Good evening and thank you for this opportunity to talk with you tonight. We're here to talk about the actual state of our nation, and how we can reclaim the promise of our democracy and the peaceful, just green future we deserve. We have heard President Obama deliver his State of the Union Address. And we heard the Republican response. Each claims to have the answer, and that the other was an obstacle to progress.
A Facebook group called Upgrade Democracy (http://www.facebook.com/groups/upgradedemocracy) is collecting a list of
teams/organizations working on technology-powered solutions to the systemic problems of governance/group decision-making.
They want help in expanding the list but
Please don't add projects that simply use technology to slightly enhance our current political system (e.g. electronic petitions). We're upgrading the democratic operating system, not tweaking the interface. ;)
Time marches on, in the constant madness that is Occupy Wall Street, within the constant madness that is New York City, within the constant madness that is the earth in 2012.
I've made a point of attending more marches lately, realizing that this is one of the best ways to let people know that we're still here even though we're not in the park. One was a march against the NDAA. For those who don't know, the National Defense Authorization Act allows the government to detain any US citizen and hold him or her indefinitely without trial if they suspect them of aiding an organization which aids al Qaeda or the Taliban. The problem is that they don't have to prove to anyone this connection, so anyone who criticizes the US government might conceivably fall into this category. There would be no judge or jury to say otherwise.
It's especially ironic because the US government has given billions of dollars in assistance to the Pakistani government and military, which has aided al Qaeda and the Taliban with millions if not billions of dollars worth of assistance in the form of weapons, trucks, food and cash. So according to the NDAA, anyone connected with the US government, military or weapons industry could technically be held indefinitely without trial. This would include the president and any members of congress who voted for any of these military assistance bills.
It's been a really long time since I last wrote. I left New York for a few weeks in early December, and returned later in the month. The timing wasn't too good, since very little happened around here during the holidays, and there was a lot of frustrating, idle time. One positive thing that did happen during that time, though, was that a lot of people worked on creating a sense of community among us who are staying at one of the churches in the upper west side. I'd originally thought of it as simply a place to sleep, and to simply leave in the morning and start my real day downtown at OWS. But some more insightful people saw it as more than that, as a chance to develop our identity as a group, a subsection of OWS. The original motivation for this might have been simple necessity-- to reduce thefts and conflicts, but in any case, it's turned into an actual community, an opportunity to meet new people and work together constructively.
Otherwise, things were scattered and thin through late December, until New Year's eve. Earlier in the evening a few of us went around town, happy to get away from the uninspired atmosphere, but came back to the area and walked into Zuccotti Park around 10 pm. Several hundred people were there, a low-level party. More people arrived steadily, and the absurdity of the situation became embarrassingly apparent. Here we are, 300, 400, 500 of us, in a park we lived in, a park from which we changed world history, until a mere six ago. And now we're surrounded by standing metal barricades which enforce arbitrary, stupid rules which are arguably illegal. Say, what about these standing metal barricades, anyway?
This is the first of a series of reports from my friend Steve, who has been participating in Occupy Wall Street since October 5th.
Hi everyone,
I arrived at Occupy Wall Street Wednesday morning. It was pure luck that I got there the day of the big march.
The feeling in the park was really nice from the moment I arrived (especially since I had to walk around Wall Street itself for a while before finding it). A lot of people under odd conditions, and doing so quite well.
Zuccotti Park is just a few blocks up Broadway from Wall Street. It's one of the only, if not the only, parks in NYC that is privately owned. Because of the deal made with the city at the time of construction, the park is open 24 to the public 24 hours, while every other park in the city is closed at night. News report (NPR) says it was pure luck that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) people picked it to occupy!
Before I got there, I'd read about a system where people can call from anywhere in the country and order a pizza to be sent to the folks in the park. This is a little misleading. In fact, there's a full-time kitchen crew that serves throughout the day. So it's even more organized than I'd imagined, with donations coming in and being used effectively.
This is the latest report from Steve at Occupy Wall Street.
