#Occupy - Nov 1
by Staff
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With Generators Gone, Wall Street Protesters Try Bicycle Power
Colin Moynihan, New York Times
Keegan Stephan pedaled to charge a battery that would be used for the power needs of protesters at Zuccotti Park on Sunday.
Rita Moreira, a visitor from Brazil, was walking past Zuccotti Park around noon on Sunday when she stopped to gaze at a man drinking a cup of coffee and pedaling a stationary bicycle connected to several wires.
“What is that?” she asked.
The bicyclist, Keegan Stephan, replied: “We’re charging batteries.”
He went on to explain that the bronze Schwinn he was pedaling was connected to a flywheel that was, in turn, connected to a dynamo. Energy created by the dynamo flowed through a motor and a one-way diode to charge a bulky black marine battery that sat on the ground next to the bike.
When the battery was fully charged, Mr. Stephan, said, it would be brought into the Occupy Wall Street encampment inside the park and used to power laptops and cellphones. He estimated that it might take six hours of pedaling to charge a battery that would then provide 100 hours of use.
Mr. Stephan, 26, a bike mechanic and a member of an environmental group called Time’s Up, said that he built the contraption more than a year ago and had used it to power the refrigerator in his apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A few weeks ago he brought it to Zuccotti Park to serve as an example of how people there might create pollution-free energy.
(30 October 2011)
A Master Class in Occupation
Chris Hedges, TruthDig
NEW YORK CITY—Jon Friesen, 27, tall and lanky with a long, dirty-blond ponytail, a purple scarf and an old green fleece, is sitting on concrete at the edge of Zuccotti Park leading a coordination meeting, a gathering that takes place every morning with representatives of each of Occupy Wall Street’s roughly 40 working groups.
“Our conversation is about what it means to be a movement and what it means to be an organization,” he says to the circle. A heated discussion follows, including a debate over whether the movement should make specific demands.
I find him afterward on a low stone wall surrounding a flowerbed in the park. He decided to come to New York City, he said, from the West Coast for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. He found a ride on Craig’s List while staying at his brother’s home in Champaign, Ill.
“It was a television event when I was 17,” he says of the 2001 attacks. “I came here for the 10-year anniversary. I wanted to make it real to myself. I’d never been to New York. I’d never been to the East Coast.”
Once he reached New York City he connected with local street people to find “assets.” He slept in the parks and on the street. He arrived on the first day of the occupation in Zuccotti Park. He found other “traveler types” whose survival skills and political consciousness were as developed as his own.
In those first few days, he says, “it was the radicals and the self-identifying anarchists” who set up the encampment. Those who would come later, usually people with little experience in dumpster diving, sleeping on concrete or depending on a McDonald’s restroom, would turn to revolutionists like Friesen for survival. Zuccotti Park, like most Occupied sites, schooled the uninitiated.
(31 October 2011)
Why America is embracing protest
Edward Luce, Financial Times
... The message also captured a more central fact about the protests: the high participation of educated young. Unlike their forebears in the culture wars of the 1990s and the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, today’s leftwing youth are mostly focused on the economy. Far from revulsion, it seems that many Americans sympathise with them.
Last week a poll by the National Journal found that 59 per cent either fully or strongly agreed with the “aims” of OWS. An even larger share backed a 5 per cent tax surcharge on millionaires – something proposed by Mr Obama. It has become common to hear that the richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150m. It is also true. Revealingly, support for Mr Obama’s “Buffett tax” drops sharply when it is presented as his proposal.
By selecting Wall Street, rather than Capitol Hill, as their frontline, the protesters have maximised their symbolic appeal. Just as the Tea Party helped drag Washington’s focus towards spending cuts – prematurely in the view of most economists – so the Wall Street protests have helped bring the jobs crisis back into the central debate.
Among those who agree with OWS “aims” are as many as a third of self-identified Republicans.
(30 October 2011)
‘Occupy’ Protest at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London Divides Church
John F. Burns, New York Times
In a city where demonstrations of every kind are part of the daily syncopation, there has rarely been any with quite the same potential for amplifying the protesters’ cause as the one that has settled in recently on the historic forecourt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, setting off a painful crisis of conscience for the Church of England .
