A new study out of Stanford University, scheduled to be published in the journal Energy Policy, argues that New York State can eliminate fossil fuels from its energy mix entirely by 2050.
In Sunset Park, a predominantly Mexican and Chinese neighborhood in South Brooklyn, St. Jacobi’s Church was one of the go-to hubs for people who wanted to donate food, clothing, and warm blankets or volunteer help other New Yorkers who were still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. On Saturday, Ethan Murphy, one of the people heading the kitchen operation, estimated they would prepare and send out 10,000 meals to people in need. Thousands and thousands of pounds of clothes were being sorted, labeled, and distributed, and valuable supplies like heaters and generators were being loaded up in cars to be taken out to the Rockaways, Staten Island and other places in need. However, this well-oiled operation wasn’t organized by the Red Cross, New York Cares, or some other well-established volunteer group. This massive effort was the handiwork of none other than Occupy Wall Street—the effort is known as Occupy Sandy.
The scene at St. Jacobis on Saturday was friendly, orderly chaos. Unlike other shelters that had stopped collecting donations or were looking for volunteers with special skills such as medical training, Occupy Sandy was ready to take anyone willing to help. A wide range of people pitched in, including a few small children making peanut butter sandwiches, but most volunteers were in their 20s and 30s. A large basement rec room had become a hive of vegetable chopping and clothes bagging. They held orientations throughout the day for new volunteers. One of the orientation leaders, Ian Horst, who has been involved with a local group called Occupy Sunset Park for the past year, says he was “totally blown away by the response” and the sheer numbers of people who showed up and wanted to help. He estimated that he’d given an orientation to 200 people in the previous hour.
By midday, a line stretched all the way down the block of people who’d already attended orientation and were waiting for rides to be dispatched to volunteer. Kiley Edgley and Eric Schneider had been waiting about 20 minutes and were toward the front of the line. Like several people I spoke to, the fact that this effort was being organized by the occupy movement wasn’t a motivating factor—they found out about the opportunity to volunteer online and just wanted to help.
So how did an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, best known as a leaderless movement that brought international attention to issues of economic injustice through the occupation of Zucotti Park in the financial district last year, become a leader in local hurricane relief efforts? Ethan Murphy, who was helping organize the food at St. Jacobis and had been cooking for the occupy movement over the past year, explained there wasn’t any kind of official decision or declaration that occupiers would now try to help with the hurricane aftermath. “This is what we do already, “ he explained: Build community, help neighbors, and create a world without the help of finance. Horst said, “We know capitalism is broken, so we have already been focused on organizing to take care of our own [community] needs.” He sees Occupy Sandy as political ideas executed on a practical level.
As frustration grows around the city about the pace and effectiveness of the response from FEMA, and other government agencies and the Red Cross, I imagine both concerned New Yorkers and storm victims alike will remember who was out on the front lines.
Occupy Sandy Relief Video. Impressive.
so a banker stabs a cab driver in a dispute about how much the banker owes the cabbie… and gets away scott free. alright guys. thats it. time to get the torches and pitch forks.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/12/williams-bryan-jennings-charges-dropped_n_1961736.html
WASHINGTON — The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded — sometimes violently — by local authorities.
Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. “special rapporteur” for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.
La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it’s clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces “as long as that doesn’t severely affect the rights of others.”
“One of the principles is proportionality,” La Rue said. “The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order — but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger.”
And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don’t work anyway, he said. In Occupy’s case, he said, “disbanding them by force won’t change that attitude of indignation.”
Occupy encampments across the country have been forcibly removed by police in full riot gear, and some protesters have been badly injured as a result of aggressive police tactics.
New York police staged a night raid on the original Occupy Wall Street encampment in mid-November, evicting sleeping demonstrators and confiscating vast amounts of property.
The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas, smoke grenades and bean-bag rounds at demonstrators there in late October, seriously injuring one Iraq War veteran at the Occupy site.
Protesters at University of California, Davis were pepper sprayed by a campus police officer in November while participating in a sit-in, and in September an officer in New York pepper sprayed protesters who were legally standing on the sidewalk.
“We’re seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation.
“The demonstrations are treated as if they’re presumptively criminal,” she said. “Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene.”
Read more….The bookworms of Occupy Wall Street have slapped the city with some hefty library fines.