Hi everyone,
It's been slow around here since my last post. Strange to say this, since up to recently things have been frantic.
We're still hanging in, securing housing for ourselves and running meetings again. I went to a spokes council meeting the other night. It was kind of nice to see the process functioning. Spokes council is a cumbersome process, but it's quite democratic. Of course, it's a messy process, lots of arguments, and then the next day everyone else yells about the decisions made. Once you explain the reasons, they lower the volume of their yelling a bit. I suppose groups making decisions about how to conduct themselves is by nature complicated and controversial and always will be.
The past few days in particular have been difficult. A lot of people arguing, about all kinds of things. I think this is partly because we're all stressed about not having a home, and partly because we're confused about our mission at this point. With Thanksgiving coming up it's unlikely much will be done about this in the next few days.
This is the latest report from Steve at Occupy Wall Street. It sounds like it is becoming an occupied territory, with the NYPD playing the role of the IDF and controlling movement of people and goods in and out.
Hi everyone,
It's Saturday morning, things are actually quiet enough for me to sit and write. Here's what happened since my last, kind of frantic, message early Thursday afternoon.
I walked over to City Hall where I heard a rally was supposed to be held to demand Bloomberg's resignation. I just missed it, people had already left for Foley Square. On the way over I made another attempt to call someone here at the storage place, and by chance happened to catch him, and find out the space was open, so I turned around and came back here. Had I not reached him, I would have gone to Foley Square and then to the Brooklyn Bridge, and witnessed history, or gotten arrested, or beaten up.
You probably know better than me what happened there. I don't have video capabilities on this old computer. In any case, there were many, many people in Foley Square, and even more at the bridge, 5,000, I heard? Lots of pushing and shoving, hundreds of arrests throughout the day, I think. I was here helping restore the medical supplies shelf when one of the medics got a call that trouble was about to start, and we helped pack up bandages, etc. We were out of Maalox, which is used as an antidote to pepper spray. The shelf has thinned out considerably this week, since the police took the medical tent and all the supplies they had there.
This is a quick report from Steve at Occupy Wall Street
Hi folks,
A quick one, if I can finish in 14 minutes.
Got back into the city around 8 a.m., and spent the morning running around Broadway, Wall Street and surrounding streets and intersections. Kind of reminded me of DC demos around'00 and '01, but without the tear gas, fortunately.
People blocked entrances to Wall Street, and there was a huge crowd behind the NYSE, on Exchange Street. Cops only allowed people with work IDs through the barricades, but at times there were so many demonstrators that the police blocked everyone in, which was a victory for us. Someone said the start of the 9:30 NYSE was delayed, but it looks like that was not true. So we didn't actually prevent the official start, but did delay a lot of people, presumably, cause a lot of headaches, and made headlines again.
The scene in Zuccotti Park is crazy. Barricades everywhere, police keep changing where you can enter and exit. All kinds of commotion. Cheers of victory, shouts of anger, irritation at this barricade and that. After a while I wonder, where is all this headed, what are we accomplishing, what should we be doing?
But we're temporarily disoriented, three days since our eviction, and where do we even go to talk with each other? Hopefully over the coming days we'll answer some questions: what do we do next, etc.
Police are being annoying, at times brutal, most of us have been able to avoid direct confrontation and arrest. Just move when they tell you to, then go back ten seconds later when they've walked away. Cat and mouse.
Storage unit closed today, hopefully we'll be in tomorrow. Okay, 6 minutes to go, will try to send to as many people as possible. Send this report anywhere you like.
This is one of a number of reports from my friend Steve who has been a part of Occupy Wall Street since October 5th. I will try to post his earlier reports because they give good insight into what is happening at the heart of an emergent revolution.
Hi everyone,
First of all, I'm okay. I did get arrested but was released later that day, it wasn't too bad.
So here's my take on Monday night/Tuesday morning.
