raising a ruckus and making a spectacle and wreaking havoc in and around Zuccotti Park.

Instead I found the park to be stuffed with an unusually large proportion of Male Bodied Individuals of unknown identification who were preoccupied with revolutionary pursuits other than the Slut Walk, which was nowhere in evidence. I asked several Male Bodied Individuals where I might find the Slut Walk, and none of them knew.

This presented an unanticipated problem. It was almost noon, and I was in danger of missing the Slut Walk entirely, wherever it was. Yet my mother raised me in such a way that I would never ask a Non-Male Identified Individual, “Hey, where’s the Slut Walk?”

So I perambulated the park a couple times searching for a Non-Male Identified Individual who would not think I was making untoward assumptions with my ever more urgent query. “I will know her when I see her,” I thought. And I did. I knew her because she was wearing blue jeans and a negligee and she had “SLUT” written in foot-high black letters from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the Slut Walk is, would you?”

“Union Square,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get there, would you?”

Thus it transpired that I accompanied Mariah Bracken and her recently acquired friends Dana and Brianna to the No. 4 Train. All of them were 22 years old. Mariah and Dana were dressed like…um, ya know…and Brianna was dressed normally. Nobody on the subway seemed to notice.

“Because there’s a serial rapist loose in Brooklyn right now and the police are saying, ‘If girls stopped dressing like sluts, then they wouldn’t be raped’—that’s why I’m going to the Slut Walk,” said Mariah, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “We are trying to reclaim the word ‘slut.’”
Arrested on the bridge by devious NYPD officers, this Wall Street occupier lets everyone know, he's still occupying The Street (Lindorff photo)