For the last 15 days, St. Paul’s has been the backdrop for London’s counterpart to the Occupy Wall Street tent city in Zuccotti Square in New York. Here, the protest has taken on aspects of a medieval carnival, a jumbled tent city with buskers and rappers and clothing stalls and a panoply of banners and a makeshift cafeteria. There have been pet dogs, and a man dressed as Jesus declaiming against the usurers in the temple.
... few, if any, of the protests outside New York have had the resonance the St. Paul’s campers have achieved in Britain by choosing as their venue what many regard as the country’s most iconic religious landmark. With bishops squaring off against bishops, priests against priests, and the church hierarchy in disarray over whether to take steps to force the dismantling of the camp — not to mention Prime Minister David Cameron’s parachuting into the debate from 10,000 miles away in Australia, where he has attending a Commonwealth summit meeting — the St. Paul’s story has been front-page news and a feast for the television newscasts.
(30 October 2011)
A New Declaration of Independence
Alex Pareene, Salon
The weight of the 1 Percent has become intolerable. How can we take our country back? Here's a fresh draft
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The following document is the result of the Salon staff's brainstorming; we're incredibly grateful to Alex Pareene for crafting it into a coherent piece. We hope you'll add your own thinking in the comments section below.
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Here’s where we are in the course of human events right now: 14 million Americans are jobless and millions more are underemployed. Those still working have seen wages fall after 30 years of stagnation. The 1 Percent of top wage earners could buy and sell the rest of us without so much as a low balance warning on their checking account apps. The tenth-of-1 Percent earns millions more every year in barely taxed capital gains and derivatives while everyone else struggles to pay down trillions of dollars of debt. Massive, growing income inequality is now belatedly acknowledged by political and media elites, but many of them seem befuddled as to its cause and importance.
It is our belief that many of the problems facing Americans today can be directly connected to the unchecked power and complete unaccountability of the 1 Percent, a group that benefits from every unequal boom of the modern era and escapes each disastrous bust unscathed.
... Our list is meant to be the beginning of a conversation, not a final product.
1. Debt relief ...
2. A substantial jobs program ...
3. A healthcare public option ...
4. Reregulate Wall Street ...
5. End the Global War on Terror and rein in the defense budget ...
6. Repeal the Patriot Act ...
7. Tackle climate change ...
8. Stop locking everyone up for everything and end the drug war ...
9. Full equality for the queer community ...
10. Fix the tax system ...
(30 October 2011)
OWS at Valley Forge
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
A (Self-)Graduation Speech for the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park
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... don’t think of me as your graduation speaker. Think of this as a self-graduation. And this time, it’s positives all the way to the horizon. After all, you haven’t incurred a cent of debt, because you and those around you in Zuccotti Park are giving the classes you took. First, you began educating yourself in the realities of post-meltdown America, and then, miraculously enough, you went and educated many of the rest of us as well.
You really did change the conversation in this country in a heartbeat from, as Joshua Holland wrote at Alternet.org, “a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs... spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families' debt-loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point” -- and more amazingly yet, at no charge.
In other words, I’m not here, like the typical graduation speaker, to inspire you. I’m here to tell you how you’ve inspired me. In the four decades between the moment when I imagined I put everything on the line and the moment when you actually did, wealth and income inequalities exploded in ways unimaginable in the 1960s. For ordinary Americans, the numbers that translated into daily troubles began heading downhill in the 1990s, the Clinton years, and only a fraudulent bubble in home values kept the good times rolling until 2008.
Then, of course, it burst big time. But you know all this. Who knows better than you the story of the financial and political flim-flam artists who brought this country to its knees, made out like bandits, and left the 99% in the dust? Three years of stunned silence followed, as if Americans simply couldn’t believe it, couldn’t take it in -- if, that is, you leave aside the Tea Party movement.
But give those aging, angry whites credit. They were the first to cry out for a lost world (while denouncing some of the same bank bailouts and financial shenanigans you have).
(30 October 2011) |