I was in my tent around midnight getting ready to go to sleep when I heard someone yelling. Someone's always yelling there, but this was different, more frantic, and someone else yelled, "Get out of your tents." I opened the flap and saw that the police across the street (the side street on the north side of the park) had set up a huge panel of lights and were flooding the park with them. Another similar panel was on the other side. There'd been a lot of strange police behavior since I got there, but never anything like this. I knew something was up, so I put my shes on and ran out.
For a while I milled around in the park, not sure what to do. I was thinking of leaving. I ran back and got my bag out of the tent. It was a chaotic scene. We all pretty much knew they were going to raid. People were yelling and screaming different things, some people were afraid, others defiant, others confused. I was pretty nervous, my hands were trembling a little, and I was confused. I talked with a few people, let someone write legal aid's phone # on my arm with a sharpie, and discovered that a few level-headed people I knew were planning on staying and getting arrested, and I decided I would stay, too.
Right to the City (RTTC) emerged in 2007 as a unified response to gentrification and a call to halt the displacement of low-income people, LGBTQ, and youths of color from their historic urban neighborhoods. We are a national alliance of racial, economic and environmental justice organizations.
The Boston area seems to be one of the few in the country where homeowners have been (somewhat) successfully fighting back against the banks' foreclosures and evictions. They have been successful because they have organized and stood up for their rights together.
My visits to the Occupy Boston site have confirmed that connections have been made between Right to the City, MassUniting, and City Life/Vida Urbana. I expect some of the occupiers downtown will be participating in eviction blockades out in the neighborhoods. I also expect that organizers from across the country will be taking back effective tactics and strategies to save peoples' homes from the chicanery of such banks as Bank of America.
We need more organized solidarity like this to expand the effects of each of our separate groups.
The Conference for a Constitutional Convention at Harvard Law School on September 24 and 25 was supposed to be an opportunity for the Left and Right to talk together about the possibility of ending our broken political system through a discussion of a new Constitutional Convention. Lawrence Lessig of Rootstrikers (http://www.rootstrikers.org/), represented the Left and Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots (http://www.teapartypatriots.org) represented the Right.
From my point of view, the conference wasn't really the advertised meeting of the Left and the Right. Lessig himself was a Reagan delegate to the Republican Convention back in the day; and although there was a good bit of representation from the Tea Party Patriot group, there was nobody there explicitly from MoveOn or anything really further left than the ADA wing of the Democratic Party, with the exception of a couple of folks from the Revolutionary Communists who were hawking their Constitution For The New Socialist Republic In North America (pdf alert: http://revcom.us/socialistconstitution/SocialistConstitution-en.pdf). It did, however, reveal a subculture that has been working towards a Constitutional Convention for decades.
Cambridge, Massachusetts is the East Coast's Berkeley, California. Its crunchy reputation -- from hippie/granola to People's Republic -- is well-earned on average, but, well, a bit off-target and way out of date. You see, since rent control was thrown out by the end of 1994, Cambridge has seen a dramatic erosion of its working class communities. And going back to 1940, when the Plan E / City Manager form of government was first instituted, the elites have found it easier and easier to pull the strings on policies of social upheaval and community destruction.
While no substitute for reading Bill Cunningham's historical backgrounder Which People's Republic?, he manages to sum it all up in one sentence:
In Cambridge, these policies have uprooted poor and working class communities in order to cultivate, on the same soil, the University City.
And for all the feel-good progressivism that pervades this city, there is an underbelly of corruption, liberalism, and exploitation that stink up the place. The racial diversity is lovely, but quietly growing apartheid conditions and a fierce, latent racism mean that such feel-good sentiments are dangerous illusions. And while it's lovely that we are sister cities with so many others around the world, we are on a path of social destruction here at home. I am proud and grateful to live in a city that has an active, funded Peace Commission, but I am ashamed to live in a city with a more active, better-funded city government that colludes to protect the elite university, biotech, and developer interests at the expense of its own people.
So it is with a bit of glee that I observe the unfolding drama around the wrongful-termination lawsuit that is haunting City Manager Bob Healy and the complicit City Council. It's rare that all the corruption, hypocrisy, and racism hiding under the veneer of all the many positives that Cambridge has going for it bubble to the surface in one instance.