The police raid on Zuccotti Park destroyed or damaged 2,800 books that had been donated to the protest movement’s “People’s Library,” a new lawsuit charges.
“You don’t nuke books,” said civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel as he filed the lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court Thursday on behalf of four Occupy Wall Streets librarians.
Incredibly powerful article. Truthdig nails it once again. Occupy Wall Street’s May Day protest in NYC saw 30,000 deomonstrators, with thousands more in over 100 U.S. cities, and yet the mainstream corporate media continues to ignore, suppress, and dismiss the movement.
This May Day brought the explosive global resurgence of Occupy, one of the most significant social movement in decades. In New York City, the heart of global capitalism and center of the movement, the New York Civil Liberties Union estimated that 30,000 demonstrators took part in a massive rally and march down Broadway, led by a score of city taxicabs. As has become alarmingly common for a country that constantly proclaims its zealous devotion to democracy, the day ended with brutal police violence and arrests.
The powerful rejuvenation of the Occupy movement, however, was used by the US media - owned by the very same interests that Occupy directly threatens - as an opportunity to finally kill the Occupy movement and marginalize the voices of its participants. Since September, the mainstream press in the US has systematically ignored and demonized the Occupy movement. The nakedness of the class bias in this case, however, was especially jarring: the size and significance of the protests were downplayed, reports of police brutality were largely ignored, and the movement was portrayed as violent and dangerous. Many of the most prominent US news outlets, such as The New York Times, practically ignored the protests altogether. These shameful distortions by the corporate press display the function of the media as an organ of the rule of “the 1 percent,” and reveal how threatened elites are by organized, direct action and democratic participation.
While tens of thousands of activists took to the streets on May Day, the only prominent mention of economic inequality on the homepage of The New York Times web site was titled “A Wealthy Guy’s Case for Inequality,” written by a former associate of Mitt Romney at Bain Capital. The Times, in fact, did not even cover the protests as a national story, instead merely producing a brief and dismissive 400-word article buried in the “Paper of Record’s” Metro section. Predictably, the article focused mostly on the wickedness of the demonstrators, who “snarled traffic and smashed windows.” The Times did see fit to cover May Day protests in Europe in its international section, but here, too, no connection was made to protests of a nearly identical nature and size at home. In other words, since “the march was too big to allow Occupy Wall Street to continue to be reduced to a dog-and-pony show,” as Occupy Handbook editor Janet Byrne said, the Times simply chose to ignore it altogether.
The Washington Post adopted a similar approach, producing just one short story, also exiled to the local section, which likewise took great pains to amplify claims of “reports of violent clashes on the West Coast.” It is telling that while these major national papers were outraged by some broken windows, they ignored the thuggish attacks by the police on both coasts on peacefully assembled human beings.
The Tea Party, a movement which serves rather than threatens corporate interests, has received front-page coverage in virtually all of the nation’s national newspapers for events that were smaller and less significant than this week’s May Day protests. Yet, a truly substantial social movement with genuine emancipatory potential and a broad base of support among Americans is largely considered un-newsworthy by the corporate press. When the demonstrations were covered, crude caricatures masquerading as objective news ruled the day.
Occupy is arguably at its most critical juncture since the eviction of Zuccotti Park and the effort by the media to portray Occupy as a toothless shell of its former self is not without potential consequences. It is vital that it be understood that the media are not any more neutral in the war being fought on the streets of our cities than are the corporations that own it. Occupiers can expect no favors from the American media, which will continue to serve their corporate owners and not the public at large. This means that the occupiers must expect to struggle mightily for their view of the world - and even their very presence - to break into mainstream political discourse. The narrative that “Occupy is dead” is merely the latest salvo by the 1 percent. We must not let them get away with it.
Be sure to read the entire article. It is so well written. My isolated quotes can’t do it justice.
For the truth about the numbers see this Guadian article:
First, the march was too big to allow Occupy Wall Street to continue to be reduced to a dog-and-pony show. Four police officers I spoke with at about 8pm near Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway, estimated the crowd at 25,000, and Occupy Wall Street organizers put it variously at 10,000–15,000 and at 50,000. The office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Affairs at the NYPD explained on the morning of 2 May that the NYPD “does not give out crowd estimates. Ask the organizers.” The New York Civil Liberties Union put the number at 30,000.
