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He hunches alone behind
His gray beard
From Idaho
He hasn’t read any best sellers
He dresses in shades
That make gray
Look like a rainbow
His name is a name
Out of a brief story
About someone whose
Jump off
A trestle
Instantly erased him
Ssst
But every night
At exactly 3:00
He floats out of bed
On his back
Lifts the open sash
And sails up into the waiting sky
Smiling at the stars
He stops at the same place
In the sky
Gathers his wits
Smiles tenderly
At the constellations and
With one flick of his little finger
Fires himself into
The fragrant gap
Between the
Honeyed lips of time

 
GARY LINDORFF, TCBH!’s resident poet, is an artist, musician, poet and counselor / dream-worker who practices shamanic techniques, and who lives in rural Vermont with his wife Shirley and two dogs. His website is BigDreamsWeb. (This poem was inspired by reading about the untimely death of Occupy Oklohoma City’s Street Poet)

Philadelphia — Common Terry was in a buoyant mood as he marched along Market Street Saturday afternoon along with a couple hundred activists who, following a rally outside the Liberty Bell pavilion, headed over to Philadelphia’s ornate City Hall to join the thousand or so occupiers camped out there.

“We’ve been occupying places for a long time,” said the laid off part-time teacher from Oakland, California. “University administration buildings, parks in Berkeley, nuclear plants. And now we’re occupying the centers of cities!”

Terry, who says he has been shuttling back and forth between the occupations in Philadelphia and New York, said he had purchased a one-month $60 Trailpass on Greyhound and was planning to attend a number of other occupation sites around the country.

The movement is clearly growing in size, and impact.

Gathering at Independence Mall before march to Occupy Philadelphia at City Hall (Photos: John Grant)

“This is cool. It’s a good thing they’re doing. Living democracy in action,” said two tourists outside the Constitution Center, as demonstrators marched past carrying signs saying “Hands of my Security and Medicare!” and “Tax the Rich!” and chanting “Banks got bailouts! We got sold out!”

A second couple, Christie and Billy Leetch, down from Boston, said they were happy to see the occupation happening in Philadelphia. “The one in Boston was violently attacked by the police a few days ago,” said Christie. “It was really disgusting, watching them arresting peacefully demonstrating veterans.”

“I agree with the message, and with the civil unrest,” said her husband. “It’s the only way to effect change without picking up guns.”

Marchers head across Market Street toward City Hall accompanied by PPD Strike Force

While the demonstration at Independence Mall was underway, a phalanx of Philadelphia Police, mounted on bikes and wearing jackets that said “Police Strike Force,” waited in a line along the 6th Street Boundary, looking ready to roll out and bang heads. It was a strikingly aggressive image juxtaposed to the completely peaceful crowd assembled across the street from them, and seemed wholly inappropriate. The crowd ignored the biker cops.

At the end of this chaotic YouTube video, made at the end of a victory rally by the activists occupying Wall Street and thousands of their supporters, one of the demonstrators is heard hollering: “He ran over his fuckin’ leg!”

Well, I’ve looked at the video three times and that seems a pretty accurate description of what this scooter cop did.

At first, the young man’s leg seems ahead of the scooter’s front wheel, as if maybe the cop ran into him with the scooter. The man on the ground is clearly a legal observer with an official National Lawyers Guild yellow observer hat, seen on the roadway in the photo above. He seems to be in serious agony at this point. So it seems likely he has already suffered some injury.

Then, for some reason (confusion? sadism?) the scooter cop runs the scooter forward over the man’s leg — again.

Now it gets really twisted and disturbing.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams possesses a rare opportunity to make a legacy mark by cleaning up a toxic mess polluting Philly’s justice system for nearly thirty years.

Williams can utilize an obscure yet occasionally utilized legal procedure to end the injustice involving the world’s most identifiable death row inmate, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who worked as a journalist in Philadelphia before his controversial 1982 murder conviction for killing a policeman.

This legal procedure, known as an Alford Plea, is a win-win situation for Williams and Abu-Jamal.

This procedure requires the inmate to concede that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict while requiring prosecutors to permit the inmate to maintain their innocence.

Williams the prosecutor gets his pound-of-flesh satisfaction of having kept Abu-Jamal in prison since his December 1981 arrest.

Abu-Jamal gains release from a conviction riddled with constitutional rights sabotaging misconduct by police, prosecutors and judges as amply documented by numerous investigators including Amnesty International.

Defendants and inmates in criminal cases from political corruption to murder, including murders of police officers, have utilized Alford Pleas.
Abu-Jamal supporters at a London event. The Mumia case has damaged the US reputation worldwide (photo by Linn Washington)

Liberty Park — For most of the night, the air hovered at the midpoint between high humidity and fog. For the rest of the night, rain poured down in silver sheets, reducing Occupy Wall Street to the Park of Many-Colored Lumps, each lump consisting of: one green/yellow/red/blue plastic tarp glistening under lightning bolts and the relentless glare of police car headlights, and 1-4 huddled recent graduates with $120,000 in debt, no employment prospects, the reading skills to write a dissertation on 12th century French troubadour poetry, and an overwhelming distrust of capitalism.

When it wasn’t actually raining, the Lumps emerged from their tarps and fell into two warring camps: Those Who Cleaned, and Those Who Complained Bitterly.

It had been decided by the previous General Assembly that Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza should be cleaned, as a way of pre-empting the cleaners hired by Mayor Bloomberg as an obvious ruse for ridding himself of Occupy Wall Street, which has struck fear into the heart of the American ruling class unlike anything since…what? The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934? Hard to figure the analogy, but Those Who Cleaned really wanted to keep it going, whatever it was, by cleaning every flat stone slab in a park that was almost all flat stone slabs. There were about two platoons of Those Who Cleaned vigorously with stiff-bristled brooms.

There were about the same number of Those Who Complained Bitterly. What they complained about was Those Who Cleaned.

“Why are you cleaning the same stone slab that someone else just scrubbed three minutes ago?”

“Because we’re the Sanitation Working Group and the General Assembly voted we should clean.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense. It’s been raining for an hour.”

“Mayor Bloomberg will say the park is dirty if we don’t clean it.”

“But it’s already clean, and he’s going to say it’s dirty whatever we do.”

“Why don’t you grab a broom and help us?”

Liberty Park filled with thousands of people in the pre-dawn hours as people responded to the call to defend the Occupation

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.