Peter Vickery gave me chills today, when he painted the picture of what will happen on October 18th this fall, when Mark C. Miller becomes the first-ever Green-Rainbow Party candidate elected to the State House. Mark, who received an extraordinary 45% of the vote against an incumbent Democrat in his first time running for office, spending just over $3,000, would raise $20,000 this go-round, and run a 90-day sprint to reach the 4,000 Unenrolled voters in his district.
Mark followed up this grand introduction by pointing out one key difference from his 2010 run -- this time he'd have a campaign manager, Peter Vickery. He then proceeded to outline what he was struggling with as a candidate, and what he was yearning to bring to the 3rd Berkshire District. And there was no simple rhetoric available to him, no campaign playbook for messaging his vision for Pittsfield, the Berkshires, and the Commonwealth. He is looking to run a transformative campaign, sparking the economic, cultural, and political transformation that Pittsfield and the rest of the state is burning for.
Transformation is what we need, and Mark's victory will indeed be a transformative act. It's easily within our grasp if we rise to this exciting -- joyous was Mark's word -- 90-day challenge and make it happen.
Part of the challenge will be communicating the idea of a transformative campaign in a way that connects with the average voter in Pittsfield, and re-connects with those who have given up on the political system entirely. It will be a crowded field for this open seat, and there's a mountain to climb to win it. But we have 93 days in which to do it. 93 days to change Massachusetts politics forever.
The Massachusetts Budget - A Work of Shame Democrats all - the Speaker, Senate President, and Governor - are patting themselves on the back for passing a budget that had three main features: crushing cuts to virtually every aspect of state government that services regular people, a major attack on public employee unions and their collective bargaining rights, and - best for last - not a dime of "shared sacrifice" from the wealthiest in our state.
Yes, those "crazy liberals" from Massachusetts have for the third year of this recession failed to ask for a single dime of "share sacrifice" - the favorite phrase of the political class who seek to undermine government and its duty to enrich our public life and lift up the neediest in our society - from those who have the most in our society. The last time the state raised taxes, what did it do? It raised the wrong tax - the sales tax - the one that is most regressive, affecting the poor more than the wealthy. And before the budget debate even began this year, those good Democratic leaders decided that no amount of cuts to libraries, schools, parks, services for the mentally ill would be painful enough to get them to violate the sacred commitment to the wealthy - no tax increases.
We have a bill to raise $1.4 billion a year, mainly from the wealthiest in our state. See ourcommunities.org. Now we just need the movement to get our "representatives" to see the light.
-Max Page
P.S. Public higher education was cut by $60 million, and financial aid by another $2 million. The catalogue of shame is detailed at our reliable friend, the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.
I was happy to meet with fellow health care advocates from around the state, most of whom are strong supporters of Single Payer Health Care (aka Medicare For All), which is one of my major campaign issues as a Green-Rainbow Party candidate. The issues is also one of the major policy initiatives behind the party's mobilization around the Commonwealth.
Joining me at the hearing were fellow Green-Rainbow Party members Patrick Burke, Mark Miller, Jeff Turner, Jeff Wheeler. Mark Miller, a candidate for 3rd Berkshire District, also provided testimony.
BOSTON - This year's state budget has revealed a yawning gap between the priorities of state legislature and the priorities of the people of Massachusetts, according to Nat Fortune, who will testify today as a Green-Rainbow Party representative at a State House hearing on budget measures. Fortune noted that while schools, health care, social services, and environmental protection are being severely cut this year, legislators have seen fit to largely protect tax giveaways to businesses with strong lobbying presence on Beacon Hill.
"How did spending public tax dollars on public services for the public good become a lower priority than subsidizing private industries?" asked Fortune.
