Occupy Climate Change

Patience, at Occupy Detroit, makes a beautiful statement.

Ok I finally got to visit Occupy Wall St. and it was a freak early wintery mix of a storm -- before Halloween for cripes sake. Three inches of slush accumulated on the streets in Jersey, while in Manhattan it melted more quickly into soupy puddles. At Liberty Plaza only a few hardy souls were leaning into a wet wind, some under light cover but most hunkered down inside tents with flys made out of tarps. We didn't stick it out very long as we were drenched and it was coming down hard. I have a lot of respect for the occupiers. There were a lot of police vehicles, watching.

The few people out in the occupy space looked really cheerful though, despite the fact that the fire dept took their generators and fuel, including used cooking oil, for "safety." The real reason is that the chief purpose of generators is the charging of digital devices used in media work, to get the message out. Squelching real news while pretending to be doing something completely different is a hallmark of corporate rule, is it not?

There were boxes of organic bananas being offered while we were there, a lot of recordings happening, and more food in the kitchen, which I read they were going to simplify for a few days while they regrouped and made some plans for feeding so many every day.

Occupy Walll St. made the evening news in New Jersey as occupiers were compared with 320,000 other people who lost electricity, in the latter case due to heavy wet snow bringing down tree limbs and power lines.

But weather doesn't change the reason people are occupying everywhere. Check out Mimi Pierre Johnson delivering a message about her home mortgage to Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.


Occupy Denver had scuffles at the capital building resulting in police using rubber bullets on the unarmed crowd; they were being swarmed by riot police later at their occupation site, and using the people's mike to joyfully recite their constitutional rights -- when the livestream video feed went dead.

Occupier Janet Weil of CODEPINK had this to say:

Please tell folks that 1000 people, myself included, came to Occupy SF the night of  Oct 26/27 to avert a police attack -- and the attack WAS averted! It helped a lot that 5 city supervisors and several union reps were there, but overall the numbers of people were crucial. While every such victory is fragile, we CAN protect our Occu-pies, but it takes a human presence on site -- as well as calls to officials, media work, etc.

Statement posted by Desiree Fairooz of VA on Facebook (not sure if she is the author or not, but I like it):

We will not stop until the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites, stops. We will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. We will not stop until students no longer have to go into massive debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. We will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. We are the 99%.