The Canadian Greens and the voters of the Saanich-Gulf Islands BC riding made history yesterday by electing Green Party leader Elizabeth May to Parliament. May, who was excluded from the national debates (as a national party leader) on the argument that they did not have an elected Member of Parliament, became the first Green MP in Canada's federal government. They excluded her despite the fact that May participated in the 2008 debates and did very well, resulting in significant federal funding of the Green Party annually. The Greens also fielded MP candidates in 304 out of Canada's 308 total ridings.
Asked what just one lone MP can do, May responded "Just watch me!"
Watch her victory speech and post-election interview (below the jump):
This is a great tool to get a quick glimpse of the effect of money in state legislative races. What did Bob DeLeo need $895,000 for? Well, it's one way to funnel money around to your Democratic buddies who do your dirty work. And it's sure gotta be nice to have $446k in the bank.
Please join us at the hearing Thursday, May 5, anytime between 10:00 AM & 3:00 PM, State House Gardner Auditorium, Boston. Come tell the Governor and legislature to stop slashing critical health, education, social and environmental services in order to protect billions in useless corporate tax give-aways and subsidies for the massive, needless health insurance bureaucracy!
Raise the bar for a better budget and real tax reform. As a first step, we're also supporting "An Act to Invest In Our Communities" (SB1416 / HB2553) at the hearing. Supporting this revenue bill is one part of our commitment to stop the cruel, & unnecessary cuts that the governor and legislature are proposing.
In addition to asking the rich to pay their fair share, the GRP is also calling for single-payer Medicare-for-all health care and the elimination of unjustified and ineffective corporate subsidies - saving at least $2.5 billion a year. The Green-Rainbow Party alone brings it all together into a "Better Budget," which will not only prevent new budget cuts, but will allow us to restore essential public services that have been severely compromised over the past decade.
Green Mass Group is an online forum for Green thought and collective action in Massachusetts. It is a community forum for justice, sustainability, democracy and health in the Commonwealth and beyond.
Read more
Quotes
"Now, is this the deal I would have preferred? No. I believe that we could have made the tough choices required - on entitlement reform and tax reform - right now, rather than through a special congressional committee process. But this compromise does make a serious down payment on the deficit reduction we need and gives each party a strong incentive to get a balanced plan done before the end of the year. Most importantly, it will allow us to avoid default and end the crisis that Washington imposed on the rest of America."
--President Barack Obama on the debt ceiling "deal"
"Despite Democratic control over the White House, despite Democratic control over the Senate, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, a small minority of the members of the Republican-controlled House have successfully pushed an extreme right-wing agenda onto the American political landscape. It is an ideology which believes that despite the fact that the rich are getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and poverty is increasing, all - all of the burden for deficit reduction should rest on working people."
--Independent Senator Bernie Sanders on the debt ceiling "deal"
"Last year Evergreen, a Massachusetts company, agreed to establish their first-ever United States based manufacturing facility here in Massachusetts. They did so, or are doing so, at Devens. They have now agreed and chosen to triple their size at Devens. Their next phase of expansion, right here in Massachusetts, a signature company in a signature sector, and we congratulate all of the folks at Evergreen and look forward to continuing to work with you...
We made a personal commitment to Evergreen for the sake of Evergreen, but also because we wanted to show that there are ways in which state government, in working together with private industry and with the utility companies, could begin to create a different kind of environment, a different kind of business climate here, to grow that sector, and it is happening. It's happening. Evergreen is one of the most prominent examples, but there are a whole host of examples."
--Governor Deval Patrick, April 7, 2008, boasting about state investment in Evergreen.
and Now...
"Evergreen Solar Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday, completing a stunning reversal of fortune for a high-flying alternative-energy company that once seemed to herald a new era for the Massachusetts economy... At its peak, Evergreen employed roughly 900 people locally and attracted more than $50 million in state support, as its stock price soared above $100 a share.
Yesterday, Evergreen's stock closed at 18 cents. The company shuttered its manufacturing plant in Devens earlier this year and now has only 85 employees left. Massachusetts is one of its top creditors, owed $1.5 million in rent."
--Erin Ailworth, Boston Globe, August 16, 2011
